Featured Department: Department of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery

Many years ago the courses in veterinary medicine were first divided into departments. The departments of Medicine and of Surgery were among the first to be established. They continued as separate departments until 1953. Upon Dr. C. H. Covault\u27s retirement as head of the Department of Medicine at that time, the two were merged into a single department, the Department of Medicine and Surgery. Dr. G. R. Fowler, who had been head of the Department of Surgery since 1932, was appointed head of the new department. He retired in July of this year. Dr. B. W. Kingrey, who had joined the staff two years previously, was appointed as the department head

A BPM-Systems Architecture That Supports Dynamic and Collaborative Processes

Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) are increasingly implemented in and across organizations. However, the current combination of functionality, concepts and characteristics in BPMSs is very much based on an industrial-based view of the economy while western economies are rapidly moving towards an information and service economy in which the ratio of knowledge workers is rising dramatically. Compared to the ‘old’ type of worker the knowledge worker is typically highly educated, used to collaborating with other knowledge workers and less likely to be sensitive to a controlling style of management in the execution of his or her work. While many organizations are initiating business process improvement projects to improve their processes, this is done with BPM-systems that are based on an old paradigm and therefore unable to support dynamic and collaborative processes. In this paper we propose a new architecture for BPM-systems that include functionality to support knowledge workers in their dynamic and collaborative activities and processes

Implications of Family Preservation Services When Working with Parents Who Are Developmentally Disabled

This study examines the success of the Iowa family preservation program when working with parents who are mentally retarded or considered to be low functioning by the referring social worker. The Iowa family preservation program is an intensive 45-day program designed to prevent out-of-home placement. The program works with parents to teach them skills to parent effectively while addressing therapeutic issues to form healthy family relationships. The data was collected by reviewing case fires at a private agency that provides family preservation services. Through program evaluation design, I have analyzed data corrected by the agency since 1987. A total of 12 files were identified to have parent(s) with a mental retardation diagnosis or considered to be low functioning by the referring social worker. There are no indications from, this study that Family Preservation Services are less successful for families with developmentally disabled parents than other families

Business Rules Management Solutions Problem Space: Situational Factors

Business rules management solutions are widely applied, standalone or in combination with business process management solutions. Yet scientific research on business rules management solutions is limited. The purpose of this paper is to define the business rules management solution problem space. Using contingency theory and relational theory as our lens, we conducted a qualitative study on 39 business rules management solutions. The range of data sources included interviews and document analysis. From the qualitative study six situational factors have been defined to classify the business rules management solution space: 1) value proposition, 2) approach, 3) standardization, 4) change frequency, 5) n-order compliance, and 6) integrative power of the software environment. The six factors can be clustered in three structures 1) deep structure, 2) physical structure and, 3) organizational structure. The classification of the problem space provides a framework for the analysis of business rules management solutions

The Isolationism Of Senator Charles W. Tobey

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 197

Applying the Decision Model and Notation in Practice: A Method to Design and Specify Business Decisions and Business Logic

Proper decision-making is one of the most important capabilities of an organization. Therefore, it is important to make explicit all decisions that are relevant to manage for an organization. In 2015 the Object Management Group published the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard that focuses on modelling business decisions and underlying business logic. DMN is being adopted at an increas-ing rate, however, theory does not adequately cover activities or methods to guide practitioners mod-elling with DMN. To tackle this problem this paper presents a method to guide the modelling process of business decisions with DMN. The method has been validated and improved with an experiment using thirty participants. Based on this method, future research could focus on further validation and improvement by using more participants from different industries

A Business Rules Management Reference Process for the Dutch Government

Business Rules Management (BRM) is increasingly being applied in the governmental context. However, currently, many of those governmental institutions apply different BRM processes, but are expected to work together in their task of delivering products and services to citizens and companies in the Netherlands. An initiative from the Dutch government was started with the goal to investigate currently applied processes and develop a BRM reference process to promote cooperation. This paper elaborates upon the process of comparison of currently applied BRM processes and development of the BRM reference process for the Dutch government. The resulting BRM reference process consists of seven main processes with twenty sub-processes and a common vocabulary which can guide (Dutch) governmental organizations to design and implement their BRM solution as well as to achieve better cooperation due to increased commonality. In terms of future research, the emphasis should lie on more thorough validation, using quantitative research methods, but we argue that other industries should be explored as well

Continuous Auditing: A Practical Maturity Model

Continuous Auditing (CA) is a methodology for issuing audit reports simultaneously with, or a short period of time after, the data is entered into the information system. The possibilities and challenges of CA have been researched previously. However, limited studies focus on the practical application of CA maturity models. In this study, we bridge this gap by developing a maturity model, including measurements to evaluate the current state of an organizations’ CA. To accomplish this goal, we adopted a focus group approach to create the maturity model in multiple iterations. During these iterations, the model was developed in concurrence with three pension funds, one accountancy firm, one mortgagor and two consultancy firms for the pension market. This resulted in a maturity model, which consists out of five maturity levels and four capabilities. The maturity levels are: 1) initial approach, 2) ad hoc approach, 3) defined approach, 4) managed approach, and 5) optimized approach. The four capabilities are: A) systems, B) data, C) organization, and D) people

Identifying Challenges in Business Rules Management Implementations Regarding the Governance Capability at Governmental Institutions

As the number of BRMS-implementations increases, more and more organizations search for guidance to design such solutions. Given these premises, more implementation challenges experienced from practice become evident. In this study, we identify the main challenges regarding the governance capability as part of BRM, in the Dutch governmental context. To be able to do so, we utilized a four-round focus group and a three-round Delphi study set-up to collect our data. The analysis resulted in eight implementation challenges experienced by the participants. The presented results provide a grounded basis from which empirical and practical research on best practices can be further explored

The Decision Transparency Framework: A framework and key transparency indicators to measure the business decisions and business logic transparency

Business decisions and business logic are an important part of an organization’s daily activities. In the not so near past they were modelled as integrative part of business processes, however, during the last years, they are managed as a separate entity. Still, decisions and underlying business logic often remain a black box. Therefore, the call for transparency increases. Current theory does not provide a measurable and quantitative way to measure transparency for business decisions. This paper extends the understanding of different views on transparency with regards to business decisions and underlying business logic and presents a framework including Key Transparency Indicators (KTI) to measure the transparency of business decisions and business logic. The framework is validated by means of an experiment using case study data. Results show that the framework and KTI’s are useful to measure transparency. Further research will focus on further refinement of the measurements as well as further validation of the current measurement