The determinants of the quality of Sales-Marketing Interface in a Multinational Customer Brand Focused Company: The Latin American Branches

Customer evolution and changes in consumers, determine the fact that the quality of the interface between marketing and sales may represent a true competitive advantage for the firm. Building on multidimensional theoretical and empirical models developed in Europe and on social network analysis, the organizational interface between the marketing and sales departments of a multinational high-growth company with operations in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay is studied. Both, attitudinal and social network measures of information exchange are used to make operational the nature and quality of the interface and its impact on performance. Results show the existence of a positive relationship of formalization, joint planning, teamwork, trust and information transfer on interface quality, as well as a positive relationship between interface quality and business performance. We conclude that efficient design and organizational management of the exchange network are essential for the successful performance of consumer goods companies that seek to develop distinctive capabilities to adapt to markets that experience vertiginous change

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

La Producción institucional del desorden : una etnografía sobre los restos en y del «Barrio Chino» de Barcelona

Esta comunicación expondrá los resultados del trabajo etnográfico con los que se (de)muestra el interés por parte de las administraciones públicas, en lo que podríamos llamar "producción institucional del desorden". Con esta producción -simbólica pero también fáctica- del desorden, los gobiernos abonarían el terreno para futuras intervenciones urbanísticas y fiscalizadoras contra grandes capas de población y con especial acritud, sobre los grupos más descapitalizados. Como es imaginable, estas imágenes distorsionadas, pueden colaborar además, en que los responsables institucionales sobre la zona, elidan su responsabilidad a la hora de tratar aquellos habitantes como sujetos de pleno de derecho.This paper will present the results of ethnographic work with the interest of public administrations, in what we might call "institutional production of disorder" is demonstrated. With this symbolic production-but-factual disorder, governments would enable the groundwork for future town planning and supervisory interventions against large sections of the population with special bitterness on the most undercapitalized groups. As imaginable, these distorted images, they can also assist in the institutional charge of the area, avoid their responsibility to treat those people as full subjects of law

Update rules and interevent time distributions: Slow ordering vs. no ordering in the Voter Model

We introduce a general methodology of update rules accounting for arbitrary interevent time distributions in simulations of interacting agents. In particular we consider update rules that depend on the state of the agent, so that the update becomes part of the dynamical model. As an illustration we consider the voter model in fully-connected, random and scale free networks with an update probability inversely proportional to the persistence, that is, the time since the last event. We find that in the thermodynamic limit, at variance with standard updates, the system orders slowly. The approach to the absorbing state is characterized by a power law decay of the density of interfaces, observing that the mean time to reach the absorbing state might be not well defined.Comment: 5pages, 4 figure

The Edge : Social Inclusion Through Space

El proceso de consolidación de asentamientos informales y su incorporación social y económica a la ciudad formal es el marco de esta investigación. Este trabajo plantea que aparte de la nueva infraestructura provista a las áreas urbanas marginadas es necesario evaluar la relación física entre los asentamientos informales y la ciudad formal en términos de conectividad espacial. Dada la existencia de fuertes límites urbanos aparentemente segregadores que rompen con la trama urbana de la ciudad, se han hecho una serie de análisis sintácticos, cuantificables, para medir la relación espacial real entre las dos situaciones urbanas. Se sugiere que el borde urbano como elemento físico segregador tiene la potencialidad de invertir su condición de barrera para convertirse en un espacio de encuentro y de integración.The process of consolidation of informal settlements and their social and economical incorporation to the formal city is the framework of this research. This paper is set out to suggest that apart from the supplied infrastructure to the marginalized urban a reas there is a need to evaluate the physical relation between the formal and informal settlements in terms of spatial connectivity. Because there seems to be segregating of urban borders that splits the whole urban grid, a series of syntactic analysis are made in order to measure the actual spatial relation between the two urban states. It is suggested that the urban edge as physical segregating element has the potentiality to invert its barrier condition to become a binding and integrating space.Peer Reviewe