The role of the board in building strategic capability: towards an integrated model of sport governance research

Governance is a critical issue confronting sport organisations. Its importance in the management of sport organisations has been heightened due to the transition of many sports from predominantly volunteer administered organisations anchored in an amateur ethos, to professionally managed entities catering to a more sophisticated sport marketplace. This paper identifies four elements from the sport governance literature as the key research foci to date: shared leadership, board motivation, board roles, and board structure. Four generic themes (performance, conformance, policy and operations) are also examined and expressed as governance capabilities. The strategic role and performance of the board, while central to the practice of governance, is shown to be a weakness in many sport organisations. Further, the strategic role of the board is underdeveloped in the sport management and governance research literature. Finally, it is noted that the governance literature is shaped by a normative and prescriptive approach that may not fully encompass the diversity that exists within the sport setting. The paper concludes by identifying and affirming the critical gaps in our knowledge of sport governance. Future work should seek to understand sector-specific considerations, such as non-profit and commercial differences in sport; governance designs in response to changing environmental conditions; the impact of the CEO on the board's strategic contributions; and strategic activity by the board. More use of qualitative research methods to probe such issues is recommended

How well do ecosystem-based planning units represent different componenets of biodiversity?

There are many proposals for managing biodiversity by using surrogates, such as umbrella, indicator, focal, and flagship species. We use the term biodiversity management unit for any ecosystem-based classificatory scheme for managing biodiversity. The sufficiency of biodiversity management unit classification schemes depends upon (1) whether different biotic elements (e.g., trees, birds, reptiles) distinguish between biodiversity management units within a classification (i.e., coherence within classes}; and (2) whether different biotic elements agree upon similarities and dissimilarities among biodiversity management unit classes (i.e., conformance among classes). Recent evaluations suggest that biodiversity surrogates based on few or single taxa are not useful. Ecological vegetation classes are an ecosystem-based classification scheme used as one component for biodiversity management in Victoria, Australia. Here we evaluated the potential for ecological vegetation classes to be used as biodiversity management units in the box-ironbark ecosystem of central Victoria, Australia. Eighty sites distributed among 14 ecological vegetation classes were surveyed in the same ways for tree species, birds, mammals, reptiles, terrestrial invertebrates, and nocturnal flying insects. Habitat structure and geographic separations also were measured, which, with the biotic elements, are collectively referred to as variables. Less than half of the biotic element-ecological vegetation class pairings were coherent. Generalized Mantel tests were used to examine conformance among variables with respect to ecological vegetation classes. While most tests were not significant, birds, mammals, tree species, and habitat structure together showed significant agreement on the rating of similarities among ecological vegetation classes. In this system, use of ecological vegetation classes as biodiversity management units may account reasonably well for birds, mammals, and trees; but reptiles and invertebrates would not be accommodated. We conclude that surrogates will usually have to be augmented or developed as hierarchies to provide general representativeness.

Size does matter : the impact of size on governance in arts organizations

This paper documents governance conformance and performance in small to medium sized arts organizations in Australia, where artistic development, innovation and stakeholder relationships inform the governance activity central to achieving their mission. The key question of this study is whether the governance of large and small arts organizations differs as they balance competing needs
in order to achieve their artistic vision. The results of the study provide evidence that size is a critical factor in how boards govern arts organizations. Using material from indepth interviews and surveys, the paper argues that governance conformance and performance are in a state of constant tension with artistic development, and governance processes are dependent on organizational size and resources.

A model for improving board performance : the case of a national sport organisation

The transition of many sport organisations from being predominantly volunteer-administered and anchored in an amateur ethos to professionally managed entities has created unique challenges for the governance of sport. This paper provides a contribution to the governance literature through the presentation of a situational case where a four-stage model, drawn from an action research approach, has been used for developing a board’s strategic capability and subsequent improvement in organisational performance.

Action research is founded on the premise that change and research are not mutually exclusive and that dual foci on improving practice and developing theory are possible (Coghlan & Brannick, 2001). Utilising a national sport organisation (NSO) in New Zealand the study developed and tested a structured model for improving board functioning and, specifically, strategic contribution.

While the case to which the model has been applied is an NSO, the model and the subsequent reflections have value for non-profit as well as commercial entities particularly with regard to a greater understanding of the mechanisms associated with balancing the performance and conformance roles of the board.

Corporate governance and information technology : findings from an exploratory survey of Australian organizations

An exploratory survey (n = 57) of the Melbourne Chapter of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association was conducted to ascertain the attitudes and practices relating to corporate governance and the corporate governance of Information Technology (CGIT) in Australia. The survey found the respondents had clear views on corporate governance but most were not engaged with it, the organizational approach to corporate governance and its expected benefits was largely conformance oriented, awareness of CGIT management frameworks and associated standards was high but implementation was not widespread, and although the CGIT standard ISOIIEC 38500 was not widely implemented IT practitioners agreed with its principles. We conclude that the value of the CGIT standard has yet to be recognised by executives in Australia.

A novel mutual authentication scheme with minimum disclosure for rfid systems

In this paper we present a novel approach to authentication and privacy in RFID systems based on the minimum disclosure property and in conformance to EPC Class-1 Gen-2 specifications. We take into account the computational constraints of EPC Class-1 Gen-2 passive RFID tags and only the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and pseudo random number generator (PRNG) functions that passive RFID tags are capable of are employed. Detailed security analysis of our scheme shows that it can offer robust security properties in terms of tag anonymity and tag untraceability while at the same time being robust to replay, tag impersonation and desynchronisation attacks. Simulations results are also presented to study the scalability of the proposed scheme and its impact on authentication delay.

Mobile application testing in industrial contexts: an exploratory multiple case-study

Recent empirical studies in the area of mobile application testing indicate the need for specific testing techniques and methods for mobile applications. This is due to mobile applications being significantly different than traditional web and desktop applications, particularly in terms of the physical constraints of mobile devices and the very different features of their operating systems. In this paper, we presented a multiple case-study involving four software development companies in the area of mobile and smartphones application. We aimed to identify testing techniques currently being applied by developers and challenges that they are facing. Our principle results are that many industrial teams seem to lack sufficient knowledge on how to test mobile applications, particularly in the areas of mobile application life-cycle conformance, context-awareness, and integration testing. We also found that there is no formal testing approach or methodology that can facilitate a development team to systematically test a critical mobile application.

A systematic mapping study of mobile application testing techniques

The importance of mobile application specific testing techniques and methods has been attracting much attention of software engineers over the past few years. This is due to the fact that mobile applications are different than traditional web and desktop applications, and more and more they are moving to being used in critical domains. Mobile applications require a different approach to application quality and dependability and require an effective testing approach to build high quality and more reliable software. We performed a systematic mapping study to categorize and to structure the research evidence that has been published in the area of mobile application testing techniques and challenges that they have reported. Seventy nine (79) empirical studies are mapped to a classification schema. Several research gaps are identified and specific key testing issues for practitioners are identified: there is a need for eliciting testing requirements early during development process; the need to conduct research in real-world development environments; specific testing techniques targeting application life-cycle conformance and mobile services testing; and comparative studies for security and usability testing.

A note on multivariate non-normal process capability analysis using "mvtnorm" library in R

In this note we examine using Genzbretz and Miwa algorithms to improve estimation of proposition of non-conformance in multivariate normal distributions. This estimation is required in the procedure outlined in Abbasi and Niaki (Int J Adv Manuf Technol 50(5-8):823-830, 2010) to determine process capability index of multivariate non-normal processes.

Evaluation of process capability indices of linear profiles

Purpose: In profile monitoring, which is a growing research area in the field of statistical process control, the relationship between response and explanatory variables is monitored over time. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the process capability analysis of linear profiles. Process capability indices give a quick indication of the capability of a manufacturing process. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the proportion of the non-conformance criteria is employed to estimate process capability index. The paper has considered the cases where specification limits is constant or is a function of explanatory variable X. Moreover, cases where both equal and random design schemes in profile data acquisition is required (as the explanatory variable) is considered. Profiles with the assumption of deterministic design points are usually used in the calibration applications. However, there are other applications where design points within a profile would be i.i.d. random variables from a given distribution. Findings: Simulation studies using simple linear profile processes for both fixed and random explanatory variable with constant and functional specification limits are considered to assess the efficacy of the proposed method. Originality/value: There are many cases in industries such as semiconductor industries where quality characteristics are in form of profiles. There is no method in the literature to analyze process capability for theses processes, however recently quite a few methods have been presented in monitoring profiles. Proposed methods provide a framework for quality engineers and production engineers to evaluate and analyze capability of the profile processes. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Do we need to handle every temporal violation in scientific workflow systems?

Scientific processes are usually time constrained with overall deadlines and local milestones. In scientific workflow systems, due to the dynamic nature of the underlying computing infrastructures such as grid and cloud, execution delays often take place and result in a large number of temporal violations. Temporal violation handling is to execute violation handling strategies which can compensate for the occurring time deficit but would impose some additional cost. Generally speaking, the two fundamental requirements for delivering satisfactory temporal QoS in scientific workflow systems are temporal conformance and cost effectiveness. Every task for workflow temporal management incurs some cost. Take a single temporal violation handling as an example, its cost can be primarily referred to monetary costs and time overheads of violation handling strategies which are normally nontrivial in scientific workflow systems.