The Australian Government`s abandoned infrastructure outsourcing program: what can be learned?

Early in 2001, after a damning public report by the Auditor-General, the Australian Federal Government abandoned its highly promoted “whole of government” IT infrastructure outsourcing initiative. This about-face was greeted in the press with reports that the initiative was a “fiasco”. Yet a four-year case study conducted by the authors suggests a more complex picture. Like many other “selective” outsourcers of IT, the Federal Government had been led to believe that it was adopting a relatively low risk strategy that would, if well managed, lead to significant cost savings and operational benefits. Instead, despite having implemented many widely promoted “best practices”, the Federal Government found a substantial discrepancy between what outsourcing promised to deliver, and what was actually achieved. In this respect their experiences were no different from those of many other large IT organizations engaged in selective IT outsourcing, who responded to a substantial contemporaneous survey. This case study examines why the Government’s expectations were not achieved, and arrives at conclusions that have important implications for decision makers confronted with choices about sourcing IT service delivery.

Measuring regional sustainability: lessons to be learned

Developing tools for measuring progress toward sustainability has proven a challenging task. Indicators offer an excellent means to explore the success or otherwise of management strategies. They also allow reporting social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability. To ensure that the tools developed are effective in measuring the progress toward sustainable futures, an evaluation of the methods and the indicators used must be undertaken so that with progress there is learning and with the new knowledge methods can be redesigned to better advance sustainability. This paper discusses a study carried out in the south west region of Victoria, Australia, using indicators as the basis for developing a tool to measure progress toward sustainability. By evaluating the methods and indicators used in the study this paper provides an insight into the challenges encountered and the lessons learned. Issues explored include selecting indicators, collating data, integrating social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability and using an adaptive approach.

Using decision-tree to automatically construct learned-heuristics for events classification in sports video

Automatic events classification is an essential requirement for constructing an effective sports video summary. It has become a well-known theory that the high-level semantics in sport video can be “computationally interpreted” based on the occurrences of specific audio and visual features which can be extracted automatically. State-of-the-art solutions for features-based event classification have only relied on either manual-knowledge based heuristics or machine learning. To bridge the gaps, we have successfully combined the two approaches by using learning-based heuristics. The heuristics are constructed automatically using decision tree while manual supervision is only required to check the features and highlight contained in each training segment. Thus, fully automated construction of classification system for sports video events has been achieved. A comprehensive experiment on 10 hours video dataset, with five full-match soccer and five full-match basketball videos, has demonstrated the effectiveness/robustness of our algorithms.

Reducing harmful traditional practices in Adjibar, Ethiopia : lessons learned from the Adjibar safe motherhood project

This paper assesses the impact of the Adjibar Safe Motherhood Project and derives lessons of value to future interventions. Amongst the participatory qualitative methods used were 15 group discussions, eight semi-structured interviews, a number of opportunistic informal discussions and observation. The information gathering was complemented by a detailed review of project documents. Field visits for data collection took place over a six day period in March 2005. The project was effective in raising awareness about maternal health, and the social, economic and health consequences of various harmful traditional practices (HTPs). It has also mobilised the community to monitor and report HTPs and has strengthened referral systems for counselling, support and treatment. A number of effective strategies were identified as having contributed to project success. These are presented using the framework offered by the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion which presents five areas of public health action: developing personal skills; strengthening community action; building healthy public policy; re-orienting health services; and, creating supportive environments. This evaluation contributes to and strengthens the expanding body of literature about effective development practices to reduce HTPs. It demonstrates that addressing HTPs takes time and long term investment; both are necessary to enable better understanding of the social and cultural reasons for HTPs before attempting to address them, and to build the community trust necessary to overcome the natural resistance to challenging such deeply entrenched practices. The project also highlighted the importance of developing a multi pronged strategy based on engagement with a broad range of stakeholders and supportive legislation.

Anything new under the sun? Lessons learned from community based natural resource management

Involving community in natural resource management has occurred under a wide variety of approaches, ideologies and titles over the last 30 odd years, with equally wide variety of outcomes for both the community and natural resource management!. Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is now a commonly used and promoted, if not always well defined, approach. Claims about the benefits of CBNRM cover wildlife management and biodiversity, sustainable utilisation and management of natural resources, poverty reduction, increased livelihoods outcomes, improved food security, as well as less material benefits of livelihood diversification, empowerment, increased gender equality, and better institutional relations. There are also some fairly convincing criticisms of CBNRM reflecting on assumptions of the nature of communities, institutional arrangements and both institutional and community expectations. This paper reflects on the changing nature of community engagement in natural resource management, the emergence of CBNRM as an approach and the lessons learned from promoting CBNRM across case studies in the developing world.