Information systems to support decision-making in *construction owner organizations: A data warehousing approach

Construction organizations typically deal with large volumes of project data containing valuable information. It is found that these organizations do not use these data effectively for planning and decision-making. There are two reasons. First, the information systems in construction organizations are designed to support day-to-day construction operations. The data stored in these systems are often non-validated, non-integrated and are available in a format that makes it difficult for decision makers to use in order to make timely decisions. Second, the organizational structure and the IT infrastructure are often not compatible with the information systems thereby resulting in higher operational costs and lower productivity. These two issues have been investigated in this research with the objective of developing systems that are structured for effective decision-making. ^ A framework was developed to guide storage and retrieval of validated and integrated data for timely decision-making and to enable construction organizations to redesign their organizational structure and IT infrastructure matched with information system capabilities. The research was focused on construction owner organizations that were continuously involved in multiple construction projects. Action research and Data warehousing techniques were used to develop the framework. ^ One hundred and sixty-three construction owner organizations were surveyed in order to assess their data needs, data management practices and extent of use of information systems in planning and decision-making. For in-depth analysis, Miami-Dade Transit (MDT) was selected which is in-charge of all transportation-related construction projects in the Miami-Dade county. A functional model and a prototype system were developed to test the framework. The results revealed significant improvements in data management and decision-support operations that were examined through various qualitative (ease in data access, data quality, response time, productivity improvement, etc.) and quantitative (time savings and operational cost savings) measures. The research results were first validated by MDT and then by a representative group of twenty construction owner organizations involved in various types of construction projects. ^

Predicting Lodging Manager Annual Salary Based on Metropolitan Statistical Area Attributes and Lodging Industry Performance: Exploring the Concept

Using multiple regression analysis, lodging managers’ annual mean salaries in 143 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) within the U.S. were analyzed to identify what relationships existed with variables related to general MSA characteristics, along with the lodging industry’s size and performance. By examining the relationship between these variables, the authors predict the long-term possibility of predicting lodging industry managers’ salaries. These predictions may have an impact on financial performance of an individual lodging property or organization. Through this paper, this concept was applied and explored within U.S. MSAs. These findings may have value for a variety of stakeholders, including human resources practitioners, the hospitality education community, and individuals considering lodging management careers.

Information systems to support decision-making in construction owner organizations : a data warehousing approach

Construction organizations typically deal with large volumes of project data containing valuable information. It is found that these organizations do not use these data effectively for planning and decision-making. There are two reasons. First, the information systems in construction organizations are designed to support day-to-day construction operations. The data stored in these systems are often non-validated, nonintegrated and are available in a format that makes it difficult for decision makers to use in order to make timely decisions. Second, the organizational structure and the IT infrastructure are often not compatible with the information systems thereby resulting in higher operational costs and lower productivity. These two issues have been investigated in this research with the objective of developing systems that are structured for effective decision-making. A framework was developed to guide storage and retrieval of validated and integrated data for timely decision-making and to enable construction organizations to redesign their organizational structure and IT infrastructure matched with information system capabilities. The research was focused on construction owner organizations that were continuously involved in multiple construction projects. Action research and Data warehousing techniques were used to develop the framework. One hundred and sixty-three construction owner organizations were surveyed in order to assess their data needs, data management practices and extent of use of information systems in planning and decision-making. For in-depth analysis, Miami-Dade Transit (MDT) was selected which is in-charge of all transportation-related construction projects in the Miami-Dade county. A functional model and a prototype system were developed to test the framework. The results revealed significant improvements in data management and decision-support operations that were examined through various qualitative (ease in data access, data quality, response time, productivity improvement, etc.) and quantitative (time savings and operational cost savings) measures. The research results were first validated by MDT and then by a representative group of twenty construction owner organizations involved in various types of construction projects.

Ser gestora da educação infantil: quais sentidos atribuídos na cultura profissional?

This research has been the aim understanding the senses that managers attribute to school management of the Child Education from his owner teacher high degree formation and his professional culture. The need to research about the sense attributed to the school management of the Child Education by the managers could be considered as contribute to school management studies in the manager team perspective itself. It depart from idea that attributed senses reveal the reinvention process of the professional culture those escape from a regard less attentive and take divers forms, been construct and reconstruct in the social interactions in the live quotidian of school community. The empirical investigation has developed in the Centro Municipal de Educação Infantil (CMEI) Marilanda Bezerra, located in Natal city (RN), during the years of 2012-2013. The methodology is endorsed in the qualitative approach with character of an ethnography type research in education having as main information’s construction tools the semi structured comprehensive interview. This permit (by the interlocutor’s oral discourse) the interpretation of the senses and values selfattributed to hers actions, the personal notebook of ground registers, the record of the interpretative analysis, the evolutionary plans and the participant observation. It distinguish auteurs as Jean-Claude Kaufmann, Adir Ferreira, Sônia Kramer, Álvaro Marchesi, Júlia Oliveira-Formosinho, Maurice Tardif, Telmo Caria, Andy Hargreaves; those supported this paper theoretically and methodologically. The analysis and the experience interpretation point to the possibilities of sharing actions of the Child Education unity with the community, featuring the importance of a participant and collaborative school management practice of the CMEI, highlight the value of this school management possibilities more horizontal and interactive in an essay of constitute a democratic and critical space to the professional culture, with a decisive participation of the managers team. This educational manager form has demonstrated sensibility, creativity, innovation and the possibility of social transformation through institutional action and Child Education teacher’s practices, cohabiting with the challenges, the dilemmas and the problems of work quotidian and the lacunas of a fragmentary formation.

Autonomic hardware manager: uma arquitetura de hardware autonômico usando a solução de repositório ativo de componentes

This Thesis main objective is to implement a supporting architecture to Autonomic Hardware systems, capable of manage the hardware running in reconfigurable devices. The proposed architecture implements manipulation, generation and communication functionalities, using the Context Oriented Active Repository approach. The solution consists in a Hardware-Software based architecture called "Autonomic Hardware Manager (AHM)" that contains an Active Repository of Hardware Components. Using the repository the architecture will be able to manage the connected systems at run time allowing the implementation of autonomic features such as self-management, self-optimization, self-description and self-configuration. The proposed architecture also contains a meta-model that allows the representation of the Operating Context for hardware systems. This meta-model will be used as basis to the context sensing modules, that are needed in the Active Repository architecture. In order to demonstrate the proposed architecture functionalities, experiments were proposed and implemented in order to proof the Thesis hypothesis and achieved objectives. Three experiments were planned and implemented: the Hardware Reconfigurable Filter, that consists of an application that implements Digital Filters using reconfigurable hardware; the Autonomic Image Segmentation Filter, that shows the project and implementation of an image processing autonomic application; finally, the Autonomic Autopilot application that consist of an auto pilot to unmanned aerial vehicles. In this work, the applications architectures were organized in modules, according their functionalities. Some modules were implemented using HDL and synthesized in hardware. Other modules were implemented kept in software. After that, applications were integrated to the AHM to allow their adaptation to different Operating Context, making them autonomic.

Cloud query manager: uso de web semântica para evitar o problema de aprisionamento em IaaS

Cloud computing can be defined as a distributed computational model by through resources (hardware, storage, development platforms and communication) are shared, as paid services accessible with minimal management effort and interaction. A great benefit of this model is to enable the use of various providers (e.g a multi-cloud architecture) to compose a set of services in order to obtain an optimal configuration for performance and cost. However, the multi-cloud use is precluded by the problem of cloud lock-in. The cloud lock-in is the dependency between an application and a cloud platform. It is commonly addressed by three strategies: (i) use of intermediate layer that stands to consumers of cloud services and the provider, (ii) use of standardized interfaces to access the cloud, or (iii) use of models with open specifications. This paper outlines an approach to evaluate these strategies. This approach was performed and it was found that despite the advances made by these strategies, none of them actually solves the problem of lock-in cloud. In this sense, this work proposes the use of Semantic Web to avoid cloud lock-in, where RDF models are used to specify the features of a cloud, which are managed by SPARQL queries. In this direction, this work: (i) presents an evaluation model that quantifies the problem of cloud lock-in, (ii) evaluates the cloud lock-in from three multi-cloud solutions and three cloud platforms, (iii) proposes using RDF and SPARQL on management of cloud resources, (iv) presents the cloud Query Manager (CQM), an SPARQL server that implements the proposal, and (v) comparing three multi-cloud solutions in relation to CQM on the response time and the effectiveness in the resolution of cloud lock-in.

Human Presence Detection in ambiente Home Manager: sperimentazione su piattaforma Raspberry

Home Manager, è una piattaforma sperimentale per la gestione di Smart Space e in particolare di una casa intelligente immersa in uno ambiente, avente l'ambizione di anticipare le necessità dell'utente. Questa tesi ha due obiettivi fondamentali: in primo luogo, implementare su piattaforma Raspberry la parte di Home Manager relativa allo scenario del riconoscimento delle persone negli ambienti della casa, mediante l'utilizzo del modulo telecamera; in secondo luogo, attraverso le informazioni ricavate precedentemente, implementare e simulare una gestione intelligente e automatica delle luci presenti all'interno della casa, sfruttando a tal fine un modulo relè.

Home Manager Application su Android ART: progetto e realizzazione in ottica modern UI

Questa tesi si occupa della realizzazione, in ottica Modern UI, di una nuova interfaccia per l'applicazione Android del sistema domotico Home Manager. Dopo una prima fase di analisi preliminare, si affronta la progettazione dell'app, dall'analisi dei requisiti - ivi incluso il nuovo strumento di sviluppo da utilizzare, Android Studio - alla successiva analisi e progettazione della nuova soluzione, seguita da implementazione e collaudo.

Ann Mentor, owner of P.R. Firm in New York

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Lois Ernst, Business owner and President of Job Opportunities for women in NY

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Personnel manager interviews job applicant

Inscriptions: Verso: [stamped] Photograph by Freda Leinwand. [463 West Street, Studio 229G, New York, NY 10014].

Understanding the work of the city manager

The managerial behaviour approach to understanding managerial work has developed from research over the course of fifty years. The approach represents a marked departure from mainstream (and still prevalent) management approaches that depict management as a set of general composite functions. The managerial behaviour approach is distinctive in its empirical research background, object, focus and methodology. Its objective is to provide the simple answer to the complex question: what do managers do? However, the emphasis in the studies on managerial behaviour represents a limitation in so far as a context for locating and judging that behaviour is largely absent (Hales, 1986). This paper presents the results of initial research into managers operating in a different and largely neglected context - city councils. The research uses Mintzberg’s (1973) concept of behavioural roles as an analytical tool to explain and understand what city managers do. This study assesses whether these roles adequately capture the important features of managerial work in the city council. It is argued that while Mintzberg’s role framework is useful, structured observation alone does not adequately address the complexities of environments and styles of managers or the cognitive processes of managers. However, by integrating this approach with an appreciation of context and cognitive processes and how they can influence or affect managerial behaviour, we develop a more realistic description of what managers actually do and why they do it.

Band manager - Ett Content Management System för musikbranchaktörer

Summit Music Management är ett managementföretag som arbetar med en rad svenska artister. I deras arbetsuppgifter ingår även hantering av artisternas webbplatser, ett arbete som visat sig vara säkerhetskänsligt och svårt att få klart. Målet med projektet har varit att utveckla ett Content Management System för aktörer inom musikbranschen, vars syfte det är att förenkla det dagliga arbetet av dessa webbplatser. Systemet ska innehålla funktionalitet som gör det möjligt att skapa webbplatser åt artisterna samtidigt som det ska gå att underhålla och uppdatera textmaterial såväl som bilder som finns på webbplatserna. Systemet har skapats med tekniker, språk och ramverk som finns tillgängliga under fria licensavtal. Systemets grund är skapat med PHP-ramverket Laravel tillsammans med HTML, CSS och Twitter Bootstrap. Denna del fungerar som gränssnitt för administratörer där användaren kan logga in och skapa webbplatser. De webb-platser som skapas av systemet är skrivna i AngularJS tillsammans med HTML, CSS och Twitter Bootstrap. Mellan dessa delar finns ett REST-api skrivet i Laravel som sköter kommunikationen mellan komponenterna. Systemet arbetar mot en MySQL-databas där all data lagras och hämtas ifrån. Summit Music Management har förutom att leverera text- och bildmaterial, även fungerat somtestpanel för att kunna mäta systemets användbarhet. Testerna visade att systemet kan möta de behov som finns hos Summit Music Management men att det kan komma att behöva vidareutvecklas för att bättre passa en större kundgrupp och för att strama åt säkerhetsaspekterna ytterligare.

Scheduling di dispositivi in una casa intelligente su piattaforma Home Manager

Obiettivo di questa tesi è estendere la piattaforma sperimentale Home Manager e sviluppare il supporto alla schedulazione degli elettrodomestici. L’utente Home Manager notificherà al sistema la propria volontà di accendere un determinato dispositivo, delegando a quest’ultimo la scelta sul quando dovrà essere eseguito il compito corrispondente, sulla base delle politiche generali della Smart Home.