Civil service reform trends in public personnel management: Experiences from the Commonwealth of the Bahamas

This study has explored the potential for implementing a merit-based public personnel system in The Bahamas, a former British colony in The Commonwealth Caribbean. Specifically, the study evaluated the use of merit-based public personnel management practices in areas of recruitment, selection, promotion, training and employee development and performance evaluation. Driving forces and barriers which impact merit system successes and failures as well as strategies for institutionalizing merit system practices are identified. Finally the study attempted to apply the developmental model created by Klingner (1996) to describe the stage of public personnel management in The Bahamas. The data for the study was collected through in-depth interviews with expert observers. ^

Customer relationship management: A content analysis of issues and best practices

This dissertation is a study of customer relationship management theory and practice. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy whereby companies build strong relationships with existing and prospective customers with the goal of increasing organizational profitability. It is also a learning process involving managing change in processes, people, and technology. CRM implementation and its ramifications are also not completely understood as evidenced by the high number of failures in CRM implementation in organizations and the resulting disappointments. ^ The goal of this dissertation is to study emerging issues and trends in CRM, including the effect of computer software and the accompanying new management processes on organizations, and the dynamics of the alignment of marketing, sales and services, and all other functions responsible for delivering customers a satisfying experience. ^ In order to understand CRM better a content analysis of more than a hundred articles and documents from academic and industry sources was undertaken using a new methodological twist to the traditional method. An Internet domain name (http://crm.fiu.edu) was created for the purpose of this research by uploading an initial one hundred plus abstracts of articles and documents onto it to form a knowledge database. Once the database was formed a search engine was developed to enable the search of abstracts using relevant CRM keywords to reveal emergent dominant CRM topics. The ultimate aim of this website is to serve as an information hub for CRM research, as well as a search engine where interested parties can enter CRM-relevant keywords or phrases to access abstracts, as well as submit abstracts to enrich the knowledge hub. ^ Research questions were investigated and answered by content analyzing the interpretation and discussion of dominant CRM topics and then amalgamating the findings. This was supported by comparisons within and across individual, paired, and sets-of-three occurrences of CRM keywords in the article abstracts. ^ Results show that there is a lack of holistic thinking and discussion of CRM in both academics and industry which is required to understand how the people, process, and technology in CRM impact each other to affect successful implementation. Industry has to get their heads around CRM and holistically understand how these important dimensions affect each other. Only then will organizational learning occur, and overtime result in superior processes leading to strong profitable customer relationships and a hard to imitate competitive advantage. ^

A methodology to measure coordination of business processes

Coordination of business processes is the management of dependencies where dependencies constrain how the tasks are performed. It has been traditionally done in an intuitive fashion, without paying much attention to the coordination load. Coordination load is being defined as the ratio between the time spent on coordination activities and the total task time. Previous efforts to understand and analyze coordination have resulted in mostly qualitative approaches to categorize and recommend coordination strategies. This research seeks to answer two questions: (1) How can we analyze process coordination problems to improve overall performance? (2) What guidance can we provide to reduce the coordination load of the process and consequently improve the organization's performance? Thus, this effort developed a quantitative measure for coordination load of business processes and a methodology to apply such measure. ^ This effort used a management simulation game to have a controlled laboratory environment enabling the manipulation of the task factors variability, analyzability, and interdependence to measure their impact on coordination load. The hypothesis was that the more variable, non-analyzable, and interdependent a process, the higher the coordination load, and that a higher coordination load would have a negative impact on performance. Coordination load was measured via the surrogate coordination time, and performance via profit. ^ A 22 x 31 full factorial design, with two replicates, was run to observe the impact on the variables coordination time and profit. Properly validated spreadsheets and questionnaires were used as data collection instruments for each scenario. The experimental results indicate that lower task analyzability (ρ=0.036) and higher task interdependence (ρ=0.000) lead to higher coordination load, and higher levels of task variability (ρ=0.049) lead to lower performance. However, contrary to the hypotheses postulated by this work, coordination load did not prove to be strong predictor of performance (correlation of -0.086). ^ These findings from the laboratory experiment and other lessons learned were incorporated to develop a quantitative measure, a tool (survey) to use to gather data for the variables in the measures, and a methodology to quantify coordination load of production business processes. The practicality of the methodology is demonstrated with an example.^

Business process quantitative analysis and optimization for service industries

The total time a customer spends in the business process system, called the customer cycle-time, is a major contributor to overall customer satisfaction. Business process analysts and designers are frequently asked to design process solutions with optimal performance. Simulation models have been very popular to quantitatively evaluate the business processes; however, simulation is time-consuming and it also requires extensive modeling experiences to develop simulation models. Moreover, simulation models neither provide recommendations nor yield optimal solutions for business process design. A queueing network model is a good analytical approach toward business process analysis and design, and can provide a useful abstraction of a business process. However, the existing queueing network models were developed based on telephone systems or applied to manufacturing processes in which machine servers dominate the system. In a business process, the servers are usually people. The characteristics of human servers should be taken into account by the queueing model, i.e. specialization and coordination. ^ The research described in this dissertation develops an open queueing network model to do a quick analysis of business processes. Additionally, optimization models are developed to provide optimal business process designs. The queueing network model extends and improves upon existing multi-class open-queueing network models (MOQN) so that the customer flow in the human-server oriented processes can be modeled. The optimization models help business process designers to find the optimal design of a business process with consideration of specialization and coordination. ^ The main findings of the research are, first, parallelization can reduce the cycle-time for those customer classes that require more than one parallel activity; however, the coordination time due to the parallelization overwhelms the savings from parallelization under the high utilization servers since the waiting time significantly increases, thus the cycle-time increases. Third, the level of industrial technology employed by a company and coordination time to mange the tasks have strongest impact on the business process design; as the level of industrial technology employed by the company is high; more division is required to improve the cycle-time; as the coordination time required is high; consolidation is required to improve the cycle-time. ^

A study on uncertain dynamic disaster management tasks, knowledge sharing, and task performance

Each disaster presents itself with a unique set of characteristics that are hard to determine a priori. Thus disaster management tasks are inherently uncertain, requiring knowledge sharing and quick decision making that involves coordination across different levels and collaborators. While there has been an increasing interest among both researchers and practitioners in utilizing knowledge management to improve disaster management, little research has been reported about how to assess the dynamic nature of disaster management tasks, and what kinds of knowledge sharing are appropriate for different dimensions of task uncertainty characteristics. ^ Using combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods, this research study developed the dimensions and their corresponding measures of the uncertain dynamic characteristics of disaster management tasks and tested the relationships between the various dimensions of uncertain dynamic disaster management tasks and task performance through the moderating and mediating effects of knowledge sharing. ^ Furthermore, this research work conceptualized and assessed task uncertainty along three dimensions: novelty, unanalyzability, and significance; knowledge sharing along two dimensions: knowledge sharing purposes and knowledge sharing mechanisms; and task performance along two dimensions: task effectiveness and task efficiency. Analysis results of survey data collected from Miami-Dade County emergency managers suggested that knowledge sharing purposes and knowledge sharing mechanisms moderate and mediate uncertain dynamic disaster management task and task performance. Implications for research and practice as well directions for future research are discussed.^

The impact of institutional complexity and top management characteristics on executive compensation and firm performance

While most studies take a dyadic view when examining the environmental difference between the home country of a multinational enterprise (MNE) and a particular foreign country, they ignore that an MNE is managing a network of subsidiaries embedded in diverse environments. Additionally, neither the impacts of global environments on top executives nor the effects of top executives’ capabilities to handle institutional complexity are fully explored. Thus, using a three-essay format, this dissertation tried to fill these gaps by addressing the effects of institutional complexity and top management characteristics on top executive compensation and firm performance. ^ Essay 1 investigated the impact of an MNE’s institutional complexity, or the diversity of national institutions facing an MNE’s network of subsidiaries, on the top management team (TMT) compensation. This essay proposed that greater political and cultural complexity leads to not only greater TMT total compensation but also to a greater portion of TMT compensation linked with long-term performance. The arguments are supported in this essay by using an unbalanced panel dataset including 296 U.S. firms with 1,340 observations. ^ Essay 2 explored TMT social capital and its moderating role on value creation and appropriation by the chief executive officer (CEO). Using a sample with 548 U.S. firms and 2,010 observations, it found that greater TMT social capital does facilitate the effects of CEO intellectual capital and social capital on firm growth. Finally, essay 3 examined the performance implications for the fit between managerial information-processing capabilities and institutional complexity. It proposed that institutional complexity is associated with the needs of information-processing. On the other hand, smaller TMT turnover and larger TMT size reflect larger managerial information-processing capabilities. Consequently, superior performance is achieved by the match among institutional complexity, TMT turnover, and TMT size. All hypotheses in essay 3 are supported in a sample of 301 U.S. firms and 1,404 observations. ^ To conclude, this dissertation advances and extends our knowledge on the roles of institutional environments and top executives on firm performance and top executive compensation.^

Assessing the impact of business group diversification on the internationalization of their affiliates: The case of Latin American firms

This dissertation explored the capacity of business group diversification to generate value to their affiliates in an institutional environment characterized by the adoption of structural pro-market reforms. In particular, the three empirical essays explored the impact of business group diversification on the internationalization process of their affiliates. ^ The first essay examined the direct effect of business group diversification on firm performance and its moderating effect on the multinationality-performance relationship. It further explored whether such moderating effect varies depending upon whether the focal affiliate is a manufacturing or service firm. The findings suggested that the benefits of business group diversification on firm performance have a threshold, that those benefits are significant at earlier stages of internationalization and that these benefits are stronger for service firms. ^ The second essay studied the capacity of business group diversification to ameliorate the negative effects of the added complexity faced by its affiliates when they internationalized. The essay explored this capacity in different dimensions of international complexity. The results indicated that business group diversification effectively ameliorated the effects of the added international complexity. This positive effect is stronger in the institutional voids rather than the societal complexity dimension. In the former dimension, diversified business groups can use both their non-market resources and previous experience to ameliorate the effects of complexity on firm performance. ^ The last essay explored whether the benefits of business group diversification on the scope-performance relationship varies depending on the level of development of the network of subsidiaries and the region of operation of the focal firm. The results suggested that the benefits of business group diversification are location bound within the region but that they are not related to the level of development of the targeted countries. ^ The three essays use longitudinal analyses on a sample of Latin American firms to test the hypotheses. While the first essay used multilevel models and fix effects models, the last two essays used exclusively fix effects models to assess the impact of business group diversification. In conclusion, this dissertation aimed to explain the capacity of business group diversification to generate value under conditions of institutional change.^

A retrospective-longitudinal examination of the relationship between apportionment of seat time in community-college algebra courses and student academic performance

During the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase by postsecondary institutions in providing academic programs and course offerings in a multitude of formats and venues (Biemiller, 2009; Kucsera & Zimmaro, 2010; Lang, 2009; Mangan, 2008). Strategies pertaining to reapportionment of course-delivery seat time have been a major facet of these institutional initiatives; most notably, within many open-door 2-year colleges. Often, these enrollment-management decisions are driven by the desire to increase market-share, optimize the usage of finite facility capacity, and contain costs, especially during these economically turbulent times. So, while enrollments have surged to the point where nearly one in three 18-to-24 year-old U.S. undergraduates are community college students (Pew Research Center, 2009), graduation rates, on average, still remain distressingly low (Complete College America, 2011). Among the learning-theory constructs related to seat-time reapportionment efforts is the cognitive phenomenon commonly referred to as the spacing effect, the degree to which learning is enhanced by a series of shorter, separated sessions as opposed to fewer, more massed episodes. This ex post facto study explored whether seat time in a postsecondary developmental-level algebra course is significantly related to: course success; course-enrollment persistence; and, longitudinally, the time to successfully complete a general-education-level mathematics course. Hierarchical logistic regression and discrete-time survival analysis were used to perform a multi-level, multivariable analysis of a student cohort (N = 3,284) enrolled at a large, multi-campus, urban community college. The subjects were retrospectively tracked over a 2-year longitudinal period. The study found that students in long seat-time classes tended to withdraw earlier and more often than did their peers in short seat-time classes (p < .05). Additionally, a model comprised of nine statistically significant covariates (all with p-values less than .01) was constructed. However, no longitudinal seat-time group differences were detected nor was there sufficient statistical evidence to conclude that seat time was predictive of developmental-level course success. A principal aim of this study was to demonstrate—to educational leaders, researchers, and institutional-research/business-intelligence professionals—the advantages and computational practicability of survival analysis, an underused but more powerful way to investigate changes in students over time.

In Favor of Hospitality-Management Education

Despite the almost one-hundred-year history of hospitality-management education; the hundreds of well-established two-year, four-year, and graduate programs worldwide; and the hundreds of thousands of graduates those programs have prepared for careers in the industry, hospitality-management education’s merit and place in higher education are still questioned at times, to the dismay of hospitality educators the world over. This article delineates several features of hospitality management that make these programs valuable and unique and provides compelling arguments in its favor. The arguments include: 1) courses tailored to the hospitality industry, the world’s largest industry; 2) focus on small-business management as well as corporate enterprises; 3) emphasis on services and service management, not manufacturing; 4) programs and coursework focused on people management, which it at the core of the hospitality businesses; 5) unique focus on the specific issues of food and beverage management, the largest component of the hospitality industry; and 6) transferability of graduates’ knowledge and skill sets, which are in high demand among other service industries. While business programs focus on the fundamentals of management and production, hospitality- management programs prepare graduates who are aware of general management principles and are particularly well-versed in managing the guest experience and employees in a service environment.

Current State of Management/Union Relations in Hospitality Sector

Labor management relations in the hospitality sector is an important aspect of effective management. Increasingly, unions are becoming proactive in organizing hospitality workers. This manifests itself in strikes, boycotts, picketing, sexual harassment complaints, and complaints to OSHA regarding safety and health workplace violations. This research monitors the current scene with respect to labor management relations and analyzes work issues that have been brought up for third-party resolution by NLRB staff or arbitrators. The study reports on 66 NLRB cases and 104 arbitration cases. Issues brought before the NLRB include mostly contract interpretations. In arbitration, there were mostly discipline issues, including work rule violations, disorderly conduct, poor performance and employee theft. Quite often, the proposed job action on the part of the employer was discharge. In NLRB cases, the employee usually prevailed, while in arbitration the employer usually prevailed.

Effects of computer self efficacy and positive mood in business -to -business service encounters

Attempts to improve the level of customer service delivered have resulted in an increased use of technology in the customer service environment. Customer-contact employees are expected to use computers to help them in providing better service encounters for customers. This research study done in a business-to-business environment explored the effects of customer-contact employees' computer self efficacy and positive mood on in-role customer service, extra-role customer service and organization citizenship. It also examined the relationship of customer service to customer satisfaction and customer delight. ^ Research questions were analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequency distributions, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. Results indicated that computer self efficacy had a greater impact on extra-role customer service than it did on in-role customer service. Positive mood had a positive moderating influence on extra-role customer service but not on in-role customer service. ^ There was a significant relationship between in-role customer service and customer satisfaction but not between extra-role customer service and customer satisfaction. There was no significant relationship between in-role customer service and customer delight nor between extra-role customer service and customer delight. There was a statistically greater positive relationship between joy experienced by clients and customer delight than between pleasant surprise and customer delight. ^ This study demonstrated the importance of facilitating customer-contact employee positive mood on the job in order to improve the level of extra-role customer service delivered. It also showed that increasing the level of customer service does not necessarily lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. ^

Progettazione e Sviluppo di un Sistema di Proactive Alerting all'interno di una piattaforma di Big Data Analytics

Il lavoro presentato in questo elaborato tratterà lo sviluppo di un sistema di alerting che consenta di monitorare proattivamente una o più sorgenti dati aziendali, segnalando le eventuali condizioni di irregolarità rilevate; questo verrà incluso all'interno di sistemi già esistenti dedicati all'analisi dei dati e alla pianificazione, ovvero i cosiddetti Decision Support Systems. Un sistema di supporto alle decisioni è in grado di fornire chiare informazioni per tutta la gestione dell'impresa, misurandone le performance e fornendo proiezioni sugli andamenti futuri. Questi sistemi vengono catalogati all'interno del più ampio ambito della Business Intelligence, che sottintende l'insieme di metodologie in grado di trasformare i dati di business in informazioni utili al processo decisionale. L'intero lavoro di tesi è stato svolto durante un periodo di tirocinio svolto presso Iconsulting S.p.A., IT System Integrator bolognese specializzato principalmente nello sviluppo di progetti di Business Intelligence, Enterprise Data Warehouse e Corporate Performance Management. Il software che verrà illustrato in questo elaborato è stato realizzato per essere collocato all'interno di un contesto più ampio, per rispondere ai requisiti di un cliente multinazionale leader nel settore della telefonia mobile e fissa.

Advanced Business Simulations-Incorporating business and process execution data

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their predictions are widely used by the enterprises for informed decision making. Nevertheless , a very important factor, which is generally overlooked, is that the top level strategic KPIs are actually driven by the operational level business processes. These two domains are, however, mostly segregated and analysed in silos with different Business Intelligence solutions. In this paper, we are proposing an approach for advanced Business Simulations, which converges the two domains by utilising process execution & business data, and concepts from Business Dynamics (BD) and Business Ontologies, to promote better system understanding and detailed KPI predictions. Our approach incorporates the automated creation of Causal Loop Diagrams, thus empowering the analyst to critically examine the complex dependencies hidden in the massive amounts of available enterprise data. We have further evaluated our proposed approach in the context of a retail use-case that involved verification of the automatically generated causal models by a domain expert.

Informationsförvaltning inom en stor organisation : En fallstudie på Trafikverket

Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur en stor organisation arbetar med förvaltning av information genom att undersöka dess nuvarande informationsförvaltning, samt undersöka eventuella förslag till framtida informationsförvaltning. Vidare syftar studien också till att undersöka hur en stor organisation kan etablera en tydlig styrning, samverkan, hantering och ansvars- och rollfördelning kring informationsförvaltning. Denna studie är kvalitativ, där datainsamlingen sker genom dokumentstudier och intervjuer. Studien bedrivs med abduktion och är en normativ fallstudie då studiens mål är att ge vägledning och föreslå åtgärder till det fall som uppdragsgivaren har bett mig att studera. Fallet i denna studie är ett typiskt fall, då studiens resultat kan vara i intresse för fler än studiens uppdragsgivare, exempelvis organisationer med liknande informationsmiljö. För att samla teori till studien så har jag genomfört litteraturstudier om ämnen som är relevanta för studiens syfte: Informationsförvaltning, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse och dess arkitektur, samt Business Intelligence Competency Center. Denna studie bidrar med praktiskt kunskapsbidrag, då studien ger svar på praktiska problem. Uppdragsgivaren har haft praktiska problem i och med en icke fungerade informationsförvaltning, och denna studie har bidragit med förslag på framtida informationsförvaltning. Förslaget på framtida informationsförvaltning involverar ett centraliserat Data Warehouse, samt utvecklingen utav en verksamhet som hanterar informationsförvaltning och styrningen kring informationsförvaltningen inom hela organisationen.

Decisions, decisions everywhere (in the open data era).

Abstract: Decision support systems have been widely used for years in companies to gain insights from internal data, thus making successful decisions. Lately, thanks to the increasing availability of open data, these systems are also integrating open data to enrich decision making process with external data. On the other hand, within an open-data scenario, decision support systems can be also useful to decide which data should be opened, not only by considering technical or legal constraints, but other requirements, such as "reusing potential" of data. In this talk, we focus on both issues: (i) open data for decision making, and (ii) decision making for opening data. We will first briefly comment some research problems regarding using open data for decision making. Then, we will give an outline of a novel decision-making approach (based on how open data is being actually used in open-source projects hosted in Github) for supporting open data publication. Bio of the speaker: Jose-Norberto Mazón holds a PhD from the University of Alicante (Spain). He is head of the "Cátedra Telefónica" on Big Data and coordinator of the Computing degree at the University of Alicante. He is also member of the WaKe research group at the University of Alicante. His research work focuses on open data management, data integration and business intelligence within "big data" scenarios, and their application to the tourism domain (smart tourism destinations). He has published his research in international journals, such as Decision Support Systems, Information Sciences, Data & Knowledge Engineering or ACM Transaction on the Web. Finally, he is involved in the open data project in the University of Alicante, including its open data portal at http://datos.ua.es