Excelling in procurement : IT Contract Management with Lean and Six Sigma. Case study on legacy contract management at Philips Global IT.

Few people see both opportunities and threats coming from IT legacy in current world. On one hand, effective legacy management can bring substantial hard savings and smooth transition to the desired future state. On the other hand, its mismanagement contributes to serious operational business risks, as old systems are not as reliable as it is required by the business users. This thesis offers one perspective of dealing with IT legacy – through effective contract management, as a component towards achieving Procurement Excellence in IT, thus bridging IT delivery departments, IT procurement, business units, and suppliers. It developed a model for assessing the impact of improvements on contract management process and set of tools and advices with regards to analysis and improvement actions. The thesis conducted case study to present and justify the implementation of Lean Six Sigma in IT legacy contract management environment. Lean Six Sigma proved to be successful and this thesis presents and discusses all the steps necessary, and pitfalls to avoid, to achieve breakthrough improvement in IT contract management process performance. For the IT legacy contract management process two improvements require special attention and can be easily copied to any organization. First is the issue of diluted contract ownership that stops all the improvements, as people do not know who is responsible for performing those actions. Second is the contract management performance evaluation tool, which can be used for monitoring, identifying outlying contracts and opportunities for improvements in the process. The study resulted in a valuable insight on the benefits of applying Lean Six Sigma to improve IT legacy contract management, as well as on how Lean Six Sigma can be applied in IT environment. Managerial implications are discussed. It is concluded that the use of data-driven Lean Six Sigma methodology for improving the existing IT contract management processes is a significant addition to the existing best practices in contract management.

Migrating legacy applications to cloud: case TOAS

Cloud computing, despite its success and promises, presents issues for businesses mi­grating their legacy applications to cloud. In this research legacy-to-cloud migration issues are reviewed based on literature findings and an experience report. Solutions are applied to Tieto Open Application Suite (TOAS) software development platform running on cloud infrastructure. It is observed that the migration strategy heavily affects the migration approach. For TOAS a strategy of redesigning the applications for cloud is suggested. Common migration-driven application level modifications in­clude adaptation to service-oriented architecture, load balancing, and runtime and technology changes. A cloud platform such as TOAS might introduce additional needs. Decision making on migration strategy is found to be an issue to be solved case by case. Use of assistive decision making tools is suggested.

Self-deposit, discovery, and delivery of scientific GIS datasets using GeoHydra

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

APIs and Datasets everywhere

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Averting the legacy of kidney disease - focus on childhood

World Kidney Day 2016 focuses on kidney disease in childhood and the antecedents of adult kidney disease that can begin in earliest childhood. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) in childhood differs from that in adults, in that the largest diagnostic group among children includes congenital anomalies and inherited disorders, with glomerulopathies and kidney disease as a consequence of diabetes being relatively uncommon. In addition, many children with acute kidney injury will ultimately develop sequelae that may lead to hypertension and CKD in later childhood or in adult life. Children born early or who are small-for-date newborns have relatively increased risk for the development of CKD later in life. Persons with a high-risk birth and early childhood history should be watched closely in order to help detect early signs of kidney disease in time to provide effective prevention or treatment. Successful therapy is feasible for advanced CKD in childhood; there is evidence that children fare better than adults, if they receive kidney replacement therapy including dialysis and transplantation, although only a minority of children may require this ultimate intervention. Because there are disparities in access to care, effort is needed so that children with kidney disease, wherever they live, may be treated effectively, irrespective of their geographic or economic circumstances. Our hope is that the World Kidney Day will inform the general public, policy makers and caregivers about the needs and possibilities surrounding kidney disease in childhood.

Efeito de danos mecânicos, da redução de temperatura e 1-MCP no metabolismo pós-colheita de brócolis Legacy

O etileno acelera o metabolismo pós-colheita de brócolis, e sua síntese é induzida por danos mecânicos e pelo aumento da temperatura. Para testar esta hipótese, foram realizados 03 experimentos. No primeiro, avaliou-se o efeito do dano mecânico na produção do etileno; no segundo, estudou-se o efeito do armazenamento refrigerado; e, no terceiro, o efeito do 1-MCP no metabolismo e conservação de brócolis. Os resultados mostraram que o dano mecânico aumenta significativamente a produção do etileno, passando de 0,25 a 501,83 mL.h-1 g-1, duas horas após a aplicação do tratamento. Já, no tratamento controle, os incrementos foram menores, passando de 0,27 para 203,13 mL.h-1 g-1. Durante o armazenamento, observou-se que a deterioração ocorreu mais rapidamente no tratamento controle (20-22 °C), com intenso amarelecimento, degradação de clorofilas e formação de odor desagradável. Os brócolis armazenados a 0-2 e a 5-7 °C mantiveram boa qualidade por 12 dias. A aplicação de 1-MCP não contribuiu para prolongar a vida-de-prateleira de brócolis Legacy a 20-22 °C, não tendo havido efeito na preservação da coloração esverdeada, nem na prevenção da degradação de clorofilas.

The storying of an educator: the power of living legacy /

"I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships." Lindbergh (1983) p.9. In this thesis, I use self-study research as I focus on the topic of living legacy. This is a personal story, using narrative methodology and method as a means of uncovering and naming life lessons learned. I write to gain insight into my interpretation of the concept of living legacy - what living legacy means to me and why this concept is significant to me - and how living legacy impacts the person that I am in the present. Using a narrative lens, I inquire into stories that connect me to my spirit, my gender, education and theology, through my living legacy lessons, and I seek the impact these stories hold for me in my life today. I utilize a variety of methods including personal journals, course work, and arts-based research experiences as I explore the connections to my emerging perceptions ofmy living legacy lessons. This thesis represents the beginning of a continuing journey of self-discovery. I take the journey in order to uncover hidden and ongoing lessons of living legacy and the impact they have on the student and educator that I am.

Doctor Congalton's legacy : a chronicle of North country by-ways by Henry Johnston

UANL

Colonial Ideology and Legacy and Feminine Resistance in Jamaica Kincaid

Mon mémoire "Colonial Ideology and Legacy and Feminine Resistance in Jamaica Kincaid" est une lecture féminine de la colonisation. Il définit, en premier lieu, l'idéologie coloniale comme une idéologie manichéiste et déshumanisante. Étant critique de cette idéologie binaire et réductrice, mon mémoire déchiffre et propose une résistance féminine, riche et diverse, à travers quelques écrits eux même divers de l'écrivaine Jamaica Kincaid. Ce mémoire conteste toute idée reçue sur la femme, en s'appuyant sur des théories anticoloniales et féministes. Il s'agit en effet d'un travail déconstructif où je vise inlassablement à décortiquer et à délégitimer ces hiérarchies qui habitent nos pensées et nos corps, et qui, entravent l'épanouissement de l'être humain. Les trois chapitres qui forment le corps de mon mémoire sont organisés à chaque fois en terme d'oppression et de résistance; de déshumanisation et humanisation, où le sujet colonisé essaie de se libérer des différentes formes d'oppression pour vivre pleinement son humanité. Cette relation hiérarchique est représentée métaphoriquement à travers la relation mère-fille, une relation que j'étudie dans le deuxième chapitre. Le troisième chapitre s'intéresse au mouvement du corps féminin, qui devient l'espace de résistance à une identité limitatrice.

A Novel Decision Tree Algorithm for Numeric Datasets - C 4.5*Stat

Decision trees are very powerful tools for classification in data mining tasks that involves different types of attributes. When coming to handling numeric data sets, usually they are converted first to categorical types and then classified using information gain concepts. Information gain is a very popular and useful concept which tells you, whether any benefit occurs after splitting with a given attribute as far as information content is concerned. But this process is computationally intensive for large data sets. Also popular decision tree algorithms like ID3 cannot handle numeric data sets. This paper proposes statistical variance as an alternative to information gain as well as statistical mean to split attributes in completely numerical data sets. The new algorithm has been proved to be competent with respect to its information gain counterpart C4.5 and competent with many existing decision tree algorithms against the standard UCI benchmarking datasets using the ANOVA test in statistics. The specific advantages of this proposed new algorithm are that it avoids the computational overhead of information gain computation for large data sets with many attributes, as well as it avoids the conversion to categorical data from huge numeric data sets which also is a time consuming task. So as a summary, huge numeric datasets can be directly submitted to this algorithm without any attribute mappings or information gain computations. It also blends the two closely related fields statistics and data mining

The Tyne Digital Library - Part 4 Datasets

This part contains geomorphological, hydrological and other information concerning the desktop research of the River Tyne catchment area.

Simple Analysis of Network Datasets

Linux commands that are generally useful for analyzing data; it is very easy to reduce phenomena such as links, nodes, URLs or downloads, to multiply repeating identifiers and then sorting and counting appearances.