Peer leadership and capability building in law and justice

The aim of this project was to create a model mapping the scaffolding and development of: peer leadership opportunities and capacity; and graduate capabilities, work-related skills and outcomes, across the range of peer assisted learning programs offered in the Faculty of Law during 2013. In doing so, it conceptualised Law and Justice students’ roles and opportunities for peer leadership across the whole of their learning experience and aimed to raise awareness of the benefits to leaders of participating in peer programs (relevant to the development of their graduate capabilities and employability). Through the mapping, the project also sought to increase student understanding of the range of peer leader opportunities available across the Faculty and therefore promote participation in such programs.

In-memory business process management

In-memory databases have become a mainstay of enterprise computing offering significant performance and scalability boosts for online analytical and (to a lesser extent) transactional processing as well as improved prospects for integration across different applications through an efficient shared database layer. Significant research and development has been undertaken over several years concerning data management considerations of in-memory databases. However, limited insights are available on the impacts of applications and their supportive middleware platforms and how they need to evolve to fully function through, and leverage, in-memory database capabilities. This paper provides a first, comprehensive exposition into how in-memory databases impact Business Pro- cess Management, as a mission-critical and exemplary model-driven integration and orchestration middleware. Through it, we argue that in-memory databases will render some prevalent uses of legacy BPM middleware obsolete, but also open up exciting possibilities for tighter application integration, better process automation performance and some entirely new BPM capabilities such as process-based application customization. To validate the feasibility of an in-memory BPM, we develop a surprisingly simple BPM runtime embedded into SAP HANA and providing for BPMN-based process automation capabilities.

Engaging expert contractors: The work health and safety obligations of the business or undertaking

This article examines the legal principles governing the statutory work health and safety general duties of principals who engage expert contractors to carry out work beyond the expertise of the principal. The article examines recent case law in which superior courts accepted the principal’s argument that the engagement of the expert contractor was sufficient to discharge the principal’s statutory work health and safety general duty. It then reframes the debate within the principles of systematic work health and safety management, and key provisions in the harmonised Work Health and Safety Acts—the primary duty of care; the key underpinning principles; the positive and proactive officer’s duty; and the horizontal duty of consultation, cooperation and coordination. It argues that it is likely that courts examining the issue of the principal’s work health and safety obligations under the harmonised Work Health and Safety Acts will require principals to do more to actively manage the work of expert contractors to ensure the health and safety of all workers and others potentially affected by the work.

International Perspectives on Business Innovation and Disruption in the Creative Industries : Film, Video and Photography

This volume examines how disruptive innovations are reshaping industry boundaries and challenging conventional business models and practices in the industries for film, video and photography. The thirteen chapters provide a rich and diverse account of these processes from a wide range of country contexts. The book fills the gap between the study of disruption by innovation scholars in business schools and the recognition of disruption by academics and practitioners from non-business school disciplines and contexts, including the broader social sciences.

“Back to the future” – a retrospective analysis of university business models

Using established strategic management and business model frameworks we map the evolution of universities in the context of their value proposition to students as consumers of their products. We argue that in the main universities over time have transitioned from a value-based business model through to an efficiency-based business model that for numerous reasons, is becoming rapidly unsustainable. We further argue that the future university business models would benefit with a reconfiguration towards a network value based model. This approach requires a revised set of perceived benefits, better aligned to the current and future expectations and an alternate approach to the delivery of those benefits to learner / consumers.

A recommendation system for predicting risks across multiple business process instances

This paper proposes a recommendation system that supports process participants in taking risk-informed decisions, with the goal of reducing risks that may arise during process execution. Risk reduction involves decreasing the likelihood and severity of a process fault from occurring. Given a business process exposed to risks, e.g. a financial process exposed to a risk of reputation loss, we enact this process and whenever a process participant needs to provide input to the process, e.g. by selecting the next task to execute or by filling out a form, we suggest to the participant the action to perform which minimizes the predicted process risk. Risks are predicted by traversing decision trees generated from the logs of past process executions, which consider process data, involved resources, task durations and other information elements like task frequencies. When applied in the context of multiple process instances running concurrently, a second technique is employed that uses integer linear programming to compute the optimal assignment of resources to tasks to be performed, in order to deal with the interplay between risks relative to different instances. The recommendation system has been implemented as a set of components on top of the YAWL BPM system and its effectiveness has been evaluated using a real-life scenario, in collaboration with risk analysts of a large insurance company. The results, based on a simulation of the real-life scenario and its comparison with the event data provided by the company, show that the process instances executed concurrently complete with significantly fewer faults and with lower fault severities, when the recommendations provided by our recommendation system are taken into account.