Determining the influence of strategic planning's elements in its success

This paper presents the results of a multinational large-scale survey, investigating the current trends in strategic planning. The survey was conducted online using the Warwick Business School alumni database. Considering the development and implementation of strategy within a multi-process framework, the 'Strategic Development Process' model by Dyson and O'Brien (1998), using factor analysis, four distinct factors of strategic planning have been produced and with regression analysis, their impact on the success of strategic planning from a process point of view has been assessed. The results indicate that significant variation in practices involved is created by complexity either of the organizational size or environmental turbulence.

Database System for Alumni Tracking

In their discussion - Database System for Alumni Tracking - by Steven Moll, Associate Professor and William O'Brien, Assistant Professor, School of Hospitality Management at Florida International University, Professors Moll and O’Brien initially state: “The authors describe a unique database program which was created to solve problems associated with tracking hospitality majors subsequent to graduation.” “…and please, whatever you do, keep in touch with your school; join an alum’ organization. It is a great way to engage the resources of your school to help further your career,” says Professor Claudia Castillo in addressing a group of students attending her Life after College seminar on 9/18/2009. This is a very good point and it is obviously germane to the article at hand. “One of the greatest strengths of a hospitality management school, a strength that grows with each passing year, is its body of alumni,” say the authors. “Whether in recruiting new students or placing graduates, whether in fund raising or finding scholarship recipients, whatever the task, the network of loyal alumni stands ready to help.” The caveat is the resources are only available if students and school, faculty and alumni can keep track of each other, say professors Moll and O’Brien. The authors want you to know that the practice is now considered essential to success, especially in the hospitality industry whereby the fluid nature of the industry makes networking de rigueur to accomplishment. “When the world was a smaller, slower place, it was fairly easy for graduates to keep track of each other; there weren't that many graduates and they didn't move that often,” say the authors. “Now the hospitality graduate enters an international job market and may move five times in the first four years of employment,” they expand that thought. In the contemporary atmosphere linking human resources from institution to marketplace is relatively easy to do. “How can an association keep track of its graduates? There are many techniques, but all of them depend upon adequate recordkeeping,” Moll and O’Brien answer their own query. “A few years ago that would have meant a group of secretaries; today it means a database system,” they say. Moll and O’Brien discuss the essentials of compiling/programming such a comprehensive data base; the body of information to include, guidelines on the problems encountered, and how to avoid the pitfalls. They use the Florida International University, Hospitality database as a template for their example.

A Study of Alumni Engagement and Its Relationship to Giving Behaviors

This paper examines the relationship between alumni engagement and two categories of variables, alumni characteristics and alumni giving behavior. The Valley University engagement score was developed using the entire alumni population and information available from the institutional database. The study found that, with the exception ofgeneration, there was no difference in engagement scores based on alumni characteristics. The study also found that the engagement score has a positive correlation to a variety of giving behaviors, including donor status, recent donor status,annual giving behavior (RFM), and adjusted lifetime giving.

A database ATP simulated waveforms of shunt reactor switching cases with vacuum breakers on motor circuits

This paper presents a database ATP (Alternative Transient Program) simulated waveforms for shunt reactor switching cases with vacuum breakers in motor circuits following interruption of the starting current. The targeted objective is to provide multiple reignition simulated data for diagnostic and prognostic algorithms development, but also to help ATP users with practical study cases and component data compilation for shunt reactor switching. This method can be easily applied with different data for the different dielectric curves of circuit-breakers and networks. This paper presents design details, discusses some of the available cases and the advantages of such simulated data.

Report : analysis of maintenance database inputs

In the previous phase of this project, 2002-059-B Case-Based Reasoning in Construction and Infrastructure Projects, demonstration software was developed using a case-base reasoning engine to access a number of sources of information on lifetime of metallic building components. One source of information was data from the Queensland Department of Public Housing relating to maintenance operations over a number of years. Maintenance information is seen as being a particularly useful source of data about service life of building components as it relates to actual performance of materials in the working environment. If a building is constructed in 1984 and the maintenance records indicate that the guttering was replaced in 2006, then the service life of the gutters was 22 years in that environment. This phase of the project aims to look more deeply at the Department of Housing data, as an example of maintenance records, and formulate methods for using this data to inform the knowledge of service lifetimes.

United States still no closer to database legislation

Last year European Intellectual Property Review published an article comparing the latest version of the proposed US database legislation, the Collections of Information Antipiracy Bill with the UK's Copyright and Rights in Database Regulations 1997. Subsequently a new US Bill, the Consumer and Investor Access to Information Act has emerged, the Antipiracy Bill has been amended and much debate has occurred, but the US seems no closer to enacting database legislation. This article briefly outlines the background to the US legislative efforts, examines the two Bills and draws some comparisons with the UK Regulations. A study of the US Bills clearly demonstrates the starkly divided opinion on database protection held by the Bills' proponents and the principal lobby groups driving the legislative efforts: the Antipiracy Bill is very protective of database producers' interests, whereas the Access Bill is heavily user-oriented. If the US experience is any indication there will be a long horizon involved in achieving any consensus on international harmonisation of this difficult area.

Recognising audio-visual speech in vehicles using the AVICAR database

Interacting with technology within a vehicle environment using a voice interface can greatly reduce the effects of driver distraction. Most current approaches to this problem only utilise the audio signal, making them susceptible to acoustic noise. An obvious approach to circumvent this is to use the visual modality in addition. However, capturing, storing and distributing audio-visual data in a vehicle environment is very costly and difficult. One current dataset available for such research is the AVICAR [1] database. Unfortunately this database is largely unusable due to timing mismatch between the two streams and in addition, no protocol is available. We have overcome this problem by re-synchronising the streams on the phone-number portion of the dataset and established a protocol for further research. This paper presents the first audio-visual results on this dataset for speaker-independent speech recognition. We hope this will serve as a catalyst for future research in this area.

Face authentication test on the BANCA database

This work details the results of a face authentication test (FAT2004) (http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/banca/icpr2004) held in conjunction with the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. The contest was held on the publicly available BANCA database (http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/banca) according to a defined protocol (E. Bailly-Bailliere et al., June 2003). The competition also had a sequestered part in which institutions had to submit their algorithms for independent testing. 13 different verification algorithms from 10 institutions submitted results. Also, a standard set of face recognition software packages from the Internet (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/evalfacerec) were used to provide a baseline performance measure.

Improving web database search incorporating users query information

The growing importance and need of data processing for information extraction is vital for Web databases. Due to the sheer size and volume of databases, retrieval of relevant information as needed by users has become a cumbersome process. Information seekers are faced by information overloading - too many result sets are returned for their queries. Moreover, too few or no results are returned if a specific query is asked. This paper proposes a ranking algorithm that gives higher preference to a user’s current search and also utilizes profile information in order to obtain the relevant results for a user’s query.