No Arabic abstract
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has practically penetrated into all spheres of life. Therefore a closer look at the impact of ICT in public financial management and performance is highly justified. Public finance is defined as a field of economics concerned with paying for collective or governmental activities, and with the administration and design of those activities. Activities will be viewed as services or more precisely as public services. We believe that there is need to consider performance from the perspective of effective performance and the perceived performance. In fact the real or effective performance might not correspond to the perceived performance. A service can be considered from the perspective of the decision-maker, who in our case could be a government or a collectivity. ICT can be employed in the three phases that concern the decision-maker: design, implementation and evaluation. The beneficiaries of a service can employ ICT in any of the three phases - awareness, exploitation and assessment - for guarantying a high level of efficiency. Each phase in the environment of a service will be presented as well as illustrations of how ICT can be employed in order to improve the end-result of each one of them. We believe that a high efficiency of each phase will produce a high global efficiency. It should be noted however that the effectiveness of any system is highly dependent on the human engagement in the system. Therefore, the impact of ICT in public financial management will be felt only if the decision-makers and the end-users of the services engage themselves in the success of the system. Instead of giving a catalog of services, the focus has been on the model (or methodology) to adopt in designing services for which ICT could enhance the implementation.
There is no doubt that management practices are linked to the productivity and performance of a company. However, research findings are mixed. This paper provides a multi-disciplinary review of the current evidence of such a relationship and offers suggestions for further exploration. We provide an extensive review of the literature in terms of research findings from studies that have been trying to measure and understand the impact that individual management practices and clusters of management practices have on productivity at different levels of analysis. We focus our review on Operations Management (om) and Human Resource Management (hrm) practices as well as joint applications of these practices. In conclusion, we can say that taken as a whole, the research findings are equivocal. Some studies have found a positive relationship between the adoption of management practices and productivity, some negative and some no association whatsoever. We believe that the lack of universal consensus on the effect of the adoption of complementary management practices might be driven either by measurement issues or by the level of analysis. Consequently, there is a need for further research. In particular, for a multi-level approach from the lowest possible level of aggregation up to the firm-level of analysis in order to assess the impact of management practices upon the productivity of firms.
Often models for understanding the impact of management practices on retail performance are developed under the assumption of stability, equilibrium and linearity, whereas retail operations are considered in reality to be dynamic, non-linear and complex. Alternatively, discrete event and agent-based modelling are approaches that allow the development of simulation models of heterogeneous non-equilibrium systems for testing out different scenarios. When developing simulation models one has to abstract and simplify from the real world, which means that one has to try and capture the essence of the system required for developing a representation of the mechanisms that drive the progression in the real system. Simulation models can be developed at different levels of abstraction. To know the appropriate level of abstraction for a specific application is often more of an art than a science. We have developed a retail branch simulation model to investigate which level of model accuracy is required for such a model to obtain meaningful results for practitioners.
For better reliability and prolonged battery life, it is important that users and vendors understand the quality of charging and the performance of smartphone batteries. Considering the diverse set of devices and user behavior it is a challenge. In this work, we analyze a large collection of battery analytics dataset collected from 30K devices of 1.5K unique smartphone models. We analyze their battery properties and state of charge while charging, and reveal the characteristics of different components of their power management systems: charging mechanisms, state of charge estimation techniques, and their battery properties. We explore diverse charging behavior of devices and their users.
The goal of this work is to minimize the energy dissipation of embedded controllers without jeopardizing the quality of control (QoC). Taking advantage of the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) technology, this paper develops a performance-aware power management scheme for embedded controllers with processors that allow multiple voltage levels. The periods of control tasks are adapted online with respect to the current QoC, thus facilitating additional energy reduction over standard DVS. To avoid the waste of CPU resources as a result of the discrete voltage levels, a resource reclaiming mechanism is employed to maximize the CPU utilization and also to improve the QoC. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Compared with the optimal standard DVS scheme, the proposed scheme is shown to be able to save remarkably more energy while maintaining comparable QoC.
Intelligent agents offer a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), one way of using intelligent agents, carries great potential for progressing our understanding of management practices and how they link to retail performance. We have developed simulation models based on research by a multi-disciplinary team of economists, work psychologists and computer scientists. We will discuss our experiences of implementing these concepts working with a well-known retail department store. There is no doubt that management practices are linked to the performance of an organisation (Reynolds et al., 2005; Wall & Wood, 2005). Best practices have been developed, but when it comes down to the actual application of these guidelines considerable ambiguity remains regarding their effectiveness within particular contexts (Siebers et al., forthcoming a). Most Operational Research (OR) methods can only be used as analysis tools once management practices have been implemented. Often they are not very useful for giving answers to speculative what-if questions, particularly when one is interested in the development of the system over time rather than just the state of the system at a certain point in time. Simulation can be used to analyse the operation of dynamic and stochastic systems. ABS is particularly useful when complex interactions between system entities exist, such as autonomous decision making or negotiation. In an ABS model the researcher explicitly describes the decision process of simulated actors at the micro level. Structures emerge at the macro level as a result of the actions of the agents and their interactions with other agents and the environment. 3 We will show how ABS experiments can deal with testing and optimising management practices such as training, empowerment or teamwork. Hence, questions such as will staff setting their own break times improve performance? can be investigated.