The Strategic Social Map of a Nongovernmental Organization

Currently, the traditional states-nation, as far as their social commitments are concerned, are giving way to the nongovernmental organizations (NGO). These organizations have a mission, strategy, and goals different from those organizations looking simply for profits. Nevertheless, NGOs are concerned about using management and information systems at least as good as those used by private companies. Organizations try to develop a social strategy taking their social responsibility as starting point. In this paper, the authors describe how to fix the organization mission, its strategy and goals, and also how to make its action map. A strategy proposal will be described, as well as the way on how to put it into practice. The main goals of this paper is to describe the mission, strategy, and goals of the organization; design its strategic social map; fix the limits of the organization's action; apply the theoretical model to a NGO; and design an information model in order to manage the strategic development. The authors would like to express their gratitude to M. Dolors Celma Benaiges, lecturer at the Escola Universitària del Maresme, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, for her assistance reviewing and translating the paper.     

How Do Debit Cards Affect Cash Demand? Survey Data Evidence

This paper analyzes how EFT-POS payments and ATM withdrawals affect cash demand. In particular, survey data about Austrian individuals are employed to estimate a purse cash demand equation, which takes account of sample selection effects. The results reveal that purse cash demand is significantly and sizably affected by debit card usage and that there are significant differences in cash demand for individuals with different debit card usage frequencies. In addition, the effect of EFT-POS payments on cash use at the point-of-sale is discussed on the basis of data from a consumer transaction survey.     

A web-based system architecture for ontology-based data integration in the domain of IT benchmarking

In the domain of IT benchmarking (ITBM), a variety of data and information are collected. Although these data serve as the basis for business analyses, no unified semantic representation of such data yet exists. Consequently, data analysis across different distributed data sets and different benchmarks is almost impossible. This paper presents a system architecture and prototypical implementation for an integrated data management of distributed databases based on a domain-specific ontology. To preserve the semantic meaning of the data, the ITBM ontology is linked to data sources and functions as the central concept for database access. Thus, additional databases can be integrated by linking them to this domain-specific ontology and are directly available for further business analyses. Moreover, the web-based system supports the process of mapping ontology concepts to external databases by introducing a semi-automatic mapping recommender and by visualizing possible mapping candidates. The system also provides a natural language interface to easily query linked databases. The expected result of this ontology-based approach of knowledge representation and data access is an increase in knowledge and data sharing in this domain, which will enhance existing business analysis methods.     

自然经济体系、食物链与禽鸟病毒传染

本文在自然经济的基础上,创建并论证了由草木、禽鸟和细菌组成的食物链及其微观和宏观经济影响.并将其应用于分析当前由H5N1类型病毒传染引起的禽鸟死亡现象可知:第一,具有双向前级让渡(级中投入)交换优势的自然市场短暂性的失去了平衡;第二,超级"自然王国"已经为全部生物种群按其信息与其适应性作出了持续性反应,以克服负面冲击;第三,生物种群的进化将跃上一个新的高度.     

Die Bundesbestimmtheit der Länderausgaben

Die L?nder beklagen bei Verhandlungen über die Finanzausstattung eine starke Belastung durch die Bundesbestimmtheit vieler ihrer Ausgaben. Wie hoch sind die durch bundesgesetzliche Bestimmungen verursachten Ausgaben wirklich? Wie lassen sich diese berechnen? Welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich durch die errechneten „Ausgabenverursachungsquoten“ für die Politik? Prof. Dr. Helmut Seitz, 51, ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Empirische Finanzwissenschaft und Finanzpolitik, an der Technischen Universit?t Dresden. Herrn Dirk Freigang, TU Dresden, danke ich für zahlreiche konstruktive Anregungen.     

Grund und Grenzen der vorvertraglichen Aufklärungspflicht des Versicherers

Zeitschrift für die gesamte Versicherungswissenschaft - Der Beitrag widmet sich der in Deutschland gängigen Praxis des Versicherungsvertriebs durch Versicherungsagenten. Gefragt wird nach...     

Full currency convertibility in Eastern Europe?

In the countries of Eastern Europe the question as to the degree of currency convertibility is among the most important decisions to be taken when setting the framework for a free market economy. This article attempts to indicate the monetary and fiscal measures that will be required if the reform countries willing and able to be integrated into the EC and OECD are to proceed rapidly to the liberalisation of capital transactions.     

Community engineering for innovations: the ideas competition as a method to nurture a virtual community for innovations

'Crowdsourcing' is currently one of the most discussed key words within the open innovation community. The major question for both research and business is how to find and lever the enormous potential of the 'collective brain' to broaden the scope of 'open R&D'. Based on a literature review in the fields of Community Building and Innovation Management, this work develops an integrated framework called 'Community Engineering for Innovations'. This framework is evaluated in an Action Research project – the case of an ideas competition for an ERP Software company. The case 'SAPiens' includes the design, implementation and evaluation of an IT-supported ideas competition within the SAP University Competence Center (UCC) User Group. This group consists of approximately 60,000 people (lecturers and students) using SAP Software for educational purposes. The current challenges are twofold: on the one hand, there is not much activity yet in this community. On the other, SAP has not attempted to systematically address this highly educated group for idea generation or innovation development so far. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a framework for a community-based innovation development that generates innovations, process and product ideas in general and for SAP Research, in particular, combining the concepts of idea competitions and virtual communities. Furthermore, the concept aims at providing an interface to SAP Human Resources processes in order to identify the most promising students in this virtual community. This paper is the first to present an integrated concept for IT-supported idea competitions in virtual communities for leveraging the potential of crowds that is evaluated in a real-world setting.     

Why Are Mothers Working Longer Hours in Austria than in Germany? A Comparative Microsimulation Analysis*

Labour force participation rates of mothers in Austria and Germany are similar; however, full‐time employment rates are much higher among Austrian mothers. In order to find out to what extent these differences can be attributed to differences in the tax‐transfer system, we perform a comparative microsimulation exercise. After estimating structural labour supply models for both countries, we interchange two important institutional characteristics of the two countries ‐ namely, (i) the definition of the tax unit within the personal income tax and (ii) the parental leave benefit scheme. As our analysis shows, differences in mothers’employment patterns can partly be explained by the different tax systems: while Germany has a system of joint taxation with income splitting for married couples, Austria taxes everyone individually, which leads to lower marginal tax rates for secondary earners than in the German system.