Implementing clinical IT in critical care: keys to success

Ensuring the success of a clinical information system in critical care requires careful selection of the right system to address the unique needs in this area. In addition, the methodology used for implementation must include key stakeholders, ensure nursing and physician leadership, understand and improve clinical processes, and provide ongoing training and support. These guidelines can be applied to the implementation of any clinical information system. They provide the opportunity to demonstrate value and benefits from CIS in critical care and beyond.     

Resource link: Re-establishing the employment relationship in an era of downsizing

This article examines AT&T's efforts to deal with force management issues by developing Resource Link^sm, an internal service unit that uses payroll management employees to help meet the variable work force needs of AT&T. Resource Link is discussed in terms of its contributions to increasing employment stability, improved learning, better governance, and helping to renew the psychological contract between employees and employers. The paper calls for future research in four major areas: skills development, teamwork, reward systems, and career management. It also addresses the potential applicability of this type of program to other firms. © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Implementing Market Segmentation Strategies in UK Personal Financial Services: Problems and Progress

Most academic research into segmentation in the financial services industry has focused on alternative analytical approaches and base variables; relatively little attention has been paid to implementation issues, despite managementS concerns about the practicality and usefulness of segmentation. Some significant barriers to effective implementation of segmentation have been encountered by major financial services firms. This paper reviews these barriers, and finds that weaknesses in customer data, and the importance of a good fit with the company'S distribution channels, can limit the range of segmentation approaches that a company can adopt, while the organisational context, structure and strategic positioning canfail to support effective segmentation. The paper also considers some of the newer entrants to the financial services industry, and finds that they are making progress in all of these areas.     

The role of customer management capabilities in public–private partnerships

Commercial organisations are increasingly asked to perform tasks traditionally associated with governmental bodies, such as law enforcement. The rationale for these public–private partnerships is that there are synergies between traditional business skills and those required to achieve certain societal goals. However, there is a lack of research into whether this is, indeed, the case. This paper addresses this gap by investigating one particular type of public–private partnership: anti-money laundering (AML). The study explores the potential synergies between customer relationship management (CRM) and those required for AML. A quantitative survey-based approach is used to identify the overlaps and connections between these two areas of competence. The findings reveal tensions between financial institutions’ dual roles as both commercial organisations and players in the battle against money laundering. The consequences for these firms are explored, and the wider implications for other organisations supplying non-commercial services to government are considered.     

Strategic loan modification: An options-based response to strategic default

This paper presents a parsimonious barrier model for the optimal principal reset in a loan modification, thereby maximizing the loan value to the lender bank and minimizing the likelihood of strategic foreclosure by the homeowner. Writing down the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio will reduce the present value of future payments on the loan, but will also reduce the probability of default, thereby saving foreclosure losses. The optimal trade-off of these two countervailing effects will pinpoint the optimal LTV at which the loan must be reset. We present a simple barrier option decomposition of the loan value that makes the optimization of LTV easy to implement. An extension of the model is shown to account for varying growth rate assumptions about house prices. The model in this paper specifically accounts for the homeowner’s willingness to pay, and uses the framework to model shared-appreciation mortgages (SAMs).     

Random Walk in the MIST

The term MIST has been coined to describe the next tier of large emerging economies, namely Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey. This article reexamined whether the properties of mean reversion for stock prices held for the MIST emerging stock markets using the sample from April 2004 to April 2012. The authors utilized a panel unit test with Fourier transformation capable of taking multiple structural breaks into account to discover that MIST stock markets indeed follow a random walk process. This is consistent with the efficient market hypothesis, suggesting that historical information is not useful in predicting future prices in MIST stock markets.