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The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

Migration from the traditional management model to the BPM (business process management) approach results in improved process performance. In order to promote BPM, it is necessary to have an organizational approach that defines the necessary tasks of the processes' project, day‐to‐day execution, and learning‐related tasks. In this aspect, there are difficulties and barriers to be confronted in a different way through organization. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the importance attributed to the tasks necessary for process management considering the way the management of these tasks and barriers found in order to change from functional management to process oriented management.

A case study was developed on two companies from the services sector. In‐depth interviews with managers from the companies studied were conducted.

It was identified that these companies found themselves at different levels of transition from the functional management process to process oriented management and that people and organizational cultures are presented in both organizations as the main barriers to changes within this management model.

This research is based on a broad bibliographical base in opposition to the limited capacity of empirical validation.

The paper describes an empirical case study which refers to BPM tasks and to the barriers that will be transposed in order to promote business process management. The research investigates which BPM tasks are executed and the importance of each task and even the barriers against changing the management.

There is limited research that utilizes the consequential‐conflictual (CC) approaches, which utilized radical orientation of double loop, second order and reorientation of organizational learning strategies. Both the functional‐institutional (FI) and CC approaches are integrated with the sustainability and ecological resources management literature. The aim of this paper is to fill this research gap.

The paper applies FI and CC sociological approaches.

This paper's contribution to the managerial auditing education literature is based on the proposition that ethics education can improve the moral and ethical reasoning of auditors, when the educational processes incorporate both the FI and CC sociological organizational learning strategies. The paper suggests that ethics education in auditing could benefit from experiential teaching methods utilized in allied applied disciplines of medicine, engineering, and educational psychology.

Sociological approaches have been commonly applied in behavioral managerial accounting and control systems research. This paper extends the FI and CC framework to ethics education in managerial auditing research.

The subject of accounting ethics education is important to auditors. When accounting ethics education utilizes both the FI and CC teaching approaches, the managerial auditing education processes become interactive and cooperative by bringing experiential organizational experiences to the classroom.

Accounting ethics education is shaped by ecological and environmental sustainability concerns. Recently, business school interest and growth in sustainability management has contributed to the integration of ethics education in managerial auditing and accounting contexts, overcoming the shortcomings accounting programs experienced from stand‐alone ethics courses.

This paper proposes a way to integrate three different analytical approaches into a consistent framework of national systems of innovation that can benefit academia and policy makers. The approaches include the traditional structural method of national systems of innovation, the new development of functional view of national systems of innovation, and the effective approach.

As a theoretical research paper, the paper reviews and analyses intensive literature on national system of innovation from the perspectives of functional, structural, and effectiveness approaches.

The paper argues that these three approaches reflect different perspectives of national systems of innovation. Instead of contradicting each other, they could be integrated into a coherent framework.

The paper builds an integrative framework to bring different methods of national systems of innovation together. It provides an integrative framework for academy and policy makers to more comprehensively understand the concept of national systems of innovation and further policy design and implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an analytical approach – functional analysis – that can be used to evaluate the current design of an organization and identify alternative designs that may increase the ability to realize strategic and operational goals.

The approach described in this paper is based on key concepts in systems theory and axiomatic design theory (Suh, 1990, 2001). A brief case example is used to illustrate the practical application of the approach.

It is shown that functional analysis can be used to map the design of an organization and identify key design challenges (e.g. related to overlapping or conflicting functions).

The case study that is described is considered to be a pilot application of the approach as it is based on a limited number of interviews.

This paper should be relevant for applied researchers, management consultants, project managers and others who are analyzing the current structure of an organization and/or are involved in re-designing an organization.

Application of the functional approach may improve design processes and thereby enhance the effectiveness of social systems, including public and private sector organizations.

This paper describes how key concepts in systems theory and axiomatic design theory can provide the basis for a new framework for analyzing organization designs.

For many decades, it has been recognized that maintenance activities should be adapted to the specific usage of a system. For that reason, many advanced policies have been developed, such as condition-based and load-based maintenance policies. However, these policies require advanced monitoring techniques and rather detailed understanding of the failure behavior, which requires the support of an OEM or expert, prohibiting application by an operator in many cases. The present work proposes a maintenance policy that relieves the high (technical) demands set by these existing policies and provides a more accurate specification of the required (dynamic) maintenance interval than traditional usage-based maintenance.

The methodology followed starts with a review and critical assessment of existing maintenance policies, which are classified according to six different aspects. Based on the need for a technically less demanding policy that appears from this comparison, a new policy is developed. The consecutive steps required for this functional usage profiles based maintenance policy are then critically discussed: usage profile definition, monitoring, profile severity quantification and the possible extension to the fleet level. After the description of the proposed policy, it is demonstrated in three case studies on real systems.

A maintenance policy based on a simple usage registration procedure appears to be feasible, which enables a significantly more efficient maintenance process than the traditional usage-based policies. This is demonstrated by the policy proposed here.

The proposed maintenance policy based on functional usage profiles offers the operators of fleets of systems the opportunity to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their maintenance process, without the need for a high investment in advanced monitoring systems and in experts interpreting the results.

The original contribution of this work is the explicit definition of a new maintenance policy, which combines the benefits of considering the effects of usage or environment severity with a limited investment in monitoring technology.

Web services play vital role in the development of emerging technologies such as Cloud computing and Internet of Things. Although, there is a close relationship among the discovery, selection and composition tasks of Web services, research community has treated these challenges at individual level rather to focus on them collectively for developing efficient solution, which is the purpose of this work. This paper aims to propose an approach to integrate the service discovery, selection and composition of Semantic Web services on runtime basis.

The proposed approach defined as a quality of service (QoS)-aware approach is based on QoS model to perform discovery, selection and composition tasks at runtime to enhance the user satisfaction and quality guarantee by incorporating non-functional parameters such as response time and throughput with the Web services and user request. In this paper, the proposed approach is based on ontology for semantic description of Web services, which provides interoperability and automation in the Web services tasks.

This work proposed an integrated framework of Web service discovery, selection and composition which supports end user to search, select and compose the Web services at runtime using semantic description and non-functional requirements. The proposed approach is evaluated by various data sets from the Web Service Challenge 2009 (WSC-2009) to show the efficiency of this work. A use case scenario of Healthcare Information System is implemented using proposed work to demonstrate the usability and requirement the proposed approach.

The main contribution of this paper is to develop an integrated approach of Semantic Web services discovery, selection and composition by using the non-functional requirements.

Developing macro queries in software systems is a complex task for many users. Geographical information systems (GIS) are large software systems that require much effort to develop expertise in. A functional programming design approach has a number of distinct strengths that can be represented in a graphical query language interface to aid users in macro query development. A visual functional query language (VFQL) for Geographical Information Systems is presented and its strengths and weaknesses discussed. The system is based on a visual functional programming design approach. This offers a consistent, non‐procedural, strongly typed environment where users can develop their own higher order functions. The approach integrates functional programming, visual programming and knowledge and rules. VFQL’s effectiveness is evaluated compared with a text based command language for GIS macro query development. The results of an experiment indicate that users could develop solutions to simpler tasks more quickly and with fewer errors than a comparative text based command language. On more complex tasks there was no significant difference. From this we deduce that VFQL demonstrates certain design features to help the development of macros or small programs for users but that the complexity of the problem in difficult tasks is likely to be the most important determinant of the error rate and time to complete the task.

In the last decade, the speed and intensity with which regional level connections are expanding in all areas of the world has been remarkable. Higher education in Africa is no exception. This chapter focuses on African policies and programme initiatives to further higher education regionalization. Regionalization is defined as the process of ‘building closer collaboration and alignment among higher education actors and systems in a designated area or framework, commonly called a region’. An analytical framework, consisting of functional, organizational and political approaches, is applied to the evolution of higher education regionalization at the continental level in Africa through a close examination of the progress related to the implementation of the “African Union Strategy for the Harmonization of Higher Education Programmes.” Special emphasis is given to the harmonization of degree structures and the recognition of qualifications through sub-regional qualification frameworks. Key issues and challenges such as rationales, governance, benefits and risks, unintended consequences, language, engagement for all and innovation are raised at the end of the chapter to stimulate further reflection and exploration of the complex process of higher education regionalization.

Functional appraisal of records is an idea which has been around for a long time but it is only relatively recently that it has actually been implemented in various organisations and countries. The aim is to ensure that archives capture the right records but avoid the huge workloads and backlogs of the past by identifying these records before they arrive in the archives, so that only archival records arrive there. This can be done by appraising functions instead of appraising documents, because records exist to document functions, so if a function is archival, then the records which support it will also be archival. Retention schedules can then be developed based on those functions, and classification schemes based on the schedules so that there is a seamless system governing the records from creation to final disposition.