Despite advances in the application of analytics in business functions such as marketing and finance, and a significant degree of interest in the topic of Human Resource analytics, its usage is still nowhere near where it could be. This study’s primary aim was to measure the levels of usage of HR analytics among South African organisations, an exercise that has not been done before. This qualitative, exploratory study was conducted among 16 senior Human Resource practitioners from large organisations in South Africa. Being qualitative, a limitation of this study is that it is not representative and therefore the results cannot be generalised. Further opportunities therefore exist for quantitative, longitudinal research in this field to objectively ascertain the extent of usage of HR analytics. It was found that South African organisations’ usage of HR analytics is still in its infancy and that the concept and its implications are little understood. It also found that there is consensus regarding the importance for HR analytics in organisations and that the HR analytical skills challenge is the main hindrance to implementation. Importantly, the study demonstrated and that the overall outlook for HR analytics is positive. The research makes recommendations and proposes a model that should enable organisations, the HR profession and the academic world to implement HR analytics. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / ccgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

This dissertation generalizes traditional models of security policies, from specifications of whether programs are secure, to specifications of how secure programs are. This is a generalization from qualitative, black-and-white policies to quantitative, gray policies. Included are generalizations from traditional definitions of safety and liveness policies to definitions of gray-safety and gray-liveness policies. These generalizations preserve key properties of safety and liveness, including that the intersection of safety and liveness is a unique allow-all policy and that every policy can be written as the conjunction of a single safety and a single liveness policy. It is argued that the generalization provides several benefits, including that it serves as a unifying framework for disparate approaches to security metrics, and that it separates—in a practically useful way—specifications of how secure systems are from specifications of how secure users require their systems to be. To demonstrate the usefulness of the new model, policies for mitigating injection attacks (including both code- and noncode-injection attacks) are explored. These policies are based on novel techniques for detecting injection attacks that avoid many of the problems associated with existing mechanisms for preventing injection attacks.

Complexity of business information systems (IS) and information and communication technology (ICT) in general is a challenge faced by both IT professionals and project managers, but also the users of these systems, whether as employees of enterprises and organizations or their customers, partners or suppliers. In this work we study the complexity and its manifestations in informatics. We review relevant literature to analyze the state of the art in methods and approaches used for building and maintaining business information systems. The main results of this analysis is realization that even though complexity is considered an important parameter that have a negative impact on performance of information systems, the current methods and approaches for IT system maintenance do not provide any tools for complexity evaluation or management. The author therefore based on existing approaches and methodologies is establishing his own definition of a metrics to measure the complexity of the information system. The complexity is defined as the sum of the individual entities of system UML models, which are selected according to the methodology MMDIS to consistently describe all relevant content dimensions of the system. Subsequently derives causal relationship between the complexity of each dimension. Both between each other in one phase of the life cycle of the information system and in time. The next section examines the reasons and mechanisms to increase the complexity of the corporate information system and identifies the causes, characteristics, stakeholders, processes and life cycle stages of the IS, which influence this growth. Next we investigate impact of IS complexity on its implementation and we identify the critical processes involved in day to day operation of IS, in its maintenance and in extending its functionality. The main aim of this dissertation thesis is to design a methodology for managing the complexity of the information system and its validation in practice on a real SAP implementation project. In addition, we provide a software tool written in ABAP programming language. This program can be used as a tool of the methodology for measuring SAP IS complexity.

Cílem práce je nastínit možnosti využití analytického CRM k zvyšování ziskovosti společnosti. Analytický CRM se zabývá analýzou zákaznických dat, které slouží jako podpora pro operativní a strategické rozhodování firmy. Teoretická část práce se zabývá různými způsoby segmentace zákazníků, zákaznickými metrikami a způsoby, jak si udržet dobré zákazníky ve společnosti. Pro ucelený obraz o analytickém CRM také nastiňuje jeho technickou stránku, ve které popisuje nejčastěji využívané techniky při získávání dat. Praktická část práce byla vyhotovena ve spolupráci se společností Makro Cash & Carry. Popisuje nejdůležitější změny, které byly podniknuty k přeměně Makra z produktově na zákaznicky orientovanou společnost, a podrobněji se věnuje práci kontrolorů, jež se analytickým CRM ve firmě zabývají.

Performance is an aspect of software quality that is often not considered at early stages of software design. Common approaches to performance analysis include utilizing profiling tools after the software has been developed to find bottlenecks and executing simulation models that are either manually constructed or derived from UML design diagrams. Many projects attempt to correct performance issues by adding more powerful hardware instead of attacking the root cause. Software metrics have been used to predict many aspects of software quality such as maintainability and fault-tolerance by correlation and regression analysis. Metrics proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer, also known as the CK metric suite, have been studied extensively in software quality model analyses. These studies examined maintainability, fault tolerance, error proneness, and scalability of the software as it evolved through time. Correlations were made between metrics and the likely quality models they represented. Other metrics such as Cyclomatic Complexity by McCabe and class couplings by Martin have also been used in quality predictions. No research has been conducted to analyze relationship between performance and metrics. The goal of this research was to construct a decision tree that used software metrics to forecast performance characteristics. The relationship between metrics and performance was derived by correlation between static code metrics and three runtime variables: number of objects, method call frequency, and average method call lengths on selected software benchmarks. The decision tree was constructed using the C4.5 algorithm implemented in the WEKA software. Pearson correlation coefficients were obtained for the combined datasets from all benchmarks. The decision trees and Pearson statistics showed that weighted methods per class (WMC), total lines of code (TLOC), and coupling between objects (CBO) have significant correlation with software performance. WMC showed positive correlation with number of objects and calls. CBO correlated positively with average method call lengths and negatively with number of objects. TLOC correlated positively with number of calls.

A universalização do acesso ao conteúdo disponibilizado em sistemas Web tem se tornado crucial para que todas as pessoas, independente de deficiências ou de outras restrições possam ter acesso a ele. Diversos estudos indicam que, apesar da instituição de leis federais sobre acessibilidade para conteúdo Web em diversos países, muitos sítios ainda apresentam problemas. A falta de conscientização das pessoas envolvidas em projetos de desenvolvimento Web sobre a acessibilidade e a não utilização de técnicas adequadas para desenvolvimento de aplicações têm um impacto considerável sobre a acessibilidade. Levantamentos foram realizados com o objetivo de identificar características dos desenvolvedores sobre o conhecimento e uso de técnicas para acessibilidade. Entretanto, os estudos realizados investigaram somente o uso de um conjunto restrito de técnicas e, além disso, também não investigaram a correlação entre as respostas obtidas pelos participantes e o nível de acessibilidade das páginas desenvolvidas por eles. Neste trabalho, propõe-se efetuar um levantamento sobre a percepção de acessibilidade e uso de técnicas para desenvolvimento de sistemas Web considerando acessibilidade com pessoas envolvidas em projetos de desenvolvimento Web no Brasil de diferentes áreas de atuação. Este levantamento foi acompanhado de avaliações de acessibilidade automatizadas com uso de métricas sobre sítios desenvolvidos pelos participantes, para verificar a influência dos fatores investigados na acessibilidade dos sítios e na percepção de acessibilidade dos participantes. O levantamento realizado contou com a participação de 613 participantes de todo o Brasil. Os resultados indicaram que no Brasil a percepção da acessibilidade por pessoas que participam de projetos de desenvolvimento Web ainda é bastante limitada. Mais do que promover o treinamento das pessoas envolvidas em projetos sobre questões técnicas, é necessário promover maior conscientização sobre a acessibilidade e sobre os problemas que pessoas com diferentes restrições e habilidades enfrentam ao utilizar a Web. / Universal access to content in Web based systems is an essential aspect to enable everyone to have access to it, regardless of disabilities or any other restrictions. Several studies indicate that, although federal legislation regarding to Web accessibility have been promulgated in many countries, accessibility is still an issue for many Web sites. The limited awareness of accessibility by people involved in Web development and the lack of appropriate use of development techniques in the development of applications have a deep impact on accessibility. A few surveys have been carried out to identify the main characteristics of Web developers regarding accessibility concepts and techniques for accessibility. However, the studies reported up to this date have only investigated the use of a restricted set of techniques by developers. Besides, they have not addressed the analysis of the correlation between the answers provided by the subjects and the accessibility level of their Web pages. The proposal of the work presented in this master\'s thesis is the development of a survey on the accessibility awareness and on the use of techniques for accessibility by people involved in the development of Web based systems. Automatic metric based accessibility evaluations on the Web sites developed by the subjects were carried out to support the investigation of the impacts that the issues investigated have on the Web pages accessibility and on the accessibility awareness. The survey was answered by 613 subjects from all Brazilian states. The results show that in Brazil the accessibility awareness is still very limited. Training people involved in Web projects on technical issues alone is not enough. It is necessary to promote a wider awareness of accessibility and of the problems people with different restrictions and abilities deal with when using the Web

abstract: Languages have long been studied through the rhythm class framework, which discriminates them into separate classes on the basis of shared rhythmic properties. Originally these differences were attributed to the isochronous timing of different prosodic units, such as stress intervals in “stress-timed” languages and syllables in “syllable-timed” languages. More recent work has turned to durational metrics as a means of evaluating rhythm class, by measuring the variability and proportion of segmental intervals in the speech stream. Both isochrony and durational metrics are no longer viewed as correlative with natural language rhythm, but durational metrics in particular have remained prevalent in the literature. So long as the conclusions of durational metrics are not overextended, their analysis can provide a useful mechanism for assessing the compatibility of a language with a given rhythm class by way of comparative analysis. This study therefore presents a durational-metric comparison of Scottish Gaelic, a language which has frequently been described as stress-timed but has never been empirically tested for rhythm class, with English, a prototypical and well-studied example of a stress-timed language. The Gaelic metric scores for %V (percentage of vocalic content), ΔV (standard deviation in vocalic interval length), and ΔC (standard deviation in consonantal interval length) (Ramus et al. 1999) are shown to be very similar to those measured for English, indicating that the language displays similar patterns of durational variability and segmental proportion typically ascribed to a rhythmically stress-timed language. This provides clear support for the classification of Scottish Gaelic as stress-timed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2020

Introduction: In the current rapidly changing world of work, organisations are investing increasingly in workforce planning. Throughout times, recruiting and retaining talented employees have been one of the most complex problems facing employers. Human Resource (HR) metrics and analytics is still a relatively untouched tool used by HR managers. However, HR practitioners are engaging in an era where recruitment and talent retention processes are becoming predictive and provide several benefits to both the employer and employee. By understanding how data can be used for insightful decisions that generate business results, HR professionals need to exploit the gap. Currently, they have the opportunity to utilise their extensive data sets by providing the organisation with the relevant and strategic analytics for informed decision-making. Research purpose: The purpose of the systematic literature review was to investigate the nature and value that metrics and analytics on recruitment and talent management add to organisations. Motivation for the study: Throughout history, people were considered as the most valuable assets in which an organisation can invest. However, HR failed to take responsibility for the programmes and initiatives which they developed and implemented. By developing a means to measure HR programmes and initiatives and assess the performance and development of employees, HR professionals will be able to demonstrate its effect on the business's 'bottom line'. Consequently, top management would then be more willing to invest money and time in HR-related activities. HR metrics and analytics will allow top management to make informed decisions on HR initiatives and programmes such as recruitment and talent management. In a volatile business environment HR departments need to prove the monetary value of the HR functions to top management. For HR analytics to be effective, it is vital that the organisation applies the correct metrics that is aligned with the overall business strategy and objectives. Research design, approach and method: For the purpose of the present study, a systematic literature review was conducted to determine the nature and value-add of recruitment and talent management analytics in an organisation. Main findings: The first objective was to determine the importance of recruitment and talent retention metrics and analytics. Results show that organisations currently struggle to recruit and retain talented employees, a factor that ultimately impacts the success of the organisation. The review provided evidence of organisations that realised the importance of recruitment and talent retention analytics by also using it to inform their human capital planning. The second objective assessed the use of metrics and analytics to manage recruitment and talent. The research indicated that organisations apply various recruitment and talent retention metrics in different ways and for diverse purposes. A possible reason may be that organisations have different data sets and also use these sets differently to develop HR-related metrics suited for the specific company. The third objective was to identify standards for metrics on recruitment and talent management. The research indicates that there is no systematic approach to evaluate recruitment and talent management. This is a topic for future research. The fourth and final objective investigated the role of recruitment and talent retention analytics in management's decision-making. Here the literature indicates that organisations have invested highly in HR analytics, and even appoint an analytics team within the company with the sole purpose of evaluating the organisation's data sets. This attest to the value management attaches to HR analytics as important contribution to the business's decision-making process, and ultimately the success of the organisation as a whole. Limitations/future research: The present research had to factor in several delimitations related to the context, constructs and theoretical perspectives of the study. The researcher firstly identified that the research context was limited to the Human Resources (HR) segment of organisations and business sector. Secondly, only HR-related analytics were used for the purpose of this study. The researcher searched, analysed and made assumptions about this research topic by consulting mainly recent (over the past 10 years) and authentic resources. Lastly, the assumptions made in the study are based on data the researcher incorporated from selected literature. Conclusion: It is evident from the findings that HR professionals began understanding the impact of recruitment and talent retention analytics on validating HR contributions to the organisation. Furthermore, it is clear that, on the other hand, management does acknowledge the importance and value that recruitment and talent retention analytics add to the organisation's 'bottom line'. This allows management to make insightful decisions, and ultimately retain a competitive edge in the market. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Marketing Management / MCom / Unrestricted

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