The attitudes of employees are key for ensuring the productivity and sustainability of an organisation. The present research aimed to explore obstacles and facilitators of positive team functioning in an offshore environment. Preliminary identification of obstacles and challenges to effective teamwork was achieved through an interview with two senior Human Resource managers at a large international bank, the primary location of which is in Australia. From this information, a survey was developed and distributed to members of an offshore Human Resource (HR) service centre consisting of 100 staff members, responsible for HR operations and described as an ‘extension’ or ‘captive’ team. An interview with management revealed that the effectiveness and sustainability of the current offshore team were of particular interest. Consideration of these issues and research into the effectiveness of virtual and captive teams led to a focus on organisational identity, work engagement, climate, trust, recognition from management, technology support, reliability of technology and goal clarity. Goal clarity and technology support were significant predictors of work engagement; low integration, goal clarity, technology support, reliability of technology and recognition from management were significant predictors of organisational identity. Thus, in an offshore environment, clear goals and the ability to complete those goals through use of efficient technologies are vital. This should impact the type of training given to offshore team members as well as the amount of technology support that is available to them.

Quality-aware management of data streams is gaining more and more importance with the amount of data produced by streams growing continuously. The resources required for data stream processing depend on different factors and are limited by the environment of the data stream management system (DSMS). Thus, with a potentially unbounded amount of stream data and limited processing resources, some of the data stream processing tasks (originating from different users) may not be satisfyingly answered, and therefore, users should be enabled to negotiate a certain quality for the execution of their stream processing tasks. After the negotiation process, it is the responsibility of the Data Stream Management System to meet the quality constraints by using adequate resource reservation and scheduling techniques. Within this paper, we consider different aspects of real-time scheduling for operations within a DSMS. We propose a scheduling concept which enables us to meet certain time-dependent quality of service requirements for user-given processing tasks. Furthermore, we describe the implementation of our scheduling concept within a real-time capable data stream management system, and we give experimental results on that.