The company's sustainable competitive advantage derives from its capacity to create value for customers and to adapt the operational practices to changing situations. Business processes are the heart of each company. Therefore process excellence has become a key issue. This book introduces a novel approach focusing on the autonomous optimization of business processes by applying sophisticated machine learning techniques such as Relational Reinforcement Learning and Particle Swarm Optimization.
The company's sustainable competitive advantage derives from its capacity to create value for customers and to adapt the operational practices to changing situations. Business processes are the heart of each company. Therefore process excellence has become a key issue. This book introduces a novel approach focusing on the autonomous optimization of business processes by applying sophisticated machine learning techniques such as Relational Reinforcement Learning and Particle Swarm Optimization.
This volume brings together two hitherto disparate domains of scholarly inquiry: organization and management studies on the one hand, and the study of visual and multimodal communication on the other. Within organization and management studies it has been recognized that organizational reality and communication are becoming increasingly visual, and, more generally, multimodal, whether in digital form or otherwise. Within multimodality studies it has been noted that many forms of contemporary communication are deeply influenced by organizational and managerial communication, as formerly formal and bureaucratic types of communication increasingly adopt promotional language and multimodal document presentation. Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies integrates these two domains of research in a way that will benefit both. In particular, it conceptually and empirically connects recent insights from visual and multimodality studies to ongoing discussions in organization and management theory. Throughout, the book shows how a visual/multimodal lens enriches and extends what we already know about organization, organizations, and practices of organizing, but also how concepts from organization and management studies can be highly productive in further developing insights on visual and multimodal communication. Due to its essentially interdisciplinary objectives, the book will prove inspiring for academics and scholars of management, the sociology of organizations as well as related disciplines such as applied linguistics and visual studies.
This volume brings together two hitherto disparate domains of scholarly inquiry: organization and management studies on the one hand, and the study of visual and multimodal communication on the other. Within organization and management studies it has been recognized that organizational reality and communication are becoming increasingly visual, and, more generally, multimodal, whether in digital form or otherwise. Within multimodality studies it has been noted that many forms of contemporary communication are deeply influenced by organizational and managerial communication, as formerly formal and bureaucratic types of communication increasingly adopt promotional language and multimodal document presentation. Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies integrates these two domains of research in a way that will benefit both. In particular, it conceptually and empirically connects recent insights from visual and multimodality studies to ongoing discussions in organization and management theory. Throughout, the book shows how a visual/multimodal lens enriches and extends what we already know about organization, organizations, and practices of organizing, but also how concepts from organization and management studies can be highly productive in further developing insights on visual and multimodal communication. Due to its essentially interdisciplinary objectives, the book will prove inspiring for academics and scholars of management, the sociology of organizations as well as related disciplines such as applied linguistics and visual studies.
This book revisits discourse analytic practice, analyzing the idea that the field has access to, provides, or even constitutes a ‘toolbox’ of methods. The precise characteristics of this toolbox have remained largely un-theorized, and the author discusses the different sets of tools and their combinations, particularly those that cut across traditional divides, such as those between disciplines or between quantitative and qualitative methods. The author emphasizes the potential value of integrating methods in terms of triangulation and its specific benefits, arguing that current trends in Open Science require Discourse Studies to re-examine its methodological scope and choices, and move beyond token acknowledgements of ‘eclecticism’. In-depth case studies supplement the methodological discussion and demonstrate the challenges and benefits of triangulation. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in Discourse Studies, particularly those with an interest in combining methods and working across disciplines.
Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. His greatness appeared in every phase of the problem. No one equaled him in power to draw new recruits to the cause; no one equaled him in fullness and dearness of understanding of the principles of flight; no one did so much to convince the world of the advantages of curved wing surfaces; and no one did so much to transfer the problem of human flight to the open air where it belonged." These words were spoken by Wilbur Wright, who successfully accomplished the first powered flight together with his brother Orville in 1903 on the sand dunes of the Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina. Wilbur was talking about the most important of their predecessors, Otto Lilienthal. Lilienthal attracted worldwide attention due to the spectacular photographs showing him in flight, made possible by technology that had only just been developed by him. This fortuitous union between a pioneer of aviation and the pioneers of so-called “instantaneous photography” is responsible for the immense contemporary popularity of Lilienthal’s flights around the globe, the first ever free flights performed by man. This book traces the life of the German aviation pioneer, focusing on the designs of his many aircraft and the photographic documentation that has survived. The presentation ends with a remarkable research project conducted by one of the authors, right up to and including his own training exercises with Lilienthal’s “normal soaring apparatus” and “large biplane”. This project offered new insight into Lilienthal’s work, and also led to a spectacular aerial meeting of Lilienthal's 1895 biplane and the Wright brothers’ 1902 biplane at a historic location on the Outer Banks. The book provides access to video material, largely stemming from this project.
Using language - speaking and understanding it - is a defining ability of human beings, woven into all human activity. It is therefore inevitable that it should be deeply implicated in the design, production and use of buildings. Building legislation, design guides, competition and other briefs, architectural criticism, teaching and scholarly material, and the media all produce their characteristic texts. The authors use texts about such projects as Berlin's new Reichstag, Scotland's new Parliament, and the Auschwitz concentration camp museum to clarify the interaction between texts, design, critical debate and response.
This book is devoted to the study of variational methods in imaging. The presentation is mathematically rigorous and covers a detailed treatment of the approach from an inverse problems point of view. Many numerical examples accompany the theory throughout the text. It is geared towards graduate students and researchers in applied mathematics. Researchers in the area of imaging science will also find this book appealing. It can serve as a main text in courses in image processing or as a supplemental text for courses on regularization and inverse problems at the graduate level.
At a time when the media are facing a severe loss of trust, what is needed above all is education. How does media work? What are the economic dependencies? How is media content created and how is it consumed? What challenges does digitization bring, and why is it more important today than ever to understand the world of media? It is questions of this nature that this book addresses, with the aim of helping interested readers understand how the media works. Especially in relation to social media and digitalization, knowing how it works is important - to be able to distinguish which media are trustworthy and to understand why independent journalism is so important. This book is suitable for anyone who wants to understand media, and that's exactly how it's laid out: Readable for everyone and explained in an understandable way.
This book investigates the impact of noise upon the emergence and sustenance of patterns. “Patterns” loosely refers to coherent spatial structures, including fronts, as well as temporal patterns. The crucial role of nonlinearities is highlighted and expanded upon in the context of dynamical system frameworks. The author's familiarity with chaos theory, statistical physics and nonlinear science is reflected in the highly interdisciplinary character of the text. Model equations and experiments taken from fluid dynamics, semiconductor devices, biophysics and statistical mechanics complement theoretical concepts.It should be of great value to researchers and graduate students who desire a quick introduction to the subject. Excursions into emerging fields such as traffic flow simulations and game theory serve to broaden the scope and to encourage the exploration of sundry topics.
Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: The recent decades have been characterised by the development from the industrial age towards a service economy. Knowledge and information have become the most essential production factors. When services and intangible assets are offered, information and soft factors are even more important elements of business communication. Any kind of worldwide communication between (anonymous) business partners has been enabled by the progress of information and telecommunication technology. The banking sector is one important part of a service economy. With regard to the globalisation the banking industry still faces radical changes. This paper is especially addressed to the business operations of WestLB AG (WestLB), a major German bank that primarily operates both national and international business-to-business (B2B) banking. WestLB operates in a partnership with the savings banks, which run the business-to-customer (B2C) banking of the mass market for private customers (esp. retail banking). In addition, WestLB s subsidiaries Readybank and Weberbank attend to private clients, whereas Readybank runs bulk-lending business and Weberbank offers private wealth management to German customers. In particular, this reading explores a number of relevant questions within the scope of well-managed marketing and its controlling. Latest organisational restructuring within the bank s marketing organisation have encouraged a rethink of how to better manage marketing communications to the clients and where to spend its marketing investments. One important change means that one worldwide marketing budget has been applied to the entire bank. This is the second largest departmental cost budget after information technology to be controlled at WestLB. All these present circumstances are described in detail in a separate chapter including organisational questions, marketing teams, customer and product groups. Motivation: Due to the homogeneity of the offered finance products, it is especially difficult for banks to position and distinguish themselves from the competition. Consequently, marketing success of financial services products requires communication activities such as imaging, loyalty factor, persuasion, and so on. Traditionally, the marketing department is responsible for shaping such a competitive communication on products and image towards the company s markets within an affluent society, where the customer can choose from different [...]
This book is a practical guide for managing archiving projects with SAP R/3 efficiently. Hereby it is addressing both R/3 consultants, system administrators and key-users. Detailed solutions for optimal archiving strategies as well as the manual for a comprehensive database analysis are provided in this book. But thereby not only the technical side, but also the business side of data archiving is taken into account. Thus the reader will be able to implement an archiving project.
This is an introduction to molecular and atomistic modeling techniques applied to fracture and deformation of solids, focusing on a variety of brittle, ductile, geometrically confined and biological materials. The overview includes computational methods and techniques operating at the atomic scale, and describes how these techniques can be used to model cracks and other deformation mechanisms. The book aims to make new molecular modeling techniques available to a wider community.
A cutting†‘edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic, which attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master?†‹ Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current†‘day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants’ relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.
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