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Het bachelorproject is uitgevoerd bij Tam Tam B.V. te Rijswijk. Tam Tam is sinds 1996 actief op het gebied van online marketing & communicatie en portals. De afgelopen jaren heeft Tam Tam een gestage groei doorgemaakt en op dit moment zijn er zo'n 80 medewerkers in dienst. Gezien de voortdurende groei van Tam Tam bestaat er de wens een oplossing te cren voor de Human Resource Management afdeling. Deze oplossing moet huidige oplossingen, bestaande uit een eenvoudige medewerkeradministratie en vele Excel sheets met persoonlijke informatie, vervangen en een volledige, portal-integrated oplossing bieden voor de HRM afdeling. De opdracht is gestart met het opstellen van een duidelijke opdrachtomschrijving waarna een plan van aanpak is gemaakt. Hierin zijn enkele constraints gedefinieerd en is een duidelijke planning opgenomen. Verder zijn de deliverables vastgelegd, waarna van start kon worden gegaan. Tijdens de analyse fase is door middel van interviews met alle actoren een duidelijk beeld ontstaan van de requirements. Naast interviews met de afdeling HR zijn er ook interviews geweest met de afdeling financi de systeembeheerders en een unit manager. Daarnaast heeft de stagebegeleider, welke zelf een directielid van Tam Tam is, regelmatig zijn input geleverd op de requirements. Van alle interviews zijn duidelijke notulen gemaakt, welke zijn teruggekoppeld naar de actoren. Hierdoor hebben er geen misverstanden kunnen bestaan over de eisen en wensen van de actoren. Tot slot zijn de gedefinieerde requirements in groepen ingedeeld door middel van cardsorting en is aan iedere requirement een prioriteit gegeven. De ontwerpfase is begonnen met het cren van papieren prototypes van de gebruikersinterface. Deze zijn vervolgens met de eindgebruikers van het systeem doorgenomen, waarna ze zijn gedigitaliseerd en nogmaals zijn doorgesproken met HR. Ook zijn verschillende technieken onderzocht en is er veelvuldig gebruik gemaakt van prototypes waardoor ervaring met de techniek opgedaan kon worden. Uiteindelijk zijn een functioneel en technisch ontwerp gecred, waarin ook het databasediagram en een eenvoudig klassediagram zijn opgenomen. Vervolgens zijn de requirements gelementeerd, waarbij veelvuldig gebruik gemaakt is van virtual machines als testomgeving. Ook tijdens de implementatie is continu terugkoppeling naar de eindgebruikers geweest. Na de implementatie in de testomgeving is het geheel deployed op de productieomgeving, waarna er grondige tests zijn uitgevoerd. Na het slagen van de eigen tests en een acceptatietest met de opdrachtgever is de software in gebruik genomen. Uiteindelijk is ongeveer de helft van de initi requirements gelementeerd. Dit was vooraf voorzien, gezien de wensen van de opdrachtgever groter waren dan het tijdsbestek wat er voor het project was. De duidelijke prioritering van de requirements heeft hier erg bij geholpen. De planning is nauwgezet nageleefd, slechts op het einde is besloten de uiteindelijke tests pas na de deployment op de productieomgeving te doen. Dit zodat met de definitieve versie van het systeem de acceptatietest uitgevoerd kon worden.

In this article we propose a framework which can assist analysts in their reflection on the requirements for a participatory modelling exercise in natural resource management. Firstly, we distinguish different types of formal models which may be developed, ranging from models that focus on (bio)physical mechanisms to models which also include the actors involved in the utilisation of the resource and the social mechanisms that co-determine actor behaviour. Secondly, we consider what different modes of stakeholder participation entail for model construction and use. Finally, we propose six different purposes for a modelling exercise (clarify arguments and values, research and analyse, design and recommend, provide strategic advice, mediate, and democratise), and highlight conditions that affect the appropriateness of stakeholder participation for each purpose. The framework does not provide a straightforward recipe for the selection of participatory modelling methods, but we expect that the systematic reflection it affords will help analysts to make appropriate choices while designing a modelling exercise.

Building on the experience built up from the management of more than 30 integration project, the objective of this research as been to improve the post-acquisition HR integration approach of Philips New Venture Integration, based on a gap analysis between the current model approach actual HR integration processes employed during the integration of acquisitions. Opportunities for improvement of the HR integration approach are proposed with respect to the definition of HR integration objectives and the implementation of HR integration activities As the field of post-acquisition integration is very broad, initial research themes are developed by both internal and external interviews. Because the NVI HR Integration model is a mature model which has been used and improved over the last five years, the internal interviews serve to quickly focus on the most pressing issues, whereas the external interviews provide an out-of-the-box view which might provide solutions to problems which Philips has not yet been able to solve. The action research method is used for this research with the aim of positively affecting organizational change, by developing the improved HR Integration approach together with the persons involved in the actual integration of acquisitions. Action research is a cyclical process that consists of five distinct phases of (1) Diagnosing (2) Action Planning, (3) Action taking, (4) Evaluation and (5) Specifying Learning. Due to the limited time, this research is based on one single cycle. Based on the results of this single cycle it can be concluded that the Philips NVI post-acquisition integration model incorporates many of the concepts of the process-perspective on socio-cultural integration discussed in academic literature. Both the perspectives of task integration and human integration are both clearly represented in the post-acquisition integration model. Using the action research method I have been able to outline opportunities for improvement in order to better match the planning, management and execution of the HR integration approach with the intended results. The inherent complexity of the M&A integration process, and the heterogeneity between deals, make it difficult to develop generalizable conclusions when comparing many different acquisitions, without the risk of over-generalizing and oversimplifying these acquisitions. By using a qualitative approach, this research allows to investigate a single approach in depth. The resulting conclusions shed new light on certain existing paradoxes within the academic literature on post-acquisition integration, and although these insights are not statistically generalizable, they might serve as a starting point for improved understanding of the performance of mergers and acquisitions.

In this paper, different control channel (CC) implementations for multichannel medium access control (MAC) algorithms are compared and analyzed in the context of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) as a function of spectrum-sensing performance and licensed user activity. The analysis is based on a discrete Markov chain model of a subset of representative multichannel OSA MAC classes that incorporates physical layer effects, such as spectrum sensing and fading. The analysis is complemented with extensive simulations. The major observations are given as follows: 1) When the CC is implemented through a dedicated channel, sharing such dedicated channel with the licensed user does not significantly decrease the throughput achieved by the OSA network when the data packet sizes are sufficiently large or the number of considered data channels is small. 2) Hopping OSA MACs, where the CC is spread over all channels, are less susceptible to licensed user activity than those with a dedicated CC (in terms of both average utilization and on/off times). 3) Scanning efficiency has a large impact on the achievable performance of licensed and OSA users for all analyzed protocols. 4) The multiple rendezvous MAC class, which has yet to be proposed in OSA literature, outperforms all the multichannel MAC designs analyzed in this paper.

In this research an attempt was made to map the Indonesian water policy network through Social Network Analysis (SNA). Furthermore, the role of the distribution of information and knowledge in this (policy) network with respect to its’ capacity to perform well has been investigated. This research has shown that there are there are some fundamental issues at hand in Indonesian water management that cause systematic underperformance of the sector as whole. Although sector reformation has introduced several principles of integrated water resources management into the Indonesian water sector, positive results in terms of water policy and solutions remain unseen because they are limited by ineffective policy processes and water policy network in transition.

In the past several years, personal mobile devices have developed rapidly as versatile computing platforms, capable of installing and running many different applications. Often, these devices are equipped with multiple (wireless) network interfaces supporting internet access through one or more networks. The availability of these networks is dynamic over time, because the device owners move in and out of range during their daily activities: a device may connect to an ultra-wideband access point at home, simultaneously use a Bluetooth network and a cellular network while traveling, and connect to an 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) at work. Applications on mobile devices therefore experience intermittent connectivity or fluctuations in available throughput capacity when communicating with other nodes on the internet. Mobile applications may benefit from taking into account aspects of these dynamics – for instance, by adapting data rates to maximum available capacity or controlling when to scan and activate specific networks. Furthermore, they may provide a better service to the user when taking into account in a proactive manner the availability of these networks over time. This dissertation covers two aspects that are important for applications dealing with dynamic network resources on personal mobile devices. We define (1) a mechanism that provides applications with awareness of and control over current resources in a comprehensive, cross-layer way, and (2) we describe an approach to predict the future time of the occurrence of a network resource event, such as getting into range or moving out of range of a particular network, using traces of resource availability in the past.

With the increasing adoption of distributed systems in both academia and industry, and with the increasing computational and storage requirements of distributed applications, users inevitably demand more from these systems. Moreover, users also depend on these systems for latency and throughput sensitive applications, such as interactive perception applications and MapReduce applications, which make the performance of these systems even more important. Therefore, for the users it is very important that distributed systems provide consistent performance, that is, the system provides a similar level of performance at all times. In this thesis we address the problem of understanding and improving the performance consistency of state-of-the-art distributed computing systems. Towards this end, we take an empirical approach and we investigate various resource management, scheduling, and statistical modeling techniques with real system experiments in diverse distributed systems, such as clusters, multi-cluster grids, and clouds, using various types of workloads, such as Bags-of-tasks (BoTs), interactive perception applications, and scientific workloads. In addition, as failures are known to be an important source of significant performance inconsistency, we also provide fundamental insights into the characteristics of failures in distributed systems, which is required to design systems that can mitigate the impact of failures on performance consistency.