PROCESSES, PERFORMANCE DRIVERS AND ICT TOOLS IN HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT
(Services 3)
HR-Management
- Strategic, integrated and coherent approach to the employment, development and well-being of the people working in organizations.
- It covers activities such as:
- Strategic human resources management
- Human capital management
- Corporate social responsibility
- Knowledge management
- Organization development
- Resourcing (human resource planning, recruitment and selection, and talent management)
- Performance management
- Learning and development
- Reward management
- Employee relations
- Employee well-being and health
- Safety and the provision of employee services
Performance Drivers
The term “performance driver” will be henceforth used to mark activities or actions that increase the potential to achieve a higher level of corporate performance.
Categories:
- Generic (valid for any and all organizations with very rare exceptions) and specific (valid for given organization at given time and place).
- Recurring (consequently applied) and non-recurring (single-use).
- Dependent (with dependencies and relations to other performance drivers) and independent.
HR related Performance Drivers
- Attract and hire a greater share of high performers.
- Monitor the effects of new policies and programs and react swiftly to trends and results.
- Drive member satisfaction, profits, and long-term success.
- Simplify administration.
- Ensure security of valuable information over antiquated paper formats.
- Define organizational policies and procedures that serve to positively motivate workers.
- Maintain learning and development activities that stimulate optimal task and contextual job.
- Align employee activities with the needs of customers or clients.
- Support advanced strategic decision-making tools.
Improvements
- Free up time for critical management tasks.
- Increased human resource processes and practices contribution to organizational outputs.
- Attention to security and the necessity of “being prepared for anything”.
- Quick return to adequate performance levels.
UNESCO'S ICT COMPETENCY FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHERS
(Teaching 3)
There is an emerging broad consensus worldwide about the benefits that can be brought to school education through the appropriate use of evolving information and communication technologies.
Using ICT effectively
- The way ICT is used will depend on the subject being taught.
- It is important to set out the basic principles which should guide the use of ICT in teaching, and this is what the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT – CFT) does.
- It offers engaging and fast-evolving learning environments, blurs the boundaries between formal and informal education and prompts teachers to develop new ways of teaching and enabling students to learn.
The three aproaches of frame work
- Technology literacy
- Knowledge deepening
- Knowledge creation
Education Reform
The successful integration of ICT in classrooms will depend on the ability of teachers to structure the learning environment in new ways to merge new technology with a new pedagogy.
Understanding ICT in education
- Identify the policy goals supported by the ICT-CFT framework.
- Identify the ICT-CFT approaches and purpose.
- Understand the relevance of the ICT-CFT framework.
Pedagogy
Integrate technology and pedagogy
- Integrate ICT into didactic knowledge acquisition learning theory models.
- Create learning activities that use ICT resources to support specific educational outcomes.
Select and apply basic tools
- Given a specific activity identify the require devices and hardware.
- Use the internet and browsers to support learning activities.
The teacher
- Selects and creates suitable software and sources.
- Uses ICT to collaborate and communicate.
Professional learning
- Use ICT resources to enhance teacher productivity.
- Use ICT resources to support teacher professional learning.
TRANSLATION AND TECHNOLOGY: STUDY OF UK FREELANCE TRANSLATOR
(Translation 3)
Demand for translation services has increased considerably over the past decade or so, exacerbated bye a number of factors, including the growing emphasis in business on globalisation, the advent of the World Wide Web as an international marketing tool, the rise ofthe software localisation industry and the increasing opportunities for international trade.
With regard to technological developments, the proliferation of personal computers (PCs) has resulted in a widespread shift among translators from the use of dictating equipment and typists to the use of word processing software.
The internet has transformed the way in which translators receive and deliver translation assignments, with much of this now being undertaken via electronic mail, rather tan by fax or via the conventional postal system.
Background
Translator's workstation
Document production, managing terminology, storing and retrieving segments of previously translated text, and automated translation.
Locke cities: Budgeting, pricing, and hardware and software acquisition.
Austermühl's ‘process-orientated’ view of the translator's workstation.
‘Translation as a business’ as well as translation ‘as a linguistic and cultural process’
Research method
When condicting an empirical investigation ofa phenomenon, the resercher has at his/her disposal a variety of posible reserch approaches, including questionnaire surveys, case studies, laboratory experiments and action reserch.
There is an established body of reserch literatura in which questionnaires have been used to study ICT adoption in a variety of small business contexts.
Such studies provided a valuable source of ideas and insight to inform the design and development of the questionnaire formulated for use in this study. The questionnaire was organised into the following sections:
Translation profile
Covering demographic data; details of translator training and qualifications; ICT knowledge and skills.
ICT familiarity and usage
Covering general-purpose software, translation-specific software, other specialised software (financial management packages), web-based language resources, online tolos and communications technologies.
ICT strategy
Covering translators opinions and thoughts about ICT use in their translation workflow, their perceptions of translation technologies, and their approaches to business planning and strategy issues.
Overview of Survey Findings
The remaining 439 valid responses - translation was the principal job. (35%)
48 (11%) – in-house translators
391 (89%) – freelancers
Research method
LETRAC project survey – 110 individual translators
Translator's Workbench Project survey – 110 translators (small proportion were freelancers)
Translation practices survey - 280 responses were received from a mailing of 1800 (16%) – which 141 were freelancers
Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) - generated 134 and 274 responses respectively.
Profile of Survey Respondents
The survey respondents were generally quite experienced translators: 24% had between 6 and 10 years translation experience; 36% had between 11 and 20 years experience and 20% had worked as translators for over 20 years.
The majority (63%) of the respondents were female.
The most common subject specialisms among the respondents were, in descending rank order: business/commerce, technical translation (science and technology) and legal translation.
Adoption of Information and Communication Technologies
Document production activities:
- Word processing software (99%)
- Graphical or presentation software (25%)
- Desktop publishing packages (17%)
- Web publishing software (13%)
Document search and retrieval activities:
- Internet search engines (85%)
- Online dictionaries (79%)
- Multilingual terminology databanks (59%)
- Document archived (51%)
- Online encyclopedias (38%)
- Academic journals available online (30%)
- Terminology management systems (24%)
Translation creation activities:
- Computer-aided translation (CAT) tools (28%)
- Machine translation systems (5%)
- 75% of the respondents were not familiar with them at all
Communication activities:
- Electronic mail (93%)
- Dial up connections (68%)
- Broadband (26%)
Marketing and work procurement activities:
- 21% - Affirmative
- 33% - Translation marketplaces
Business management activities:
- 79% - spreadsheet packages
- Special-purpose business management software – only a few
- 13% - used to dedicate accounting/ financial management packages
- Project management software (2%)
Attitudes towards ICT
The overwhelming majority of translators believed ICT to be important to support each of the various groups of activity discussed earlier, particularly for communication activities and for information retrieval activities, such as terminology identification and locating relevant background reference material.
The translators reported that their adoption of ICT had: brought time saving benefits; helped them provide higher quality services to their clients; improved their effectiveness as translators; and improved their communication with clients.
ICT Adoption Strategies
There was little evidence of technology being adopted ‘just for the sake of it’ or ‘just because it was there’, an approach conventionally thought of by ICT strategists as immature. For many in the sample, it seemed that their guiding principle was to ensure that ICT adoption improved their efficiency and productivity.
Discussion and Implications
The findings of the survey indicate that there has been widespread adoption of general-purpose software applications to support a number of the activities involved in the freelance translators workflow.
The translators were concerned to adopt software applications that aligned with the needs of their translation business.
Conclusion:
The use of ICT by UK freelance translators is a timely and relevant subject of inquiry, given the high proportion of the translator community now working on a freelance basis.
The results of a statistical analysis suggest that general-purpose software applications are widely used, but there is less evidence of translation-specific tools being adopted.
