Beauty and the Beast Analysis Essay

In August of 2009, Jaycee Lee Dugard was found alive after she had been abducted in 1991, and she was still with her original captor. Sources have stated that Dugard had developed a case of Stockholm syndrome with the man who kidnapped her eighteen years ago. A psychiatrist named Keith Ablow stated that â€Å"To maintain one’s desperation and grief and rage for many years, would be too damaging to the human mind – so the human mind tells itself a story about safety and contentment to safeguard itself – that’s the essence of Stockholm Syndrome† (Engel). For decades, Stockholm syndrome has made an appearance in dozens of films; sometimes the entire plot focuses around it, sometimes it’s a vague reference. However, one instance of Stockholm syndrome that is incredibly pronounced, yet never addressed occurs in Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale 1991). Based on a French novel, Beauty and the Beast was critically acclaimed as being one of the best love stories ever told, as it taught to love what is within, instead of being consumed by vanity; it was considered so successful that it was even the first animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. However, even with its critical and box office success, no one has really addressed what kind of love story Disney is promoting. The film Beauty and the Beast does not show a story of true love and admiration of inner beauty, but instead promotes the idea of Stockholm syndrome and falling in love with your kidnapper. When Belle goes on a quest to save her father, she ends up at a secluded castle, where she finds her father locked inside the dungeon at the top of a tower. The Beast, who rules the castle, offers to let her father go if Belle takes his place as prisoner. His reasoning for making her stay as his prisoner is his hope of making her fall in love with him (and him with her) in order to break the curse upon him, his servants, and his castle. Right there we see that the Beast’s entire character motivation is focused around Stockholm Syndrome, as he is attempting to make his prisoner, who he is holding against her will, fall in love with him. He is not kind at first; he roars and yells, effectively scaring the woman of his desires, and demands she follow his orders, much like any captor would. Belle, on the other hand, is at first adamant about keeping her distance from the Beast, even when his enchanted furniture servants attempt to convince her that he’s really a â€Å"good guy†. Belle begins to have a change of heart after the Beast saves her from being eaten by wolves†¦she was almost eaten because she was attempting to escape. Even though the Beast saves her from the mean and scary wolves by bringing her back to her place of captivity, she’s so grateful for his â€Å"rescue† that she begins to think that he has the potential to be good. A montage of cute interactions between the two characters then takes place, showing how the two are beginning to bond and feel something for one another, with barely a whisper of the fact that Belle is still being held against her will. The Beast lavishes upon her with food, music, and clothing; the gracious captor even deems a huge library in the castle to be hers, and she can access it any time she wants. How kind of him to give her full access to books inside a castle that she has no choice but to spend all of her time in. He later creates a fancy date night for the two of them (still inside the castle) that even contains ballroom dancing. He finds out she is homesick, figures out he is in love with her, and let’s her go free. However, she later returns to the castle of her own free will in order to save his life. She professes her love, he turns into a handsome prince, and they live happily ever after at a castle that he now has permission to leave any time she wants. Perhaps by the end of the film Belle really did love the Beast. Even so, her love was shaped and influenced by her self-created tale of â€Å"safety and contentment† altered opinion of him during her captivity in his castle. Disney’s version of this tale of Stockholm syndrome-based love seems to contain a great moral message for young girls: if you’re held captive by a hideous monster who is vying for your affection, just go ahead and fall in love, because he’ll turn beautiful. Belle’s happy ending meant she never had to sue the beast for kidnapping, luckily for him. It’s a shame real life doesn’t follow Disney cartoons as often as it should. Just ask Jaycee. Her beast is still a beast; there was no prince at the end of her story. She got her freedom, yes, but no prince. That’s probably a good thing. It’s definitely better that beastly captors don’t change into rich and handsome men once their imprisoned object of desire returns their feelings; the justice system would never get anything done.

Sepsis Systemic Immune Response Health And Social Care Essay

Sepsis is defined by the clinical marks and symptoms of a systemic immune response to infection. ( 1-2 ) Presently, sepsis on a world-wide degree creates a important degree of mortality ; and consequences in about one tierce of all Intensive Care admittances. ( 3-5 ) In Victoria entirely there are about 8500 admittances to Emergency Departments with patients enduring from sepsis ( 3 ) and this figure is increasing. Sepsis intervention can be initiated with a wide spectrum antibiotic, and so transferred onto a specific antibiotic regimen. Presently the degree of pre infirmary informations available on the direction of sepsis is really limited and the most advanced theoretical account has been initiated in the United Kingdom ; including a pre infirmary testing tool and so the infirmary direction known as the ‘Sepsis six ‘ . ( 6 ) Pre hospital direction can be utilised to the full potency of paramedics developing and cognition with the disposal of pre infirmary antibiotics ; nevertheless this is non without hazard. Possibly the opposition to manus over the authorization to paramedics in the United States is the impression of making a ace bug ; similar to Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aures. This paper proposes that the disposal of antibiotics in the pre hospital field does transport some hazard, but the research suggest that the benefits clearly outweigh these hazards. A new pre infirmary guideline must be created due to the sheer figure of Emergency Department admittances. The possible to do a important difference to a patient ‘s result is imperative.EpidemiologyIt has been extremely researched and reported across the universe that sepsis is a major cause of morbidity, mortality and topographic points an tremendous fiscal load on the several wellness system. ( 2, 5, 7 ) Statistics from Australia, United States and the United Kingdom are similar in nature and supply a wealth of information sing the epidemiology of sepsis. Sepsis in the Uni ted States has been recognised as a public wellness issue, ( 8 ) with surveies describing that there are 300 reported instances per 100,000 with about 40 % mortality. ( 5, 7-9 ) Severe sepsis in the United land histories for 27 % of Intensive Care Unit admittances ( 4 ) and this is comparable with 23.8 % of Intensive Care admittances in Victoria, Australia. ( 3 ) However it may be noted that this information is non really recent and that in the clip of survey the incidence was increasing by about 9 % per twelvemonth ; whilst besides describing a lessening in the figure of deceases associated with sepsis from about 45 % to 37.7 % . ( 5, 7, 9 ) Whilst many surveies report the figure of admittances, few report the age distribution of patients showing with sepsis. Sundararajan et. Al. high spot that the age distribution within their survey was bimodal which identified that the age brackets at the extremes of the spectrum were over represented ; with kids less than 1 and grownups in the 70-79 age bracket. ( 3 ) Upon farther probe into the types of causative pathology doing sepsis in these patients ; gram positive beings account for 28 % , gram negative for 20 % , fungous infections 2 % and other beings for 49 % . ( 3 ) These figures are comparable with a survey conducted by MacArthur et. Al. of about 2634 patients with about 30 % identified as gm positive and 26 % gram negative bacteriums. ( 10 )Pathophysiology and clinical characteristicsWhat is Sepsis?Sepsis is an infection induced syndrome and the clinical visual aspect in nature is the effects of cellular interactions between the host and invading pathogen. ( 2, 11-12 ) Sepsis may be initialised by drawn-out local redness to extinguish and unclutter the invading pathogen. The 2nd line of defense mechanism against occupying pathogens involves the production and activation of leucocytes at the local site of infection. ( 13-14 ) Throughout this stage, immune cells identify the pathogen through pattern acknowledgme nt protein receptors on the cells. ( 15 ) An illustration of one of these receptors are toll like receptors and these are among the acknowledgment receptors which have the ability to trip immune cells, bring oning the production of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines by the stimulation with bacteriums and viral proteins ( depending on the infection ) . ( 15-16 ) The occupying pathogen may originate the complement tract of the immune system, leting leucocytes to phagocytose [ digest ] the pathogen. If the host fails to restrict the invading pathogen to a local country, the pathogen may occupy the blood stream. ( 16 ) If phagocytosis continues in the blood watercourse, toxic substances released by the pathogen may leak straight into the blood stream ; these include endotoxins released by gram negative bacteriums ( 17 ) and lipoteichoic acid and peptidoglycan released by gram positive bacteriums. ( 18 ) These byproducts of phagocytosis and decease of the cell may trip a systemic a ctivation of the complement system and excite the production of inflammatory cytokines. ( 19 ) Subsequently taking to an increased excessive and prolonged inflammatory response. ( 20 ) The consequence of this drawn-out response leads to Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome ( SIRS ) which is the consequence of either direct or indirectly through the production and activation of azotic oxide, oxidizers and proteolytic enzymes which is known to hold the possible to take to inflammation induced organ hurt. An illustration of this would be Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. ( 16, 20 ) SIRS is characterised by two or more of the undermentioned: organic structure temperature & gt ; 38A °C or & lt ; 36A °C, bosom rate & gt ; 90 beats per minute, respiratory rate & gt ; 20 per minute or arterial CO2 & gt ; 32mmhg or a demand for unreal airing, and white blood count greater than 12,000/mm3 or & lt ; 4000mm3 or & gt ; 10 % immature signifiers. ( 21 ) Sir can be besides initiated non m erely by infection, it may besides develop as a consequence of injury, ischaemic hurt or unfertile redness. ( 22 )What is terrible sepsis?If SIRS is left untreated, this response so cascades into what is known as terrible sepsis. Severe sepsis is defined as ‘sepsis associated with organ disfunction, hypoperfusion or hypotension responsive to fluid resuscitation ‘ . ( 23 ) This can come on to infected daze, which involves ‘persistent hypotension unresponsive to fluid disposal ‘ . ( 23 ) An illustration of terrible sepsis is called Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome ( MODS ) . This occurs when the infection of the blood stream leads to progressive failure of two or more organ systems which result from a drawn-out and uncontrolled inflammatory response. This organ disfunction can take to possible organ failure and decease. ( 19 )Analyse grounds associating to the prehospital direction of sepsis to place hazards and benefits of paramedic-initiated antibiotic the rapy ;Sibley and Sibley ( 23 ) suggest that if Emergency Medical Services ( EMS ) or Paramedics have a patient enduring from suspected sepsis, that they must be managed with O therapy, good documented critical marks and IV entree to originate unstable resuscitation. ( 24 ) The end for EMS is to keep systolic blood force per unit area merely above 90mm Hg, with a Mean arterial force per unit area of 65mm Hg as any higher has the possible to decline cardiac end product, with inauspicious reactions. ( 24-26 ) Other surveies support the impression of keeping Mean arterial force per unit area at 65mm Hg as there is no clinical benefit to increasing this value higher. ( 27-28 ) Sibley and Sibley ( 23 ) contradict many other surveies which suggest that early empiric antibiotic intervention of patients suspected of holding sepsis is a standard pattern ; and the earlier intervention is initiated, the more positive the result. ( 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 25, 29-30 ) Empirical antibiotic intervention is the usage of a wide spectrum antibiotic whilst curative intervention with antibiotics is the induction of antibiotic intervention after blood civilizations are taken and the specific pathogen is identified. ( 31 ) Whilst empirical antibiotic intervention in the direction of sepsis may be the initial drug of pick, it is in the patient ‘s best involvement that appropriate antibiotic therapy is continued within the infirmary. Appropriate antibiotic therapy is defined as â€Å" the usage of an antimicrobic agent that is right on the footing of all available clinical, pharmacological and microbiological grounds. † ( 32 ) With regard to the pre-hospital disposal of antibiotic therapy, a recent survey concluded that, if a patient is enduring infected daze, with each hr of hold in antibiotic disposal after the oncoming of hypotension was associated with an mean lessening in endurance of about 8 % . ( 33 ) However, a possible job with empirica l antibiotic intervention is that because sepsis is non the consequence of a individual pathogen, the usage of empirical antibiotics may non cover the pathogen doing the disease or unwellness. Broad spectrum antibiotics may ‘bide clip ‘ until blood civilizations and appropriate testing can be done within a infirmary scene. The current research suggests that the antibiotic choice used to handle conditions such as sepsis has a profound impact on patient results ( 34 ) and this is besides the instance with unequal antibiotic therapy, where the invading pathogen is non being efficaciously treated. ( 31 ) With respect to the empirical intervention, there are many different signifiers of pathogens that can do sepsis, including Staphylococcus aures, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. ( 10 ) With this in head, the aforesaid figures that approximately 28 % of infected patients are caused by a gm discoloration positive, and 20 % of patients are gram discoloration negative, and the remainder being about 52 % ( 3, 10 ) , the impression is that wide spectrum antibiotics may non cover these specific pathogens, hence rendering intervention useless. Potentially this could take to a negative or inauspicious result. An International Initiative, the ‘Surviving Sepsis Campaign ‘ ( 30, 35 ) and the Critical Care Community in the United Kingdom ( 6 ) ab initio concentrated on educating exigency section staff to advance the debut of direction of sepsis known as ‘Early Goal Directed Therapy ‘ . Upon reappraisal, hapless execution of this enterprise and resuscitation lead the instruction staff involved to a move to aim the staff working in countries outside of the exigency section, including the execution of an operationalised resuscitation direction program referred to as the ‘Sepsis Six ‘ . The ‘Sepsis Six ‘ involves the disposal of high flow O, blood civilizations, IV antibiotics, fluid resuscitation, step serum lactate and hemoglobin and the interpolation of a urinary catheter to mensurate urine end product. The ‘Sepsis Six ‘ can be implemented by hospital staff with different accomplishment sets in the first hr following the diagnosing of sepsis and can do a important part to diminishing mortality. ( 6 ) With regard to the principle of the ‘Sepsis Six ‘ Robson et. Al. proposes that constituents of this intervention can be initiated pre infirmary, and interestingly, the writers besides highlight that pre infirmary sepsis attention is unusual, but pre infirmary cardiac attention is common. The inquiry remains as to why that is. Given that all the literature available suggests that there is a important lessening in morbidity and mortality associated with early antibiotic intervention. Within Ambulance Victoria, the current direction for the intervention of terrible sepsis has non been established. Merely a guideline is specifically written for meningococcal blood poisoning which allows paramedics to administrate Ceftriaxone in the pre infirmary field in the suspected instance of meningococcal blood poisoning. ( 36 ) Walker ( 37 ) proposes that in the twelvemonth 2003, meningococcal disease affected about 500 Australians with about 100 of these instances showing in Victoria. It would look logical that an appropriate guideline is established for sepsis and terrible sepsis based on the available informations from Sundararajan et. Al. ( 3 ) which suggest within a 4 twelvemonth clip frame, about 34,000 admittances to hospital were identified as enduring from sepsis. However, it must be recognised that this lone histories for 1.1 % of the entire figure of admittances to Victorian exigency sections. ( 3 ) This is well more hospital admittances when compared with meningoc occal blood poisoning, with similar, if non more deathly effects. Possibly the idea of utilising empirical antibiotic therapy doing a ‘super bug ‘ with sepsis is debateable. Whilst many surveies report that Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aures is developed within the infirmary system ( 38 ) instead than the community based scene ; this attitude is altering with larger Numberss of community acquired Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aures being reported, ( 39 ) with an estimated 50 % of the population being a bearer of the bacteriums. ( 40 ) The concern of physicians and other wellness professionals to the idea of originating intervention with an empirical antibiotic may be a consequence of old traffics with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aures. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aures has evolved and mutated to be come ‘resistant ‘ over coevalss with different strains of antibiotic that were ab initio effectual at extinguishing the bacterial pathogen. ( 41 ) The idea that exposing such a wide spectrum antibi otic ; for illustration Rocephin, ( a Mefoxin antibiotic ) is that the exposure of a drug like this may potentially originate a familial mutant in potentially a broad spread of different strains of pathogens. Many surveies have investigated the usage of empirical antibiotics and besides the possibility of non merely one pathogen doing disease, hence developing an appropriate antibiotic government. This makes logical sense nevertheless, with consideration to the possible to do a familial mutant, exposing a pathogen to several antibiotics may hold the possible to bring forth a immune strain to non merely one antibiotic, but several. The surprising intelligence is that these surveies have proven to hold small or no excess consequence in cut downing mortality. ( 42-43 ) Walker ( 37 ) proposes that the disposal of pre infirmary antibiotics by paramedics does hold the potency for complications, including inauspicious reactions such as anaphylaxis and vasomotor prostration. However, the hazard of antibiotic disposal is no different to the disposal of any other drug, with possible side effects and inauspicious reactions specific to single patients.Synthesise recommendations for paramedic direction of sepsis based on available grounds.Pre infirmary informations available on the intervention and direction of infected patients are scarce. It is apparent that more research needs to be undertaken in order to right place infected patients and originate early intervention. However the inquiry remains as to whether informations will of all time be available due to the possible inauspicious reactions and the ethical quandary environing the prospective withholding of intervention to patients. The information that is available suggest that paramedics can do a diff erence in the possible results of these patients. A mortality rate of stopping point to 40 % is unacceptable. It is proposed that paramedics undertake a similar theoretical account to the ‘Sepsis Six ‘ with an available pre infirmary testing tool ; similar to what the United Kingdom propose. This involves the designation of systemic engagement of the immune system by using the categorization for SIRS ; whilst utilizing this in concurrence with history of a new infection. Taking both of these into consideration, relentless hypotension, low O impregnation and deficiency of urine end product classifies pre hospital patients as enduring from terrible sepsis. ( 6 ) Paramedics are an built-in portion of the wellness attention squad and within the United States they are being overlooked and possible accomplishments are being disregarded and this is still non understood when the literature suggest that early intervention does do a difference in results. With respect to the early disposal of antibiotics, non all patients will name at the oncoming of symptoms. Many will wait until the status is intolerable or they feel like they are deteriorating, therefore it is of import that empirical antibiotic therapy is undertaken at the earliest chance. From the available literature ; the United Kingdom ‘s theoretical account is the gilded criterion in footings of pre infirmary showing and direction of sepsis. Paramedics are extremely trained wellness professionals and are able to pull off infected patients consequently, and as antecedently mentioned, the sepsis six involves high flow O, blood civilizations, IV antibiotics, fluid resuscitation, measured serum lactate and hemoglobin and urinary catheter and step urine end product. This paper does non suggest that paramedics undertake all of the intervention outlined, but alternatively have the ability to originate O therapy, deliver endovenous fluid and antibiotics ; and potentially have the ability to take blood civilizations to manus over to the infirmary. However, it must be emphasised that excess on scene clip to finish these appraisals and intervention must be taken into consideration every bit good as how long till the nearest infirmary. Besides of import to observe that paramedics must advise a receiving infirmary so that the infirmary can suitably triage ( 44 ) and use the pre infirmary pickings of blood in the beginning of faster intervention and supply the ability to originate an appropriate antibiotic government. Possibly a reappraisal of the current guideline in Victoria is needed to widen the range of paramedic pattern to test for possible infected patients, as the literature suggest that this current proportion of patients are exponentionally increasing. However ; it may be easy to theorize alterations that need to be made to the system, and this will take clip and money. Walker ( 37 ) proposes from a direction position there are important costs associated with the antibiotics, preparation and appraisal and on-going replacing of antibiotics on all vehicles. Therefore it is imperative to go on research and hence implement a new guideline into ambulance pattern ; which will profit the wellness of all invested parties. The early acknowledgment and direction of sepsis has deductions on possible patient result. Sepsis has an highly high mortality associated with it and as mentioned antecedently the Oklahoman antibiotics can be administered ; the rapid lessening in patient morbidity and mortality. With regard to the high Numberss of presentations to Victorian exigency sections and intensive attention admittances ; this is mirrored throughout the universe. One of the of import points to understand that the admittances to intensive attention can be avoided if sepsis is recognised earlier and paramedics may hold a important impact on the acknowledgment and disposal of antibiotics, as infected patients have the possible to be really unwell. The fiscal load on the wellness system is tremendous with one survey theorizing that the United States approximate spend on sepsis entirely to be 16 billion dollars. ( 2, 7 ) Data is unavailable from Victoria and Australia ; nevertheless the costs associated with suppl ying antibiotics for the direction of sepsis will be less than handling in an Intensive Care Unit.DecisionOne of the chief repeating subjects throughout this paper is that sepsis and terrible sepsis have a high association with morbidity and mortality, even though the figure of presentations have increased. The point needs to be emphasised that current direction is non good plenty. The research within infirmaries is apparent, that early antibiotic intervention of patients enduring from sepsis has profound effects on endurance and recovery. Paramedics are potentially the first line of wellness attention workers exposed to patients enduring terrible sepsis and have the ability to move with wide spectrum antibiotics. Within Victoria, ambulances already carry Ceftriaxone ; an illustration of a wide spectrum antibiotic. A guideline particular to sepsis demands to be developed and implemented in the pre infirmary field, potentially on the footing of the United Kingdom ‘s theoretical account of recognizing terrible sepsis. The cost benefit analysis of implementing a new guideline, with the possible disposal of antibiotics to more patients would badly outweigh the costs associated with an admittance to an intensive attention installation. The impression of taking pre infirmary blood and advising a receiving infirmary of the possible infected patient may originate appropriate intervention faster. Paramedics have the ability to do a difference with this clip critical patient.

Review of Operations Management

Introduction and Organizational Background Methodology Limitations of Research Literature Review Motivation and Culture Employee Reward Conclusion Recommendations References Need for Strategic Human Resource Procedures for Effectiveness Operation Management in Lead Way Business Group International.This report Is an evaluation of Lead Way Business Group International (ALIBI) a general business multinational servicing firms, human resource practices to see if it effective and follows best international best practices, in relation to its rewarding employees performance and what system sand strategies it uses to engage its staff towards achieving Its goals and objectives as a business. The challenges that ALIBI face is that of its operation management in its call centre department.Recent changes in its management structure of the centre has led to a decline In profits. It needs to adopt a strategic Human Resource strategy to be able to maintain its customer base and ultimately its profit s. To achieve get a holistic view of its Human resource policies and practices a robust examinations was undertaking o identify the level of motivation and the attitudinal disposition of the staff of the at different level from the Executive team to the newest recruit to the company .As with most companies in its industry Lead Way aim and drive for doing business 1 org that its clientele demand and also the in order to fulfill its obligation as a whole Lead Way has a relatively highly motivated team of employees this may be as a result of its qualities of leaders and managers in the Human Capital division however some variances occur in the level of enthusiasm in all the other parts of the company this s due to an ongoing reposition and change management process being implanted in the company.On paper it strategy to encourage performance is effective as it uses regular appraisal tools to assess the performance of its staff to meet the need its business targets This submission of the evaluation of Lead Ways has highlighted minored for the company to meet is business target and save cost and deliver on quality it most lay emphasis on its staff training and human capital development and change the over culture to one that it becomes a learning organization which is considers employee involvement and engagement is paramount to ensure improvement in service delivery.Managing the Operations at Lead Way employee is the role of the managers who have the task of doing it effectively by making it a fundamental part of its operations by emphasis development and progression in career and also recognition for outstanding performance. In order to achieve its Organizational goals and business targets its Operations management policies must work hand in hand with its human resource objectives too. 1.Introduction and Organizational Background Lead Way Business Group International is in a highly competitive service based industry that demand innovation , creativity , service de livery excellence which are all dependent upon the performance of employees in its organization. As a result it need to have start performing at optimal level in the next ray in line with is change management agenda to transform the firm to expand and begin to expand to other international territories . Arrives to its client from Office supplies, Sales Outsourcing, International Freight services to business management Consultancy it employees over 100 employees in 3 different cities and seeks to expand to it forth in Africa The heart of the business is error in its slogan called â€Å"Servicing Your Business Needs Efficiently'. It business target is to be a leader in providing business services of Medium and Large cooperation's in the areas it is situated also providing global business insights due to its international presence.Efficiency being at the heart of Lead Ways business ethos demands that performance of its staff is at optimal level all the time in-order to also meet its b usiness targets. Lead Way Business Service is a new generation sustainable social enterprise whose profits are reinvested in it, how its aim is to serve small start- p entrepreneurs and medium scale business to grow them to foster economic development.So its business with a heart as a result. Its main objective is not profit making but rather have to do with more socio political Issues which are influenced but changing technology, environmental and legal issues and also governmental policy changes (Slack et al,1995) As Lead Way is an international group and runs diverse services, to underpin its success it has a very elaborate human resource system that caters for the need of its employees.It is very effective and supports the rest of the organization in reaching TTS business objectives through various human capital development plans and procedure and people management strategies. Peculiar to its multicultural and multi-location set up it has HER challenges always arising from misco mmunication and due to language barriers and personal relation problems, employee motivation staff welfare and attendance takes a lot of its productive time.There need to be a shift from such elementary but important issues to much more strategic and pro- growth and developmental issues that HER can contribute too , to ensure that the company tests its growth and service objectives In order to have a clear picture of the company's performance and how the employee engagement and motivation contribute to it, an in-depth look at its performance management practices is essential. There are a range of services provided by Lead Way delivered by both skilled and unskilled staff and there are key performance indices that are used to asses performance.Everyone employed manual staff, volunteers, part time and full time start are all appraised and the Performance Management Framework is the basis of this report. Terms of Reference This report aims to establish and asses the following The Manag ement of Operations in the call centre of ALIBI The effect and influence of HER polices and procedures on Operations in LABS! The Strategies for employee motivation and engagement within the company 1. In order to get a god understanding of the organizational culture in relations to performance of the Operations management framework a simple research was undertake of different types of employees ranging from the skilled to the unskilled managers to the new entry staff and they were asked to give their own view of the HER raciest and how it impacted them from different point of views Things that were sought after where the level of staff motivation and their attitude toward their work and how it affected communication, relationships and the culture of and within the organizations.It is essential to find out the relationship that exist if any of staff attitude/motivation, Strategic Human resource management and the overall Performance management Strategy for the organization and to ac hieve this both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed. 1. 2 Limitations of Research Some of the limitations face during this research had to do with the different actions of the staff as some were office based and others where site based so the working culture couldn't be duly ascertained holistically Also the samples size of the employees form various levels was limited.And due to the fact that the CEO of the organization was not physically present during the research and it was not commissioned by the organization. They were reluctant in provide all the support to reach a more conclusive and deductive results, Limited time and space was giving. Sam Lewis & Thrill (2007) view of methods of data collection formed t the basis of nagging valuable insight that involve data collection and triangulation will assist in seeing if the figures and data match up with the perception and reality of the employees. 2.Literature Review – Operations Management According to Josep h G . Monks (2004. ) Operations Management is governed by polices that are stipulated by the management of an organizations It governs the predefined flow of resources in a systematic manner in a controlled environment to create a valuable service or product that meets the consumers' needs and the organizations objectives Source http://www. Mandarin. Com/operation/ 27370849x_IPPP . PDF Two things are paramount which are the resources and systems. Resources which may include but are not limited to human I. E. He use of intellectual knowledge in planning and coordination of the process, capital I. E. Cash , stocks , store values etc. And material I. E. Physical inventories, supplies, plants etc. That are injection in the production process. Systems relate to components of management for the achievement of the objectives of the organization as a whole. For there to be efficiency there has to be a systematic approach to everything from problem solving o achieving goals Operations manage ment refers to the administration of business practices to create the highest level of efficiency possible within an organization.Operations management is concerned with converting materials and labor into goods and services as efficiently as possible to maximize the profit of an organization. Performance is important, and the optimization of the performance of employees and seeks to address, for there to be a harmonies operation of system and people a comprehensive Human Resource policy and procedure my in place to oil the wheels of efficiency. Pawpaw (2005) research looks at effect of HARM on Performance management and the focus should not be on policy creation to drive performance alone but also in addition to that their implementation.In relations to other internal and external environmental factors. The question now is how do you measure performance? Performance Management is as Newly (1998) is about evaluation the of past action because past action is always a good determinate of present performance. It also involves picking, defining and applying of key bench marks for performances, factors which are used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the process. Fine & Sender (1999). Len any organization the main objective are quality, flexibility, dependability, cost and Speed .And a good reflection of if the company of meeting this objectives will be measured in its financial performance Self-Assessment Model of Performance Measurement Jackson, Zaire & Whammy (1998) describe the self-assessment model as a tool that is foundational to effectiveness of any company business or organizations, because it gives full and clear view of activities and it also facilitates constant improvements. This is because it links organization performance with customer satisfaction, financial reference sphere headed by strategic planning.For there to be strategic planning a concrete HARM strategy must be employed The management must be cognizance of these factors and as a result create systems in the operation management process that would engage employees and keep them motivated to undertake the work at hand. So what is good Human Resource management in relation to operation management? Janssen and Stewart (2008) see human resource management as a set of social and cultural practices in every organization in to effectively manage the human capital taking into consideration the level and skill of employees, motivation , etc.They also say that it is easy to assume that employee and employers are working together toward a specified goal but in reality this must be subjected it the individual Interpretation and engagement with the HARM practices and how it motivates, engages or disengages them. Best HARM practice where explored by Thereof, Programs and Catalogue (2007). And it was discover that knowledge management and organizational learning are important contributors, they also suggest that HARM best practice leads to the effective running of and or ganization and that in turn performance of operations management.So there is a link between best HARM practices and peak performing Operation Management Systems in organizations. However these HARM policies and procedures must be continually monitored and buttressed to ensure they meet their specified objectives. Strategic HARM should always compliment Strategic Operations Management which aims at playing an active role working towards constant improvement to move to the next level of service delivery and empowering other sectors of the company play an active role in the overall strategy There are three main types of strategy employed Corporate, business ND functional level strategy.Slack & Lewis (2001) see strategic operation as decision objectives taking into consideration it resources and its ability to meet ever growing market. Demands The Hayes and Wheelwright Model (1998) can be used to identify how effective the organization is as a whole and how operations affect this from a strategic stand point It has 4 stages I-Internal neutrality (being unable to contribute to effectiveness) & 2-External neutrality (comparisons with external companies) 3- Internally supportive (employing best practices for credible effective operations) & 4- Externally supportive (looking how operation can be a driver of cooperate strategy).For the purpose of this study we are going to be looking at the operation management of the office supply department of Lead Way Business service and in particular we would be looking at how it effective the operation are managed in its customer service department of its office supplies division In recent time there have been a lot of complaints from customers about the poor level of service delivery of the customer service team and this intern has affected the performance of the company as people are now taking their business somewhere else Last year in an attempt to save cost company outsource it s customer service operation to India and were able to save a lot off money .In the initial stage the initial stage the Indian company Tolerance India which they part own having substantial amount of shares in seem to be dependable and delivered on quality and it seemed their business approach was quite innovative compared to their competitors at the moment as they were also offering online chat support service for customers who order their services online. But in recent time there has been a drop in the quality of service. They had a new management team come in and changed most of the way he company operates and has also cut down lots off staff as a they have lost the advantage of flexibility and they are unable to meet the growing demand in calls and the online response time has slowed down drastically and the average call waiting time is minutes instead of the 4 minutes last year and 2 minutes average when it was based in the ask.Customers have been posting negative reviews and feedback on the internet and this has drasticall y affected their office supplies business services There is also the issue of language barrier that man Britons and English people say hey have difficulty understanding the ascents of the Indian employees and in some recent cases their English is very bad and as a result communication is gravely impaired. Discussion and Analysis of the HER strategies for Effect operations management in ALIBI This report would be assessing how the operations quality of service can be improved The major problem not uncommon to LABS managers is staffing level. A times demand falls and they need lest staff and a times it rises and they need more staff How can they maintain cost and quality and also be flexible in the staffing need to meet their consumers expectations dependably.They need to be able do an efficient long-tern forecast of demand for services to be able to avoid problems so they would have a good number of agents at all times. This must be done several week and even months in ahead and in c onjunction with HER department to be able to operation management process. These are the inputs into the system and selection of adequately trained staff with the necessary skill is essential for the running of an internal call centre and how do y Characteristic of call centers is high turnover rate and also seasonal workers. How do you balance cost of training staff that would eventually leave the company and the emend for service from the customers.

Dell Direct and Not-So-Direct Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Dell Direct and Not-So-Direct - Case Study Example As a result Dell began to form alliances with retailers around the world to sell Dell products at their stores. Key Marketing Issues Branding – Dell was able to build a strong brand value in the United States, but the company has not been as effective at marketing its brand in other parts of the world. Dell was forced to change its business model to allow retailers to sell its products at retail outlets worldwide. Brand loyalty – The brand loyalty of the company is weak outside of the United States. Dell should increase its spending in advertising and marketing to solidify the brand value of the business entity. Channels of Distribution – Dell was effective at being the sole channel of distribution for its products for many years. As the business matured the company realized that further business growth required increasing its distribution channels. Retailers – Dell is now using retailers as a permanent strategy to achieve growth in market share. The firm has to identify the top retailers that can bring the company the maximum amount of sales. Wholesalers – Dell is using the wholesaling strategy to penetrate the market for business computers as well as governmental contracts. The firm has to adequately identify the required volume of sales and price per lot to ensure the firm maintains profitability. Personal Case Analysis Dell Computers was one of the biggest success stories in the high tech industry during the 1990’s and early part of the 21st century. The direct selling method was innovative because it allowed the customers the ability to customize their computers. The business model was helping the company achieve higher profit margins, while offering very competitive prices due to the fact that Dell eliminated the intermediaries. The strategy was tremendous, but it had an inert flaw that eventually caught up to the company. The strategy was not effective at attracting international clients. Once Dell reached the ma turity stage the firm had to seek expansion outside the United States. It became cheaper for Dell to outsource the selling function to retailers than to sell directly to customers in foreign countries because the company did not have the marketing expertise to target customers outside the United States. Case Questions 1. Is Dell using intensive, selective or exclusive distribution for its market coverage? Dell is using selective distribution is its market coverage of different parts of the world. The company has identified specific retailers they have targeted as business partners. The company has control over which retailers sell the firm’s products. Some of the retailers Dell has selected for distribution of its products include: Wal-Mart, Carphone Warehouse’s U.K. Stores, Bic Camara Japanese Stores, and Gome’s Chinese Store. 2. How does dell's preference for direct channels affect its decisions about physical distribution? The preference of Dell of selling di rectly to customers positively influenced the entire supply chain of the company. Dell was able to centralize its warehouses in strategic positions in the United States to be able to deliver the final product to its customers as fast as possible. The direct sale approach saved the company money because the firm had a lower obsolesce rate than other competitors. 3. What issues in channel conflict might arise from Dell's current distribution arrangements? The new channel approach Dell is using could cause

Aristotlean Virtue Ethics Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Aristotlean Virtue Ethics - Assignment Example Such, having the right quantity, including moral qualities, is to be desired and this can only be acquired through temperance. Temperance in everything should be exercised because this is wise and anything that is deficient and excessive should be avoided for this destroys temperance and the preservation of the mean. To strengthen value in accordance to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, one has to practice it at all times. In the same manner that nature nurtures the body that is rightfully nourished and trained, virtue is also strengthened by perpetual observation. This virtue or moral disposition is determined on how pain or pleasure influences an individual’s behavior. If a man is susceptible to pleasure, he is licentious. But if he is able to restrain himself and abstains from indulging in physical pleasure naturally without distressing himself, then that said man is virtuous. The ability to restraint oneself from excessive physical pleasure is necessary because it is the temptation of pleasure and its excesses that makes and induces us to behave badly. For us to endure and become virtuous, training is necessary for an individual to feel and experience joy and grief at the right time which is a requirement in the observance of the golden mean. This training has to begin in infancy for us to be educated on becoming virtuous because joy and grief are the basic motivations that dictates our actions. If our sense of joy and grief are misplaced; that is, feeling joy and grief at the wrong time and place, it would inhibit us from becoming virtuous. We would tend to be shunning the wrong pains and we would be seeking the wrong virtues that would lead us to become licentious. Early training would predispose us to act according to the right virtues and would avoid vice as expressed in Nicomachean ethics. This sense of virtue which had been nurtured since infancy would also dictate on how we make choices. The good man, who had been trained since infancy to be feel joy and grief at the right time and place is likely to make right in his choices. In the same vein, the bad man will likely to decide wrong when given a choice especially when it involves pleasures. Pain and pleasure regulate our conduct and the virtuous man is he who effectively regulates his sense of pleasure and pain. And the real virtuous man is he who exercises virtue by choice and not just performs them because it is expedient. Rather, the real virtuous man effectively conducts himself and makes those choices for the sake of doing it amid difficulty and he knows what he is doing. Knowing the choices that one is making that is virtuous is different from an incidental virtuous man who only acts virtuous when it serves a particular purpose or without difficulty. The real virtuous man chooses it from a fix and steady purpose whatever the circumstance or qualification. The doctrine of the golden mean According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics, the acquisition of vi rtue is a result of the right habit which was nurtured by education and choice. This virtue which has been nurtured by early training and conscientious choice can be destroyed either by excesses or deficiency and it is important that the individual should hit the mean condition of virtue to remain virtuous. This â€Å"golden mean† according to Aristotle is an approximation of in-betweens between two extremes that is neither excessive nor deficient. It is to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity and pleasure that is neither too much nor too little because both polarized directions are wrong. What is desired is to have â€Å"feelings at the right times on the right grounds towards the right

Comparison of Feud, Neo-Feud and Post Feud Ideas Coursework

Comparison of Feud, Neo-Feud and Post Feud Ideas - Coursework Example As theories were tested through discussions and questioning most of his followers found themselves holding diverging opinions from Feud and his theories. The result was a breakaway and formulation of other theories. The new theories, nonetheless, still hold some of the same underlying principles of psychoanalysis by Feud. Example the view of the unconscious self a drive in emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. The defense mechanism idea in relation to unconscious is also maintained. Karen Honey on Feminine psychology: FEUD PERSPECTIVE Karen perspective differed with feuds perspective because of feuds portrayal of women as desiring to be male. Feud perspective viewed women as incomplete and missing some element- not being a person of their own (Brown, 1961). NEO-FEUD PERSPECTIVE The Adult behavior is focused on overcoming basic anxiety experienced in child hood i.e. neurotic needs, behavior is shaped by attempts to avoid this anxiety experiences (Brown, 1961). Carl Jung’s Analytic Psycholog: FEUD PERSPECTIVE Most of personalities displayed in child adulthood is shaped by experiences in early childhood (Ash, 1987). NEO-FEUD PERSPECTIVE Collective unconscious All people share certain inborn ideas and memories, most of which reside in the unconscious †¢ Archetypes-fundamental images. †¢ Persona– Social mask used in public False self to protect privacy †¢ Anima– The perception of the female, as held in the mind of a male †¢ Animus– The idealized image of the male, as held in the mind of a female †¢ The anima and animus images lead to misunderstandings (Ash, 1987).

The theory of Financial Repression and its Application in Economies of Essay

The theory of Financial Repression and its Application in Economies of Different Countries - Essay Example This essay describes the concept of financial repression, and illustrate the mechanism of its action, using the cases of different countries. The studies conducted by experts confirm that the restrictions imposed on the financial sectors of these two countries have indeed negatively impact on their respective economies giving credence to the McKinnon-Shaw hypothesis. Financial repression must have been fundamentally influenced by Keynesian economics as well as provoked by the instability of the early 20th century events. Financial repression is underpinned by the theory that the state should intervene in financial matters to ensure lesser demand for money that should be channeled instead to the capital/labour sector. It was McKinnon and Shaw, who called attention of the world to the negative effects of such practices. Their hypothesis recommended the liberalisation of the financial sectors from such restrictions to stop stagnation and initiate economic growth. They asserted that financial repression causes economic stagnation and that countries must therefore liberalise their financial sectors. This assertion is confirmed by other studies and models as well. Nonetheless, a number of cases exists that point to a contrary finding such as the cases of Korea and Malaysia that were both placed under financial repression in the 1980s to avert financial collapse. This paper presented the cases of India and China, both of which are considered emerging global super economies, where the provisions of the theory proved to be accurate. ... The existence of financial repression can be deduced from the presence of the following factors: unsystematic distortions in financial prices such as interest and exchange rates; interest rates with ceiling caps and nominal interest at fixed rates, which lead to low or even negative real interest rates; high reserve ratios; guided credit programmes, and; ineffective credit rationing (Bhole 16). Gupta (2004), however, narrowed down the elements of financial repression into interest rate ceilings, high reserve requirements and compulsory credit allocation. The consequences of these intermediary measures are: the implementation of high reserve and liquidity ratio for the purpose of easing budget deficits forcing banks to hold government bonds and money; private bond and equity markets remain undeveloped because of the difficulty of getting government money from private securities, and; government measures adopted to discourage private financial entities from competing with the public se ctor and to spur low-cost investment characterise the banking sector with interest rate caps (2). Financial repression is an economic tool usually employed by developing countries and was popular before the last quarter of the 20th century. It was said to be a knee-jerk reaction to the events of the first half of that century. History shows that the first half of the 20th century was blighted by two financial catastrophic events: the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and; the Great Depression, which was instigated by the Crash. These two events were themselves thought to be two of the underpinning reasons for the outbreak of WWII. The lesson that these events brought was that command economies were more stable and that the state can take the

Current HR Practices and Insights Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Current HR Practices and Insights - Essay Example The article shows that inadequate practices applied by OBM management led to lack of skills and knowledge among employees. A special attention is given to assessment, creation and sharing of information and knowledge. The authors state that learning strategies are formalized and structured by the goals, activities and culture of the work practice, just as learners' experiences in educational institutions are structured by those institutions' cultures of practice. Workplaces are often highly contested, with access to the activities and guidance required for learning not being uniformly distributed. Opportunities to participate may be distributed on the basis of factors such as workplace cliques, affiliations, gender, race, language or employment standing and status. Indeed, it could be suggested that, rather than being unstructured, workplace learning experiences are structured by too many factors. Instead, the kinds of activities engaged in by individuals and the support and guidance they can access in the workplace from other workers will influence the quality of learning at work. In this way, much of the knowledge required for demanding vocational practice can be learnt through work. The article provides a clear and detailed description of the situation and allows readers to concentrate on the best practices and solutions proposed by IBM team. There is long-standing evidence of the efficacy of learning in the workplace. Prior to the establishment of vocational colleges and universities, most people learnt their vocations through their work. The evidence also suggests that workers have long produced goods and provided services with limited technology and in ways that have required understanding and robust (transferable) procedures developed through their work. The products and services of craft and other workers require combinations of creativity and functionality. Many of the world's great buildings, such as the castles, churches and cathedrals of Europe, were built by workers whose vocational practice was developed through participation in their craft (Becker 1993). The article "Organizational Learning" by D. Cayla describes the role of permanent changes and its impact on environmental interactions. the author argues that learning takes place on the job and is structured, with supervisors having the responsibility for developing the work-related knowledge of their subordinates. Much of what apprentices learn during their three- or four-year indenture is also a product of engagement in everyday work practice. This learning often generates capabilities that are transferable across tasks and situations. Learning in the workplace cannot, therefore, be described as concrete-fixed and embedded inextricably in the circumstances of its acquisition. Instead, at least some of what is been learnt in workplaces is transferable to other situations. Learning can be independent and interdependent, with the latter probably best able to be achieved through guidance rather than direct teaching. It is also inaccurate to characterize workplace learning as concrete. Learning in any environment will be more or less transferable, depending on the quality of learning processes experienced (Bateman and Snell 2004). Therefore, the same claims about the structure,

Disparity and Discrimination Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Disparity and Discrimination - Essay Example Disparity means the â€Å"difference between the ratios of a cognizable group in one population when compared to the ratio of that same group in another population† (Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparity in the Criminal Justice System, 2004, p. 6). This means that if for example, 15% of women in the USA are arrested, but that 40% of the women arrested are from one racial or ethnic group, disparity is evident. The one racial group (the 40%) is therefore overrepresented, and the other racial groups may be underrepresented. Disparity, however, does not always mean that discrimination is taking place. Discrimination occurs when disparate treatment – when one group is being treated differently from others for â€Å"invalid reasons such as gender, racial and/or ethnic status† (Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparity in the Criminal Justice System, 2004, p. 6). When disparity is caused by discrimination in the Criminal Justice System, it is of great concern, as the Constitution of the United States of America is contradicted. Therefore, if people from minority groups are more likely to be arrested, or to appear in court, or imprisoned, discrimination is clear, and the situation has to be addressed. Both disparity and discrimination remain characteristics of the Criminal Justice System in the USA, even though the law is meant to prevent especially discrimination. This is true of all levels of the Criminal Justice System: law enforcement, court procedures, and in correction populations. The ratio of African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans found in every stage of the Criminal Justice System is higher than the ratio of any other ethnic or racial group in the USA (Johnson & Widder Heilman, 2001, website). While it is clear that the proportion of particular race groups does differ from area to area, which would explain the disparity of arrests, it is also clear that nationally,

Build and Sustain an Innovative Work Environment Assignment - 2

Build and Sustain an Innovative Work Environment - Assignment Example The principle aligns those of Virgin Atlantic Red’s business needs since it depends on customers to buy the services. Another underlying principle is that innovation should drive the core business process (Davila, Epstein, & Shelton, 2012). Virgin Atlantic Little Red is always in a constant need for new ways of providing goods and services to their customers thus the principle aligns with its business needs. In addition, the innovation plan relies on the principle of becoming ten times better with the new ideas (Boons, & LÃ ¼deke-Freund, 2013). The new idea should prove better than the previous and even far much better than those of the competitors. There are many domestic flights in the UK and Virgin Atlantic Little aims at becoming a leader in the industry thus the principle serves its business interests. A major area, that requires the pilot program, is the service provisions especially the flight services. Onboard services like inflight entertainment and connectivity will suit the pilot program since it proposes the provision of unique experiences to the passengers on board. The program might as well suit booking services with a strong emphasis on quick and reliable booking system to the customers. The plan begins notifying the management to know how best the staff can implement the proposal. In the implementation stage, it is also imperative to develop time frame for all activities specifying duration for their completion. On the other hand, the plan will have performance indicators to notify the implementing team on the success of the plan in meeting set goals and objectives. Moreover, the implementation plan should have a monitoring mechanism and assign duties to specific individuals. The communication plan in this proposal entails developing a comprehensive plan that states where chains of command come from and those who take the orders. Commands should come from the executive management who also has to state clearly the objectives and

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 6000 words - 1

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS - Essay Example Relational exchanges are supported by more frequent communication activity. McDonalds is one of the largest fast food chains in the world with more than 30,000 restaurants across the world (Sweney 2004). It operates in innumerable markets, in different countries and cities and thus caters to consumers with different cultures, backgrounds, languages and tastes. Thus its marketing communication plan is not standardised and needs tailoring for different markets. Previously McDonalds focused primarily on the US and thus the marketing communication was similar in all the regions as the market characteristics were the same. However, argue Brinkman and Brinkman (2002) as the US market saturated, challenges increased as McDonalds surged new markets abroad. Though the marketing mediums are similar in all the countries, however, as per Fill (2006), the extent to which communication medium is used depends upon the market exposure to that medium. As Brinkman and Brinkman (2002) explain, it realised that it could not appeal to all the countries together so it adopted the ‘brand globally, act locally’ strategy to communicate its messages. For instance according to Douglas, in China, the trend is that when consumers watch TV, the in-between advertisements between programs are generally ignored. Thus keeping this in mind, McDonalds thought that it was a waste to spend large sums of money on TV commercials and thus it concentrated on print m edia in China. At the same time, adds Cheung (2006) the few TV commercials it ran in the country featured more male kids than female, as it is a male dominated society. In East Asia, as Schultz and Philip (1999) exemplify, McDonalds concentrates on TV commercials and features children in them to optimise the results. To retain the attention of customers in the US, McDonalds employed the interactive method of advertising via television where the viewers could participate in a competition

Assignment Essay Example for Free

Assignment Essay 1) By creating a new position between the CEO and the location managers the position can deal with the day to day tasks and operations needed for the store to operate properly. This will allow Dalman and Lei to spend less time assisting the location managers. By Dalman and Lei efficiently delegating the work, they will be able to spend more time on the strategic aspect of building and growing the business. 2) Both hiring within as well as seeking someone from the outside have their advantages and disadvantages. By hiring within the person who moves up is already working for the company as well as be familiar with some the needs and goals of the business. The negative aspect of hiring within would be possible issue with jealousy among co-workers. The advantage to hiring from outside you get the advantage of a fresh set of eyes coming in and seeing things from different perspectives. The disadvantage would be that they would not be familiar with the company and how it works. 3) Both Dalman and Lei should make the decisions. As the owners of the business they should be the ones deciding how they want their business ran. Dalman is currently playing and active role in this position as is, this should help them determine what they may want to change about how it is currently being ran. This would allow for a nice transition in to the change. Weather Dalman and Lei decide to hire from within in or find someone from the outside; it should be a joint decision that takes the growth of the business into full consideration when making the choice. 4) The levels of authority that Sandwich Blitz Inc have including the new position would be: CEO, CFO, Staff accountant, Operation manager, Site Managers, Team supervisor, Customer associate.

Key Features of Business Process Management

Key Features of Business Process Management Key Features Of Business Process Management Suite: BPMS Vendors And Core Functions Reviewed. Introduction Organisations seek to improve their business process by making them more efficient, real time, automation and agile. The business demand was met with a suite of technologies, ranging from groupware and office automation, to workflow and more currently, BPM technologies (Bandara,Wasana and Indulska ). Finding a vendor and which tool to use that can be very daunting exercises. One the other hand, vendors introduced innovative ways to meet their customers demands. Gartner (Feb 2009) predicts that through 2012, managers and consultants will develop process centric methods and disciplines analogous to those used in territorial and function organization. This paper will review features are included in the BPMS suite. Discuss few vendors that are in the Gartner Major Quadrant, functions of BPMN, BPEL which are languages or execution standards that support a BPMS tool. Description Of Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) A BPMS is an integrated collection of software that enables the control and management discipline of business process (Gartner 2009). BPM enable-technologies have existed for so many years as point products supporting explicit control of particular aspect of a process, such as human workflow, document and image routing, system system interaction patterns (Garter 2009). The appearance of integrated BPM- enable technology is part of disaggregation of application software and is an example of the trend toward building software systems from small â€Å"chunks.† BPM-enabling technologies are available as separate specialty tools, integrated BPMSs, and are being adder to some major application packages (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) For some vendors it is a lucrative profitable business. Gartner research shows that the BPMS market will have a compound annual growth of more than 24 % from 2006 2011 (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) Business Process Management Suite Architecture BPMS has been divided into four layers; Middleware/Application, Engines, Utilities and Knowledge (Paul Harmon). There are no standards set on what should be included in the business process management suite. Some companies look for tools that are workflow centric, application integration or decision centric (Bptrends). BPMS products need to be able to manage the access of other application. Few BPMS products can handle this function; they have to rely on existing middleware and application server products to provide support (Paul Harmon). Rules Engine The heart of the BPMS product consists of the engine that manages the runtime execution of the business process instance (Paul Harmon). Rules Engine execute rules that abstract business policies and decision tables from the underlying applications, and make available more flexi process changes (Gartner 2009). When a decision point is reached, the rule engine will determine which business rule apply and then execute them to determine the appropriate decision (Paul Harmon). If customer applies for a loan, business rule will determine if the loan is granted or not, based on the customers credit history. Business rules are managed by tools called Business Rule Management. Workflow Engine Workflow is one of capabilities delivered with BMPS. Some important parts of the workflow are poorly understood. The BPMS helps reviles better workflows by making their process execution visible and audited (Garter 2009). Workflow management improved things not only by managing the flow of work, but also digitising the information, thereby making the process as automated and paperless as possible (Ryan K.L. Ko,Stephen S.G. Lee,Eng Wah Lee) EAI Engine Enterprise application integration (EAI) tool was developed to interface between systems. Paul Harmon in his book says that, â€Å"EAI engine manages the calling and coordination of the software application required for the execution of a process â€Å"(Bptrends) Modelling tools Popular process modelling tools that are supported by BPMS is UML and BPMN. BPMN defines a Business Process Diagram (BPD), which is based on a flowcharting technique tailored for creating graphical models of business process operation. BPMN was first released in May 2004 by Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org), the graphical, flowchart-based BPMN is a recent BP modelling language that is already gaining wide acceptance (Koskela and Haajanen, 2007). 1. Execution standards Execution standards enable business designs to be deployed in BPMS and their instances executed by the BPMS engine. 1.1 BPEL The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is the short name for BPEL4WS (Paul Harmon). BPEL is the currently the most popular and influential execution standard in the market. It is used together with Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and other related technologies. This means that BPEL is used to define how the business process is built from invocations of existing web services and the kind of interaction of the process with external participants (Ryan K.L. Ko). BPEL is more widely adopted in several prominent software suites (e.g. IBM Websphere, BeA AquaLogic BPM Suite, SAP Netweaver, etc.) (Ryan K.L. Ko,Stephen S.G. Lee,Eng Wah Lee) Strengths of BPEL (Ryan K.L. Ko,Stephen S.G. Lee,Eng Wah Lee) 1. focuses on process that low level programming constraints 2. It subscribes to the web services paradigm 3. Its popular most vendors are using it. Weaknesses 1. Complex syntax and very difficult to implement its XML representation is difficult and readable to the trained eye 2. Does not example human involvement in business process well Workflow management systems have always able to model human participation in business process (Ryan K.L. Ko,Stephen S.G. Lee,Eng Wah Lee) 1.2 BPML The Business Process Modelling language is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) process definition language that describes the structural representation of a process and the semantics of its execution ( Have,2005). BPML was designed for business processes to be executed in contemporary web service based BPMS (e.g. Intalio BPM) (Ryan K.L. Ko,Stephen S.G. Lee,Eng Wah Lee) Strengths of BPML 1. Zero code programming programmers dont need to dwell on coding but defining business process. 2. Encourages usability and scalability Weaknesses 1. BPML has its limitation ( Shapiro, 2002, Smith, 2004,Koskela and Haajanen, 2007) Garners Magic Quadrant for Business process management Suite (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) Gartner ‘s 2009 Magic Quadrant depicts the relative strength of the top 22 vendors offering multiregional, cross industry business management suits (BPMSs) . Magic Quadrant is one of the several tools that clients can use to evaluate BPMS market. Gartners Magic Quadrant for BPMS has been recognised by vendors that they reference to it in their websites. Leaders offers products and services that best enable all of the use cases and have customer references for each. Niche players focus on a specific area, where they have very good functionality to offer, but they do not have a comprehensive BPMS Suite Visionaries develop new and comprehensive concepts regarding architecture and functionality Challengers- companies in that have undergone major changes in their organisations and products that they offer. For the vendors to qualify to be placed in the leaders section of the quadrant have to meet all the required characteristics of the BPMS. Characteristics of BPMS (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) Following are functions that are delivered in the BPMS. BPMS tools must have all these functionality in order to meet the changing marker and user needs. Gartner suggest that in order for the vendor to be a leader in the marker, all these capabilities must be met. â€Å"Support the modelling and analysis of business processes, including all aspects of workflow: tasks,roles,decisions,approvals,reviews,escalations,collaborations,flows,rules,policies,forms and other documents, events, goals, objectives and scenarios. BPMS is not only an automate tool but support documents and ( check the source ) Support process change in the design and the execution of transactions, with auditing. ( support this statement) Coordinate any type of interaction pattern among users, system task and information resource, regardless the location of these resources. Interaction patterns include human to human, system to system, human to system, human to content and content interdependencies. Enable participants to manipulate and manage structured and unstructured information within the process, not just as referenced attachments to their tasks. Support the definition, manipulation and management of business rules by business and IT users. Support user and group collaboration on work items in the process (in real time and offline). Support the monitoring, reporting, analysis and notification of activities and events affect work, using data about completed and in progress transactions (in the real time and offline). Support process simulation and optimisation of desired business outcomes by using real-time, historical and estimated data. Interoperate with external software assets, especially SOA web services, and include these in the end to end business orchestration. Enable management of all process artefacts (models, process definitions, rule definitions, service definitions. Executables and more) throughout the entire process life cycle Include packaged business content, such as sample process models, rule sets; prebuilt user interfaces (UIs) and composite process frameworks†. BPMS vendors Only selected vendors from the Gartner Magic Quadrant that are reviewed below:- Intalio Enterprise And Community Edition BPMS Intalio community edition is the first that offers an open source reliable BPMS. This packaged is scaled for small companies. Intalio is lacking distribution channel and efficient marketing. (Janelle B. Hill , Nikos Drakos) Strengths In this unstable harsh economic climate, open source is gaining more attention. Intalio has a unique business model that uses open-source content, licensing and community marketing. The intelligence use of using open source business model, combined with adoption of industry standards, has resulted in more that 500, 00 companies downloading Intalio BPMS community Edition (open -source code). Intalio has more that 500 customers in 50 countries; six of these companies are located in South Africa. ( www.intalio.com) Caution Advanced features for business rules engine, BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) are only available in the commercial Enterprise Edition. Companies that start using Intalio Community Edition should be prepared to send their employees on training as Intalio is not offering consulting services. IBM BPMS (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) According to Gartners Magic Quadrant, IBM is a leader in the BPMS. It meets most of the required capabilities to make it a leader. IBM suite contains a comprehensive set of role based capabilities that enable customers to model, simulate, run, rapidly change, monitor and optimise core business processes. IBM BPMS tools reviewed in this paper are: Business Leader widget which is available through IBM BPM Blueworks, WebSphere Business Modeller and Business monitor. Business Leader widgets: WebSphere business publishing server Enable users to share process models and BPM assets through a Web browser. Enable users to publish an array of BPM assets including process models, WebSphere Business Monitor dashboard designs, and user interface forms. WebSphere Business Modeller Business Analyst can document , test and share business process Simulate process runs and identified inefficiency and bottlenecks Define key performance indicators and business metrics for in the WebSphere Business Monitoring WebSphere Business Modeller can generate IT implementation artifacts for WebSphere Process Server and facilitate human centric- process in a server environment. WebSphere Business Monitor WebSphere Business Monitor is an integrated business activity monitoring (BAM) environment that provides end to end visibility of business activity on WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere MQ Workflow, FileNet ® Business Process Manager, and other enterprise application.  · WebSphere Business Monitor development toolkit provides templates and a test environment to further accelerate time to value  · Fully configurable dashboards that shows you what you only need to see  · Deliver alerts to email, pagers or PDAs Strengths IBM has marshalled all its resources including Global services, university, IBM staff and families, outreach industry and its partner ecosystem to accelerate user adoption of BPM as a management discipline. SOA companies has benefited its BPMS by showing how SOA and BPM work better together Has a vision for exposing process artifacts and data more directly to business professionals Caution IBM has multiple of BMPS products, it fulfils its BPM strategy through federated interoperability across two basic offerings augmented by extended offerings. Broader software divisions acquisition strategy will continue to augment IBMs BPMS vision and product road map. Customers are cautioned to monitor the integration of new technologies Individual products in the suite have strong and rich functionality. And in combination, the permutations of configuration possibilities are overwhelming. Customers usually require help from a service provider. WebSphere dynamic Business Process has few references. Lombardi BPMS Lombardis BPMS, called Teamworks , is best known for human centric process that change dynamically based on business factors such as dispute resolution, product returns, tax reconciliation, loan origination, or supply chain management. Lombardi describes Teamworks as focused on â€Å"operational processes,† meaning complex flows spanning organisation and system boundaries. Lombardi has customers in almost all sector; Financial Services, Government, HealthCare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Retail, Telecommunications and companies like Ford Motors. Its evident why Lombardi is on the top leaders in Gartners magic quadrant. Its not surprising why companies like IBM have shown interest in it. (http://www.lombardisoftware.com/bpm-software-customers.php) Lombardi BPMS Tools These are the following tools that Lombardi is offering:- Lombardi Teamworks 7 Enterprise offers a complete Business Process Management Suite supporting modelling and simulation analysis, human workflow, integration, business rules and performance management. Lombardi Blueprint: Is a hosted web- based environment that provides an extremely business friendly front end to BPMN modelling and supports team collaboration. Means that Blueprint is a cloud- based process discovery and documentation platform that can be accessed from any browser. Blueprint models can be exported to Teamworks for implementation. Lombardi Services Included the entire range of BPM enablement services covering core competencies; Process analysis, process implementation, process optimisation, reporting and performance management, architecture and infrastructure and program leadership and governance. ( Bruce Silver Associates) Strengths Lombardi has keen insights into the functions required by each individual user role that is involved in business process life cycle. User friendly modelling tool, making business analysts life easier. Continuous process improvement programs where empowering business users or business analysts is key. Customer references are among the most advanced in BPM maturity. Blueprint which is a cloud based, appeals to business managers and strategic planners who seek for high process diagramming and knowledge capture. (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) Caution Customers with smaller deals will find it challenging to command Lombardis attention. And its case management is not strong as its competitors. (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) Metastorm BPM vs 7.6 (Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006) The Metastorm BPM suite provides an open standards based framework for integration, enabling organization to easily integrate external applications and data with Metastorm BPM processes (Metastorm). Strengths In 2008 customer experience was excellent. Enable Metastorm BPM processes to access SAP functionality and data during the development and execution of business processes Strong heritage in providing BPM software based on Microsoft technologies Product easy to use, even for non technical users. Caution Some users have reported support problems outside the U.S. Metastorm has developed a global presence through regional resellers to sell its BPMS and targeted solutions. Customers should understand the scope of the solutions they buy from a reseller and the path to further licensing options to ensure expectations are met. Some customers report difficulties in negotiating pricing and contracts. It may take longer than anticipated to determine the appropriate licensing configuration Conclusion Its been almost a decade since BPMS tools entered the market. Business Process Management (BPM) is the most talked about subject. Yet I have found that information about the tool that support BPM, which is BPMS is not easy to find. Or there is not much information available. I can only imagine how difficult it is for companies to decide what tool best fits their needs. Companies will have to purchase papers from companies like Gartner and Forester. Evidently BPMS is still new in the market. Their standard has not reached maturity. As much as BPEL and BPML are popular standards, their limitation and drawback have major impact in the BPMS. For companies looking to implement BPMS tools in the companies can be very difficult. Companies go to big vendors that can support globally and have customers references. Word of mouth is a big deal. With the help of Gartners Magic Quadrant, companies can save time to search for suitable products that can meet their needs. For companies who seek to explore the BPMS tools, or student who want to know what is about. Open -source vendors like Intalio and others who can offer their products for free. Its very interesting to see how this marking is growing. Vendors like IBM purchasing smaller vendors, but who are excelling to the BPMS field in order to improve their products. University of Cape Town ICTS department is planning to implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Its going to be an interesting observation to see how they will choose the vendor. Will the UCT look within the companies that they have been dealing with like Microsoft SharePoint. Or they will look for a new vendor, how they will base their findings. References (Harmon, www.bptrends.com) ; Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, David Flint, Michael James Melenovsky, 2006. Gartners Position on Business Process Management, 1-26 Bandara, Wasana and Indulska, Marta and Chong, Sandy and Sadiq, Shazia (2007) Major Issues in Business Process Management: An Expert Perspective. In Proceedings ECIS 2007 The 15th European Conference on Information Systems, pages pp. 1240-1251, St Gallen, Switzerland. Ryan K.L. Ko,Stephen S.G. Lee,Eng Wah Lee. Business process management (BPM) standards: a survey, 1-47. Available: www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-7154.htm

Statistical techniques for cryptanalysis

Statistical techniques for cryptanalysis Introduction: Cryptography is the art of writing messages in code or cipher, to disguise, and thereby secure the content of a particular stream of text. When encrypted, a plain text message can be revealed only through the use of the key used to encode the cipher. Cryptography does not mask the existence of the message, but does disguise its content [1]. In contrary, cryptanalysis is the art of recovering the plaintext of a message without access to the key. Successful cryptanalysis may recover the plaintext or the key for a specific ciphertext [2]. There are five general types of cryptanalytic attacks:- 1. Ciphertext-only attack: In this type of attack, the cryptanalyst has a series of cipher texts encrypted using the same encryption algorithm. Then, the cryptanalyst deduces the plain text of each of the cipher texts or identifies the key used to encrypt the cipher text 2. Known-plaintext attack: In this type of attack, the cryptanalyst has a series of ciphertext and their corresponding plaintext values encrypted using a specific key. The cryptanalyst then tries to deduce the key by forming a relationship between the ciphertext and plaintext entries. 3. Chosen-plaintext attack: In this type of attack, the cryptanalyst not only has access to the ciphertext and associated plaintext for several messages, but he also chooses the plaintext that gets encrypted. His job is to deduce the key used to encrypt the messages or an algorithm to decrypt any new messages encrypted with the same key. 4. Frequency analysis: It is the study of thefrequency of lettersor groups of letters in aciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breakingclassical ciphers. Frequency analysis is based on the fact that, in any given stretch of written language, certain letters and combinations of letters occur with varying frequencies. 5. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis: The cryptanalyst threatens, tortures or blackmails the person who has the key until they give it up. Among the many cryptanalytic techniques, frequency analysis or frequency counting is the most basic technique applied to break substitution cipher based algorithms, among the varied list of attack techniques. The basic use of frequency analysis is to first count the frequency of ciphertext letters and then associate guessed plaintext letters with them. More complex use of statistics can be conceived, such as considering counts of pairs of letters digrams, trigrams, and so on. This is done to provide more information to the cryptanalyst. It exploits the weakness in the substitution cipher algorithm to encrypt similar plaintext letters to similar ciphertext letters. Frequency analysis based cryptanalysis techniques were used to break ciphers based on the traditional cryptographic algorithms, but they do not work well with the modern block cipher based cryptographic algorithms. Statistical properties of English: Frequency analysis based cryptanalysis uses the fact that natural language is not random in nature and single alphabetic based substitution does not hide the statistical properties of the natural language. In the case of encryption using monoalphabetic substitution, to start deciphering the encryption it is useful to get a frequency count of all the letters. The most frequent letter may represent the most common letter in English, E followed by T, A, O and I whereas the least frequent are Q, Z and X [7]. Statistical patterns in a language can be detected by tracing the redundancy of the text in the language. It has been realized that various universal regularities characterize text from different domains and languages. The best-known is Zipfs law on the distribution of word frequencies [5], according to which the frequency of terms in a collection decreases inversely to the rank of the terms. Zipfs law has been found to apply to collections of written documents in virtually all langu ages [5]. English language characters have a very high redundancy rate when used for cryptographic substitutions. If we have a message encrypted using the substitution cipher that needs to be cracked, we can use frequency analysis. In other words, if the sender has used an encryption scheme, that replaces one letter in the English to be another letter in English, we can still recognize the original plain text as, the frequency characteristics of the original plain text will be passed on the new cipher text characters [4]. To apply frequency analysis, we will need to know the frequency of every letter in the English alphabet, or the frequency characteristics of the language used by the sender to encrypt the text. Below is a list of average frequencies for letters in the English language. So, for example, the letter E accounts for 12.7% of all letters in English, whereas Z accounts for 0.1 %. All the frequencies are tabulated and plotted below:- For example, let us consider the following sentence: We study Cryptography as part of our course. Using a simple substitution cipher, let us consider the following: a->c , b-> d, c->e..w->y, x->z, y->a, z->b So, the cipher text becomes: yg uvwfa etarvqitcrja cu rctv qh qwt eqwtug. A simple frequency analysis of the cipher text can be carried out and the results are as given below: The above data can be used by a cryptanalyst to identify the key or the plaintext by using simple substitution to the cipher text till a suitable plaintext value is not identified. Apart from the use of mono alphabetic frequency analysis, cryptanalysts also identify frequency of paired letters better known as digram frequency and that of three letter words, called as Trigram frequencies. These help the cryptanalyst to exploit the redundant features of English language to break the cipher. The most common Digrams (in order): th, he, in, en, nt, re, er, an, ti, es, on, at, se, nd, or, ar, al, te, co, de, to, ra, et, ed, it, sa, em, ro. The most common Trigrams (in order): the, and, tha, ent, ing, ion, tio, for, nde, has, nce, edt, tis, oft, sth, men Table 1: Digram and Trigram Frequencies [6] These help in identifying the most commonly used terms in English to break a cipher. The digram frequencies are used to break two letter words such as an, to, of etc and the trigram frequencies are used to break three letter words such as the, are, for etc. After breaking a significant two letter and three letter words, it is practically east to identify the key from the cracked values of plaintext by matching the corresponding values in the ciphertext. This huge weakness in English language is used to break cipher texts encrypted using simple algorithms that make use of English alphabets. In practice the use of frequency analysis consists of first counting the frequency of ciphertext letters and then assigning guessed plaintext letters to them. Many letters will occur with roughly the same frequency, so a cipher with Xs may indeed map X onto R, but could also map X onto G or M. But some letters in every language using letters will occur more frequently; if there are more Xs in the c iphertext than anything else, its a good guess for English plaintext that X is a substitution for E. But T and A are also very common in English text, so X might be either of them also [4]. Thus the cryptanalyst may need to try several combinations of mappings between ciphertext and plaintext letters. Once the common single letter frequencies have been resolved, then paired patterns and other patterns are solved. Finally, when sufficient characters have been cracked, then the rest of the text can be cracked using simple substitution. Frequency analysis is extremely effective against the simpler substitution ciphers and will break astonishingly short cipher texts with ease. Attacks on Traditional algorithms Encrypting using traditional algorithms have been defenseless against cryptanalytic attacks as they use bit by bit encryption, which can be easily broken using frequency analysis based attacks. 1. Caesar Cipher: Considering the case of one of the oldest ciphers, the Caesar Cipher, this cipher replaces one letter of the plaintext with another to produce the ciphertext, and any particular letter in the plaintext will always, turn into the same letter in the cipher for all instance of the plaintext character. For instance, all Bs will turn into Fs. Frequency analysis is based on the fact that certain letters, and combinations of letters, appear with characteristic frequency in essentially all texts in a particular language [9]. For instance, in the English language, E is very common, while X is not. Likewise, ST, NG, TH, and QU are common combinations, while XT, NZ, and QJ are very uncommon, or even impossible to occur in English. This clearly shows how the Caesar cipher can be broken with ease by just identifying the frequency of each letter in the cipher text. A message encrypted using Caesar cipher is extremely insecure as an exhaustive cryptanalysis on the keys easily breaks the code. 2. Substitution Ciphers: The Caesar cipher forms a subset of the entire set of substitution ciphers. Here, the key of the encryption process is the permutation of all the twenty six characters of the English alphabets. Rather than choosing a particular key for all encryption process, we use a different key for successive encryption processes. This technique increases the number of possible key to 26!, which is about 4 X 1026, which eliminates the exhaustive cryptanalysis attack on the keyspace [7]. To decrypt the cipher the, statistical frequency distribution of single letter occurrence in English language is analyzed. Then, the digram and trigram frequencies of standard English words are compared with the frequencies of the trigrams in the cipher to finally reconstruct the key and in turn decipher the text. This is an efficient method to break the substitution cipher as, each plaintext letter is represented by the same ciphertext letter in the message. So, all properties of plaintext are carried on to the cipher text. 3. Vigenere Cipher: In a Vigenere cipher, there is greater security as, a given plaintext letter is not always represented by the same ciphertext letter. This is achieved by using a sequence of n different substitution ciphers to encrypt a message. This technique increases the possible number of keys from 26! to (26!)n. Although this was considered to be unbreakable, the Kasiskis method of attacking a Vigenere cipher yielded successful results of decrypting the message. According to this method, the first step is to find the key length (n). Find identical segments of plain text that get encrypted to the same ciphertext, when they are b positions apart, where b=0 mod n. According to Kasiski, the next step is to find all the identical segments of length greater than 3, and record the distance between them [7]. This can then be used to predict the length of the key (n). Once this is found the key is found by an exhaustive search of the keyspace for all possible combinations to identify the key. This is done by substituting all possible values for n to generate substrings. Once the substring is formed, the plaintext message can be automatically identified by using the back substitution of the key into the cipher [7]. This can be done for all possible values for n until finally arriving at the actual key, which reveals the plaintext that was encrypted. This method can take a long time to break the key to identify the plaintext incase the key length is very long, as the keyspace value would be large for larger keys. Defeating frequency based attacks: Frequency based attacks have been used for a long time to break traditional encryption algorithms. It uses the fact that, traditional encryption algorithms do not eliminate the statistical properties of the language upon encryption. The first way to defeat frequency based attacks is to encrypt blocks of characters at a time rather than single letters [7]. This would ensure that, the same text in the plaintext is not encrypted to the same text in the ciphertext upon encryption. For e.g., if we use the Caesar cipher encryption scheme, the word ADDITIONAL will be encrypted to CFFKVKQPCN, we can see that the alphabets A, D and I are repeated more than once and at each instance, the encryption scheme used always encrypts A to C, D to F and I to K. This can clearly be used during frequency analysis to analyze the redundancy of the characters and in turn map them back to get the original plaintext character. Using a block encryption scheme, one can be satisfied that, this phenomenon does not occur as, in a block encryption scheme, the whole plaintext is broken into chunks or blocks of data, that is fed in as input to the encryption algorithm. The algorithm then, reads the input block along with the key and encrypts th e complete block of plaintext, rather than individual characters, so there is a smaller chance that two blocks will produce the same chunk of ciphertext. The second way of defeating frequency analysis is to make use of synonyms of words [7], rather than repeating the same word over and over again in a sentence. There are a lot of words in English, which have more than one synonym, thus providing with a set of words to be used as convenient in the particular context. To help in the selection of a synonym, grammar checking would have to be used to ensure that, the meaning expressed in the sentence is not altered by changing the words. Attacks against this technique could include creating a list of the best synonyms, but this would not help the attacker as different word could be used at each instance the same meaning needs to be expressed, defeating the benefit of this technique. This technique of using alternate words to represent common words to defeat cryptanalysis attacks is called Homophones [7] in cryptography. A third technique that can effectively defeat cryptanalysis is Polyalphabetic substitution, that is, the use of several alphabets to encrypt the message [3], rather than using the same substitution technique again and again. The Vigenere Cipher is a form of Polyalphabetic cipher. This ensures that, no two characters are encrypted to the same ciphertext alphabet in the same message. This ensures that, direct frequency analysis of the cipher is not possible to successfully retrieve the original message. However, other techniques need to be used to identify the key length, if this is possible, then frequency analysis attack could be used to identify the original plaintext message successfully. Finally, a possible technique that could be used to defeat frequency analysis is to encrypt a single character of plaintext with two ciphertext characters [3]. Upon encountering the same character twice, then different characters should be used to encrypt the message. This can be achieved by using a key size double that of the plaintext message and then encrypting the same plaintext with two values in the key and save them together for the same plaintext character. This would ensure that no two plaintext characters will have the same ciphertext character, defeating the frequency analysis method of breaking the cipher. Modern encryption algorithms and cryptanalysis: Modern cryptographic algorithms take a better approach in defeating frequency analysis based attacks. The cryptographic algorithms nowadays use block encryption, rather than encrypting characters bit by bit, thus eliminating the redundancy of ciphertext alphabets for similar plaintext alphabets. Block ciphers are the central tool in the design of protocols for shared-key cryptography. A block cipher is a function E: {0, 1}k ÃÆ'- {0, 1}n à ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚   {0, 1}n. This notation means that E takes two inputs, one being a k-bit string and the other an n-bit string, and returns an n-bit string [2]. The first input is the key, which is used to encrypt the secret message. The second string is called the plaintext, and the output is called a ciphertext. The key-length k and the block-length n are parameters associated to a specific block cipher. They vary from block cipher to block cipher, and depend on the design of the algorithm itself. Some of the most trusted symmetric ciphers inclu de AES, Triple-DES, Blowfish, CAST and IDEA. In public-key cryptography, the most commonly used cryptosystems are RSA and the Diffie-Hellman systems, which have not been found to have any vulnerabilities till date. Preferably, the block cipher E is a public specified algorithm. In typical usage, a random key K is chosen and kept secret between a pair of users. The function EK is used by the sender to encrypt the message, for a given key, before sending it to the intended receiver, who decrypts the message using the same key [2]. Security relies on the secrecy of the key. So, at first, one might think of the cryptanalysts goal as recovering the key K given some ciphertext, intercepted during transmission. The block cipher should be designed to make this task computationally difficult. In order to achieve this, the algorithms that are used to encrypt the message must be designed with a high degree of mathematical complexity, which cannot be reversed to obtain the plaintext from a known ciphertext. The length of the key used during encryption of a message plays an important role in deciding the effectiveness of an algorithm. Key length is conventionally measured in bits, and most of the well known strong ciphers have key lengths between 128 and 256 bits. A cipher is considered strong if, after years of attempts to find a weakness in the algorithm, there is no known effective cryptanalytic attack against it. This indicates that, the most efficient way of breaking an encrypted message without knowing the key used to encrypt it is to brute force it, i.e. trying all possible keys. The effort required to break an encrypted message is determined by the number of possible keys, known as thekeyspace. Knowing the speed of the computer to break the key, it is easy to calculate how long it would take to search the keyspace to break a particular cipher [2]. For example, considering a cipher that uses 128-bit keys, each bit can either be 0 or 1, so, there are 2128 or 3ÃÆ'-1038 keys approximately. Suppose we imagine that about ten billion computers are assigned the task of breaking the code, each capable of testing ten billion keys per second, then, the task of running through the entire keyspace would take around 3ÃÆ'-1018seconds, which is about 100 billion years. But, in fact, it would be necessary to run through only half the keyspace to hit upon the correct key, which would take around 50 billion years. This is longer than the estimated age of the universe according to modern cosmology, which is about 15 billion years [2]. This shows that, it is practically infeasible to crack modern cryptographic algorithms using Brute Force attacks. So, one can imagine the effectiveness of the modern cryptographic algorithms and their resistance towards cryptanalytic attacks. Conclusions: Cryptography has progressed in recent years and modern cryptographic algorithms have proved to be successful in defending against most forms of cryptanalytic attacks. Frequency analysis based attacks have proved to exploit the weaknesses in traditional encryption algorithms into revealing the plaintext message that was encrypted using them. The natural language used to encrypt messages is not considered to be random in nature, which is exploited by frequency counting based attacks. Based upon the frequency of letters that occur in the ciphertext, one can guess the plaintext characters due to their redundancy rate and the specific combination of letters in a word. This weakness can be repelled by using stream ciphers, which do not carry the redundancy in the plaintext to the ciphertext. Modern block cipher, encrypt a chunk of plaintext into ciphertext and vice versa, eliminating the redundancy of language used in encryption. Although the algorithm plays an important part, it is the key length used in block ciphers that helps in repelling cryptanalysis. Modern ciphers use a key length starting from 128 bits, eliminating the possibility of a brute force attack to decrypt the message. The higher the key length, the more time it takes to break these ciphers. These advantages have made modern cryptographic algorithms more popular among the security community. No known weaknesses have been found in these algorithms yet, that may allow one to identify the plaintext message. Bibliography: [1] Stallings, W., Cryptography and Network Security, Chapter 1, Third Edition, Prentice Hall, 2003 [2] Schneier, B., Applied Cryptography, Chapter 1, Second Edition, John Wiley Sons, New York City, New York, USA, 1996 [3] Hart, G.W., To Decode Short Cryptograms, Communications of the ACM 37(9), 1994, pp. 102-108 [4] Lee, K.W., Teh, C.E., Tan, Y.L., Decrypting English Text Using Enhanced Frequency Analysis, National Seminar on Science, Technology and Social Sciences (STSS 2006), Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia [5] Zipf, GK., Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort, 1949, Cambridge: Addison Wesley Publications. [6] Lewand, R.E., Cryptological Mathematics, The Mathematical Association of America, 2000, Pages 345-346 [7] Stamp, M and Low, R.M., Applied Cryptanalysis, 2007, Chapter 1 and 2, John Wiley Sons, New York City, New York, USA [8] http://www.simonsingh.net, Online internet frequency analysis tools [9] http://www.textalyser.net, online text analysis and frequency analysis information