Which of the following considered a disadvantage of matrix method?

Matrix Organization

A matrix organization attempts to spread resources horizontally, instead of retaining them in a vertical structure, as is found in Taylorism. Figure 5.15 is an example of one type of a matrix organizational structure. The advantage to a matrix is that talent can be obtained across different departments for a project, which will bring different experiences and knowledge into the project. Another advantage is that resources can be shared more effectively across all departments, and projects will often examine security issues at a higher and more comprehensive level.

The disadvantage to matrix organizations is that authority over staff members becomes complex. Not only does a penetration test engineer have a functional manager within his or her leadership chain, he or she must also report to the pentest project manager, who may come from a different department. When the engineer needs to report to multiple managerial chains, conflicts for time and workload will present itself.

The “winner” of the staff member’s time will depend on where the corporation places power within a matrix organization. In a weak matrix, the functional manager will be able to control staff assignments more than the project manager, whereas a strong matrix places most of the power in the hands of the project manager.

A matrix organization is rarely used as a defined method of corporate-wide management. Often, a matrix is used occasionally when a high-profile project is created. Staff members will spend most of their time satisfying the demands of their functional boss, until tasked with a cross-department project. The amount of authority the project manager has will often depend on who the project stakeholders are and how high in the organization the project champion resides.

Unidentified Data Sources

Before a decision is made to include these data sources in the inventory matrix, organization must first determine the relevance and usefulness of the data during an investigation. When assessing additional data sources, the business scenarios aligned to the digital forensic readiness program must be used as the foundation for the final decision to include or exclude the data source.

If a decision is made to include the data source into the inventory matrix, the organization will need to start back at Phase #1: Preparation discussed previously to ensure that the action plan is followed and all prerequisite questions have been answered.

Capability Matrix

The development and management of shared capabilities requires a separation of shared capabilities from line of business capabilities. This new matrix organization requires new organizational disciplines and technical support. Top management must ensure that the cost of services are properly computed and allocated to the consumers of the services, and that the capability units are allowed appropriate overhead to properly maintain and improve their services.

This represents a new way of thinking about budgeting, accountability, cost allocation, and management of levels of service. This also clarifies the potential for outsourcing of commodity capabilities.

Solutions Fast Track

Matrix Management

Having defined functional and process management let’s consider how an organization might combine the strengths of the two approaches at the top of the organization. Recently, leading organizations have begun to establish some kind of process management hierarchy that, at least at the upper level, is independent of the organization’s functional hierarchy. The top position in a process hierarchy is a manager who is responsible for an entire value chain. Depending on the complexity of the organization the value chain manager might have other process managers reporting to him or her. This approach typically results in a matrix organization like the one pictured in Figure 6.8.

In Figure 6.8 we show a company like the one pictured earlier with three functional units. In this case, however, another senior manager has been added, and this individual is responsible for the success of the widget value chain. Different organizations allocate authority in different ways. For example, the widget process manager may function only in an advisory capacity. In this case he or she would convene meetings to discuss the flow of the Widget value chain. In such a situation the sales supervisor would still owe his or her primary allegiance to the VP of sales, and that individual would still be responsible for paying, evaluating, and promoting the sales supervisor. Key to making this approach work is to think of the management of the widget value chain as a team effort. In effect, each supervisor with management responsibility for a process that falls inside the widget value chain is a member of the widget value chain management team.

Other companies give the widget value chain manager more responsibility. In that case the sales supervisor might report to both the widget value chain manager and to the VP of sales. Each senior manager might contribute to the sales supervisor’s evaluations and each might contribute to the individual’s bonus, and so forth.

Figure 6.9 provides a continuum that is modified from one originally developed by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PMI proposed this continuum to contrast organizations that focused on functional structures and those that emphasized projects. We use it to compare functional and process organizations. In either case the area between the extremes describes the type of matrix organization that a given company might institute.

The type of matrix an organization has is determined by examining the authority and the resources that senior management allocates to specific managers. For example, in a weak matrix organization functional managers might actually “own” the employees, have full control over all budgets and employee incentives, and deal with all support organizations. In this situation the process manager would be little more than the team leader who gets team members to talk about problems and tries to resolve problems by means of persuasion.

In the opposite extreme the process manager might “own” the employees and control their salaries and incentives. In the middle, which is more typical, the departmental head would “own” the employees and have a budget for them. The process manager might have control of the budget for support processes, like IT, and have money to provide incentives for employees. In this case employee evaluations would be undertaken by both the departmental and the project manager, each using their own criteria.

Most organizations seem to be trying to establish a position in the middle of the continuum. They keep the functional or departmental units to oversee professional standards within disciplines and to manage personnel matters. Thus the VP of sales is probably responsible for hiring the sales supervisor shown in Figure 6.8 and for evaluating his or her performance and assigning raises and bonuses. The VP of sales is responsible for maintaining high sales standards within the organization. On the other hand, the ultimate evaluation of the sales supervisor comes from the SVP of the widget process. The sales supervisor is responsible for achieving results from the widget sales process and that is the ultimate basis for his or her evaluation. In a sense the heads of departments meet with the SVP of the widget process and form a high-level process management team.

Core, Support and Management Processes

So far, we have focused on core or operational processes. These are processes that add value to the product or service that the organization is producing for its customers. When Michael Porter defined the value chain, he distinguished between core and support processes. Core processes generate products or services. Support processes do not add value, but are necessary to assure that the core processes continue to function. Thus, in a manufacturing organization, accounting is a support process. We maintain the books to let management know how much manufacturing is costing and to enable them to report to stockholders. Similarly, IT is a support process that generates and maintains the software and systems that manufacturing needs to control its production-line machinery. Today, it is popular to divide support processes between processes that directly support the core processes and more generic management processes that plan, organize, communicate, monitor and control the activities of the organization. Support processes are sometimes called enabling processes.

Figure 4.7 provides one way of thinking about the distinction. In this case, we have a core set of processes that generates a product. Separately, we have a support process—the Stock Reorder Process—that resupplies a core assembly process. We also have a management process that determines which suppliers the company will use and establishes and maintains relationships with the suppliers. Obviously, this management process could be an activity undertaken by procurement, but it might also be a process undertaken by finance.

Should we include support or enabling processes in our business process architecture, and, if so, how should we represent them? One approach would be to divide all support processes and organize the support processes under the core processes they enable. This is conceptually clean, but it isn't, in fact, very realistic. In most cases, a company conceptualizes its IT group as a department. In the best case the IT group is managed as a matrix organization, and has some managers responsible for generic IT functions like new product development and ongoing software maintenance, and other managers responsible for IT support for the Supply Chain and IT support for Sales and Marketing. The key here, however, is that IT has a core set of functions, like the company network and good maintenance practices, that apply to all processes or departments it supports; thus, there is a very strong argument for treating IT as an independent department.

An alternative approach, which is increasingly popular, is to treat IT as an independent organization, a cost center, or an independent value chain. This reflects what happens when IT is outsourced. In essence, IT becomes a separate company—a value chain that produces software and services that it sells to the parent company's core processes. Whether your company outsources IT or keeps it in house, if you regard it as its own value chain, and create an independent business process architecture to describe IT's core, support and management processes, you will find that it makes everything easier to understand. Obviously, the same logic can be applied to the other main support processes, including human resources, facilities, and accounting. If you follow this approach, then you will leave support processes off the business process architecture worksheets you create for your core value chains and describe each major support process as an independent architecture with its own worksheets.

Handling management processes is trickier, because the whole idea of management processes has not been very well thought out. To begin with, we need to discriminate between two basic types of “management processes.” In one case, we have the processes or activities that are performed by the individuals that actually manage processes on a day-to-day basis. Thus, if we consider Figure 4.7, there is some individual who is responsible for managing the Fill Order From Stock process. That individual plans, organizes, communicates, monitors and controls the Fill Order From Stock process each hour of each day. He or she interacts with the employees that undertake the tasks that we associate with the Fill Order From Stock process, communicates new targets as they occur, and provides feedback when employees do their work in an outstanding or an unacceptable manner. It isn't useful to treat the day-to-day process management directly associated with the core process as a separate process. When you seek to redesign or improve the process, you need to consider both the activities of the employees assigned to the process and, simultaneously, the activities of the manager who is in charge of the process. Insofar as it's useful to discriminate these day-to-day process management processes, it's done to define standard or best-practice procedures that process managers should follow. We'll consider standard process management practices later, when we consider process management and the establishment of BPM support groups. At this point, however, we will simply ignore these day-to-day management processes. They are so closely associated with core processes that they don't need an independent representation on our business process architecture.

There remain some general management processes that perform enterprise planning, organizing, communication or monitoring functions. In essence, if the organization has a business rules group that works to define company policies and to dictate the business rules that specific processes should implement, that group and the processes it implements constitute a kind of management process. Similarly, the team that defines corporate strategy follows a process and the BPM group implements a set of processes. These are true management processes that are independent of the core processes in a normal value chain. Sophisticated companies will want to analyze these management processes to assure that they function as efficiently and effectively as possible. Thus, we should define them and document how they function. The question is where to include them. Unlike the standard support processes, like IT and HR, it is hard to think of these “management processes” as a cost center or an independent company. It's easier to simply think of them as activities undertaken by senior managers. At the moment, it is probably best to simply think of all the “management processes” that are independent of specific operational processes as their own “management value chain” and document them on their own worksheets. It's not a very elegant solution, but it's probably better than trying to associate them with a conventional value chain.

14 New biology insights from reprocessed data identifications according to SDC ectodomain

With the exponential increase of published biomedical literature and public proteomics databases (Martens and Vizcaíno, 2017). Finding protein-protein interaction (PPI) information has become a challenging and a time-consuming task. Several methods and mining tools have been developed and upgraded, in order to help users to retrieve and mine information on PPI.

Besides, in proteomics, the number of data types and formats can be an overwhelming resource. However, it enables a full reanalysis and repurpose to generate new knowledge (Martens and Vizcaíno, 2017). In this review, we started reprocessing SDC-1 interaction partners list and other SDC identifiers, with focus on IIS software, previously mentioned. These results were usefully visualized as a network display, which summarized the interactions among the four SDC members and their interaction partners, including the common ones. As presented in the network at Fig. 4, FGF2 is the unique protein that interacts with the four types of SDC. Interestingly FGF2 is located in the extracellular environment and also participates in the extracellular matrix organization process (Fig. 4 and Fig. 5), as all the four SDC members do. However, this tool reports only the interactors that are present in curated databases (i.e. all information that has been collected and organized under the supervision of qualified people), while new data of potential interaction partners may not be present in the results.

In order to verify the existence of other interaction partners, we used STRING tool and the mining tools PIE the search and PPI Finder. Thus, considering the broader sources used by STRING, it was expected to gain a larger results list of interacting proteins, as presented in the Suppl. Table 1. Also, the analyses by the mining tools PPI Finder and PIE the search resulted in several interaction partners for each SDC (Suppl. Table 2 and Suppl. Table 3).

The collected results from IIS, STRING and PPI Finder were compared to find common interaction partners reported between these tools (Suppl. Table 4). In general, STRING and PPI Finder tools retrieved a larger number of interaction partners than IIS. However, as we mentioned before, this difference might be attributed at the non-updated data information in IIS. In addition, such comparison revealed that all common proteins founded by these tools, belong to the experimental source used by STRING software.

When using PIE the search, the user has to choose the keywords that fit the purpose of the search. For example, in this review, three different searches were performed to seek for PPI of SDC, using combinations of the keywords “extracellular” and “ectodomain” for each SDC member (Suppl. Table 3). As expected, the more specific combination of keywords used the less articles showed, when compared to a more general search using only the protein name as a keyword.

The resulting lists from PIE the search were compared to find common research articles between the different inputs (Suppl. Table 3). Additionally, such comparison was applied to verify the number of articles retrieved from a search using the keywords “syndecan + ectodomain” and “syndecan + cytoplasm” (Suppl. Table 5). This analysis exemplifies the higher content of studies involving the cytoplasmic domain over SDC ectodomain studies, which is in accordance with the more detailed information of the participation of the cytoplasmic domain in several biological functions.

All the tools presented in this review are valuable to gather recent information on PPI for SDC. Also, the mining tool PIE the search was helpful to seek for up-to-date PPI information on articles describing the involvement of the extracellular/ectodomain region of SDC with other proteins.

Another tool to browse for PPI and for the prediction of protein-protein interaction could be found at http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/obrc/index.php?page=protein_protein_interactions.

The results obtained from the analyses of the proteins identified as SDC-1 binding partners (Suppl., Table 6–7) belong to the intracellular content in search tools such as Cytoscape, and were also identified with possible localization in EVs content in the FunRich and APID programs. These two tools, unlike the previous ones used for the determination of the location and functional association, are associated to EVs database, such as Vesiclepedia (http://microvesicles.org/). This correlation can now give new insights to SDC ectodomain rule by the perspective their ligands, which function, exceed their canonical description.

1 Introduction

The great economic and industrial interest resulting from the exploration of oil deposits, made by modern seismic analysis technologies, produces intense development and improvement of numerical methods in the area of dynamic of structures, seismic data inversion and many others. Many initiatives in this direction can be observed, especially the improvement of numerical processing algorithms coupled with powerful discrete methods, such as the Finite Element Method and the Finite Difference Method. Such initiatives are justified due to the huge computational storage and processing effort required in the treatment of discrete systems with many millions of degrees of freedom. Particularly, this problem is aggravated in the case of 3D dynamic response, since an incremental scheme to advance over time is required.

Due to the unattractive features of a matrix organization, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) has appeared in the background of these applications, which does not mean there is no significant effort in its research context, aiming to improve its mathematical flexibility and to decrease the computational storage effort without losing the quality of its results.

Part of this effort has been made through alternative formulations based on the use of interpolation procedures using radial basis functions [1], since many problems of practical interest are not expressed in terms of differential equations whose operators are self-adjoint or else the inverse integral form is too complicated. The use of these functions also allows the choice of a series of procedures that may, under certain conditions, greatly simplify the processing of the response.

With respect to dynamic problems, there are contents of undeniable interest for the BEM, in which is not demanded huge computational effort, as occurs in step by step time integration procedures. Two important cases consist of analysis of the modal spectrum of the response, which requires as first step calculating eigenvalues and analysis in the frequency domain. These problems are ruled by the Helmholtz Equation. The BEM already has an inverse integral formulation associated with this problem, which uses a fundamental solution which depends on the excitation frequency. Despite its elegance, accuracy and compliance with the mathematical formalism, this formulation presents difficulties related to computational storage effort, and relative lack of flexibility in dealing with problems not concerned with determining directly the response to a known excitement. The solution of a simple eigenvalue problem is one of those limited cases. The matrix related to the system inertia is dependent on the, eigenfrequency, preventing following the classic matrix formulation used for solution of eigenvalue problems.

In this sense, a first major contribution came with the development of the Dual Reciprocity Boundary Element formulation (DRBEM) [2] that uses radial basis functions as auxiliary tool. The DRBEM allows accessible simulation of transient cases, characteristic value problems, dynamic response problems, and problems characterized by domain sources or actions, which were previously solvable only with costly and relatively complex methods. Although flexible and presenting reasonably results, the DRBEM is exposed to certain numerical inaccuracies, primarily due to matrix conditioning problems deriving from the need of imposing interpolation basis points to represent domain properties, commonly called poles [3].

More recently, it was proposed a new technique based on the use of radial functions, called Direct Radial Basis Interpolation using Boundary Integration (DIBEM) [4].

Unlike DRBEM, the DIBEM formulation proposed here does not require construction of two auxiliary matrices by multiplying classic boundary element matrices H and G because it directly approximates the complete integral kernel, similar to what is done in an interpolation process, using only one primitive function. Only the transformation of a domain integral into a boundary integral makes DIBEM different from simple interpolation. Therefore, a wide range of different radial functions and a huge number of poles can be used without instability problems, which commonly occur when using the DRBEM.

This work seeks to accurately compare the performance of DIBEM in face of the traditional formulation of the BEM using the fundamental solution depending on the frequency (FSBEM) [5]. There is no expectation that DIBEM results be superior, since in this technique the system inertia is approximated by radial functions. Thus, when dealing with the high frequencies, there is need for better characterization of the system inertia, and under these conditions the approach dictated by DIBEM will certainly provide more inaccurate results.

However, the DIBEM is a technique more versatile than the FSBEM. Its mathematical model allows a wider range of applications using simpler fundamental solution. Unlike the DRBEM, many type of radial basis function may be used without numerical inaccuracies or instabilities. A simple scheme using primitive functions avoids domain integrations, as it will be shown herein.

Anyway, it is important to perform a comparison between the two boundary element formulations concerning the solution of the Helmholtz problems, in which the accuracy is evaluated: this is the main objective of the present study.