Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the business process management (BPM) approach contributes to applying systemic characteristics in organisations. Design/methodology/approach-This is a theoretical and descriptive work based on a review of the literature on BPM and systemic approach. Findings-From the analysis of its stages, it was possible to find a strong correspondence between BPM and the systemic characteristics found in the literature. Practical implications-The paper presents practical implications to professionals as well as academics. The contribution to the body of knowledge on BPM derives from the identification of systemic characteristics in it, thus justifying its practical application to organisations in order to ensure better systemicity and adaptability. As processes are directed to the same goal, unnecessary and misdirected steps are redesigned or eliminated, concentrating resources on core processes and improving the organisation's performance. The paper also contributes to education, since the systemic approach may be a key subject to clarify the interrelationships among processes, and processes and their contexts. Originality/value-The originality resides on elucidating the systemic characteristics of BPM, being academically valuable for justifying the studies about such an approach, besides contributing to the characterisation of its basic assumptions as well. In addition, the value of the present work for business management resides in the identification of a practical approach which can be applied to organisations in order to ensure them systemicity and flexibility.

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Background and Purpose-Studies continue to reveal persistent gaps in stroke awareness despite existing stroke messages, especially when the length of time from message exposure increases. Therefore, there is a need to discover messages that promote long-term retention of stroke knowledge. We modified a standard stroke education poster using one health communications model, Extended Parallel Process, to assess its comparative effect on public stroke awareness and information retention. Methods-This was a single blinded, randomized, pretest, posttest study using 2 age cohorts: younger (18 to 30 years) and older (50ϩ years). Stroke knowledge was measured by the 28-item Stroke Action Test taken before and after viewing either an Extended Parallel Process modified poster or a standard educational poster in widespread use and again 6 weeks later. Results-Overall, there were 274 participants (222 younger and 52 older) with 139 randomly assigned to view the Extended Parallel Process poster and 135 assigned to view the standard poster. There was no significant difference (PϾ0.05) in the average Stroke Action Test score change between poster groups at all 3 testing intervals, although there was a nonsignificant greater drop in Stroke Action Test scores observed in the control group at the 6-week follow-up (Ϫ3.52 versus Ϫ2.60; Pϭ0.46). The observed power for this difference was only 11% due to attrition of study participants (total 6-week follow-up, nϭ170). The younger group did significantly better on the Stroke Action Test from baseline to immediate posttest when viewing either poster (PϽ0.05). Conclusions-

Traffic delay caused by incidents is closely related to three variables: incident frequency, incident duration, and the number of lanes blocked by an incident that is directly related to the bottleneck capacity. Relatively, incident duration has been more extensively studied than incident frequency and the number of lanes blocked in an incident. In this study, we provide an investigation of the influencing factors for all of these three variables based on an incident data set that was collected in New York City (NYC). The information about the incidents derived from the identification can be used by incident management agencies in NYC for strategic policy decision making and daily incident management and traffic operation.In identifying the influencing factors for incident frequency, a set of models, including Poisson and Negative Binomial regression models and their zero-inflated models, were considered. An appropriate model was determined based on a model decision-making tree. The influencing factors for incident duration were identified based on hazard-based models where Exponential, Weibull, Log-logistic, and Lognormal distributions were considered for incident duration. For the number of lanes blocked in an incident, the identification of the influencing factors was based on an Ordered Probit model which can better capture the order inherent in the number of lanes blocked in an incident. As identified in this study, rain is the only factor that significantly influenced incident frequency. For incident duration and the number of lanes blocked in an incident, various factors had significant impact. As concluded in this study, there is a strong need to identify the influencing factors in terms of different types of incidents and the roadways where the incidents occured.

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