Appropriate Information Technology In Emerging Economies: An Application For Strategic Decision-Making In Manufacturing Industries

Competing in global marketplace has pressured managers respond to shifting market trends by increasing product quality, business process reengineering, and decreasing time to market for new products.  Within emerging economies top executives have realized that adoption of appropriate information technologies such a decision support systems (DSS) and group decision support systems (GDSS) have led to changes in the existing organizational structure and communication mechanisms.  This paper explores the advantages and constraints of DSS and GDSS in formulating manufacturing strategies in emergent economies.  We argued that to fit appropriate information technology to organizational design top executive would benefit from strategic information systems planning process.  This process enables top executives to invest in appropriate information system that fits their structural arrangements and organizational culture.  Moreover, we explored the impact of DSS and GDSS on executive decision-making capabilities.  We also explored the methodology for implementation of appropriate information systems in manufacturing firms in emergent economies

Integrating group Delphi, fuzzy logic and expert systems for marketing strategy development:the hybridisation and its effectiveness

A hybrid approach for integrating group Delphi, fuzzy logic and expert systems for developing marketing strategies is proposed in this paper. Within this approach, the group Delphi method is employed to help groups of managers undertake SWOT analysis. Fuzzy logic is applied to fuzzify the results of SWOT analysis. Expert systems are utilised to formulate marketing strategies based upon the fuzzified strategic inputs. In addition, guidelines are also provided to help users link the hybrid approach with managerial judgement and intuition. The effectiveness of the hybrid approach has been validated with MBA and MA marketing students. It is concluded that the hybrid approach is more effective in terms of decision confidence, group consensus, helping to understand strategic factors, helping strategic thinking, and coupling analysis with judgement, etc

A contingency view on italian companies' adoption of strategic planning system: an empirical research

La tesi si propone di indagare possibili fattori contingenti lo scarso utilizzo da parte delle aziende italiane dei sistemi di pianificazione strategica. Tali fattori sono stati identificati attraverso ricerca bibliografica e raccolti in un questinario inviato alle aziende, in cui dati sono stati analizzati statisticament

Are cognitive and social factors sufficient to explain the acceptance of decision aiding processes within organisations?

This research extends the limited existing research into the acceptance of decision aids by considering this in an organisational, rather than personal, context. This led to the thesis having a theory-building bias as it was not clear at the outset what a decision aid in an organisation consists of, what the main influences on acceptance would be, nor how to conduct such an enquiry. The potential influences were identified as the extent of agreement within the organisation with the way in which the decision aid represented the basic problem, and this was argued to form the cognitive and social/actors. The expectation was to find an association between the level of intra-organisational agreement and either acceptance or rejection of the decision aid if they are the sole cause. Other potential influences include the type of problem (especially whether maintenance of the status-quo is an option), the approach to decision aiding in use, and other external factors. Decision aiding in organisations was linked with approaches to organisational planning, whether or not this included significant use of IT. Such approaches involve constructing a problem representation and testing the implications of potential solutions. From this perspective, it was possible to see some of the influences on the acceptance of a decision aid as those which will affect any decision whether aided or not. The empirical work was designed to disentangle these effects by concentrating on the degree of intra-organisational agreement and using case-studies to capture any other factors which applied. The findings were that intra-organisational agreement, continuation of the status-quo and external constraints all influenced acceptance. However, there was no simple relationship between the cognitive and social factors and acceptance

Operating theatre planning and scheduling in real-life settings.Problem analysis, models, and solution procedures

Falta palabras claveNowadays health care organizations experience an increasing pressure in order to provide their services at the lowest possible costs as a response to the combination of restrictive budgets, increasing waiting lists, and the aging of the population. In general, hospital resources are expensive and scarce, being the operating theatre the most critical and expensive resource. In most hospitals, the operating theatre is a complex system composed of operating rooms (ORs) together with their specialized equipment, preoperative and postoperative facilities and, finally, a diversity of human resources, including surgeons, anesthetists, nurses, etc. To handle such complexity, decisions related to operating theatre management are usually decomposed into three hierarchical decision levels, i.e.: strategic, tactical and operational. At the strategic level, hospital managers set the volume and the mix of surgeries that will be performed over a long-term horizon (typically, a year) to keep up acceptable size of waiting lists while achieving cost targets, thus making long-term decisions related to the dimensioning of surgical facilities (e.g. build new ORs, adding new recovery beds, etc.), the hiring of surgical staff (e.g. surgeons, nurses, etc.), the purchase of novel surgical devices, and the amount of operating theatre resources required by surgical specialties to perform their surgeries (OR time, number of beds, etc.). Once decisions at strategic level have been made, the operating theatre resources are allocated over a medium-term planning horizon (ranging from few weeks to 6 months) in the tactical level. Since the OR is both a bottleneck and the most expensive facility for most hospitals, surgical specialties are first assigned to OR days (i.e. a pair of an OR and a day) over the planning horizon, until the OR time allocated to each surgical specialty in the strategic level is reached. Then, the above assignment defines aggregate resource requirements for specialties, such as the demand of nurses, drugs, diagnostic procedures, laboratory tests, etc. Finally, the working shifts of human resources and their workload (e.g. the number of surgeries allocated to each surgeon) are defined over the medium-term planning horizon in order to achieve the volume of surgeries set by hospital managers. Finally, the surgical schedule is determined over a short-term planning horizon (ranging from few days to few weeks) at the operational level. The operational level is usually solved into two steps. The first step involves the determination of the date and the OR for a set of surgeries in the waiting list; while in the second step, a sequence of surgeries for each OR within each day in the planning horizon is obtained. Note that only a set of surgeries will be performed during the planning horizon due to capacity constraints (both facilities and human resources). The decomposition of the operational level into the two aforementioned steps intends to reduce the complexity of the resulting problem, although the quality of the so-obtained surgery schedule may be reduced due to the high interdependence among these two steps, being the integrated approach a popular topic of research. At the operational level, a feature greatly influencing the performance is the uncertainty in the surgical activities, as frequently large discrepancies between the scheduled duration and the real duration of the surgeries appear, together with the availability of the resources reserved for emergency arrivals. Despite the importance and the complexity of these hierarchical levels, decisions in practice are usually made according to the decision makers’ experience without considering the underlying optimization problems. Furthermore, the lack of usage of decision models and solution procedures causes the decision makers to consume long times on performing management tasks (e.g. determine the surgical schedule, react to unforeseen events, carry out what-if analyses, etc.), instead of healthcare tasks. The context discussed above stresses the need to provide healthcare decision makers with advanced operations research techniques (i.e. models and solution procedures) in order to improve the efficiency of the operating theatre resources and the quality of the healthcare services at the operational level. This Thesis is aimed at this goal

Software Libre de apoyo a la toma de Decisiones en Energías Renovables

This thesis details the process of construction, set up and dissemination of a decision support system for the promotion and incorporation of renewable energies. The study was conducted in the province of Salta and focuses mainly on the promotion of solar energy.In the first sections of the thesis the problematic, the conceptual approach and the general methodological strategy that sustains the work are presented. The following chapters detail the renewable energy scenario at different scales and the methodology used for its approach. Likewise, it continues with the presentation of the tools developed to contribute to energy planning, the methodology used in them and the results obtained. As a final result, the conclusions of all the research work, progress, and challenges in energy planning and the lines of research that have emerged from this work are integrated.En la tesis se detalla el proceso de construccón, ajuste y despliegue de un sistema de ayuda para la toma de decisiones para la promoción e incorporación de energías renovables. El estudio se llevó a cabo en la provincia de Salta y principalmente se centra en la promoción de energía solar. En las primeras secciones de la tesis son presentadas la problemática, el planteo conceptual y la medodología de estrategia general que fue utilizado en el trabajo. Los capítulos siguientes detallan el escenario de la energía renovable a diferentes escalas y la metodología utilizada para su aproximación. De la misma forma, se continúa con la presentación de herramientas desarrolladas para contribuir al planeamiento energético, la metodología utilizada en el mismo y los resultados obtenidos. Como resultado final fueron integrados el trabajo de investigación, el progreso, los problemas del planeamiento estratégico y las líneas de investigación que resultaron a partir de este trabajo.Fil: Sarmiento Barbieri, Nilsa Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Salta. Instituto de Investigaciones en Energía no Convencional. Universidad Nacional de Salta. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Departamento de Física. Instituto de Investigaciones en Energía no Convencional; Argentin

Strategic intelligence in Hong Kong

What would happen in Hong Kong after the 1997 transfer of its political sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China? For organizational leaders in Hong Kong, this was more than an academic issue. As the handover approached, they faced an impending discontinuity in their environment. Although the Chinese are renowned for their business success amidst environmental uncertainty, little is known about information management in Chinese organisations. Given that the ethnic Chinese constituted a vast majority of both the general population and organisational leaders in pre-handover Hong Kong, it was an attractive context for strategic intelligence research. The study considered how Hong Kong Chinese chief executive officers (CEOs) perceived the pre-handover business environment, and how they acquired and used information about that environment. A multiple method design was employed to extend an existing body of management literature on environmental scanning. Eight case studies across four industries complemented a survey of 53 CEOs in the printing and securities industries. The questionnaire was designed to determine 1) the levels of perceived uncertainty in six distinct sectors of the business environment, and 2) the environmental scanning conducted in response to the perceived uncertainty. Quantitative analysis revealed many similarities but also several significant differences from both previous studies in the West and between the two industries in Hong Kong. The case studies examined how CEOs acquired and used information about the external environment as they attended to specific strategic issues. The cases provided empirical grounding for an explanatory theory of information management and indicated that the handover was not a uniform or even universal source of environmental uncertainty. Specific cultural, institutional, and competitive factors were found to influence the environmental perceptions, scanning behaviours and information management activities of Hong Kong Chinese chief executives

PRAXIS: um referencial para o planeamento de sistemas de informação

O Planeamento de Sistemas de Informação é a actividade da organização onde se define o futuro desejado para o seu Sistema de Informação, para o modo como este deverá ser suportado pelas Tecnologias da Informação e para a forma de concretizar esse suporte. O Planeamento de Sistemas de Informação, é hoje uma actividade complexa, de natureza holística e contingencial, e cuja prática, nas organizações, tem inúmeras motivações e finalidades. Apesar de comummente aceite como uma actividade vital para o sucesso das organizações, é curiosamente uma das suas actividades mais desprezadas e insucedidas, acreditando-se que esta situação é devida, principalmente, à inexistência de sistemas de referência adequados às suas características actuais. A procura duma solução para este problema, tornou-se a finalidade deste projecto, tendo-se formulado como a sua principal tese, a necessidade e a possibilidade de conceber um novo referencial, resultante de um balanceamento entre razões teoricamente justificadas e razões justificadas pela experiência e pela prática do Planeamento de Sistemas de Informação. Procurou-se assim, uma fundamentação teórica e conceptual rigorosa, sem comprometer a proximidade e a adequação desse referencial às diferentes realidades da prática desta actividade nas organizações. O referencial construído, o PRAXIS, é um sistema de referência completo, pois inclui a proposta de um enquadramento conceptual (PRAXIS/ec), de uma abordagem (PRAXIS/a), de um método (PRAXIS/m) e de uma ferramenta (PRAXIS/f). Globalmente, o PRAXIS é um referencial que se crê com as características necessárias, para corresponder às necessidades e expectativas actualmente associadas à prática do PSI, sendo o seu enquadramento conceptual um contributo particularmente útil para o estudo desta actividade.Information Systems Planning (ISP) is an organisational activity whose purpose is to define the desired future for the organisation's information system, how it should be supported by information technology and how that support should be implemented. ISP is a complex activity, holistic and contingent in nature and its practice in organisations has different motivations and goals. Although ISP is recognised as vital to organisational success, it is often neglected and its results are often described as a failure. This situation is explained with the lack of a sound referential system, adequate to ISP characteristics. The main purpose of this work was the search for a solution to this problem. Since the beginning it was clear that any proposal for a new ISP referential should be based on the existing theoretical studies and it should also take in account the necessities of ISP practice and the results of ISP experience. The necessity and the technical feasibility of such a referential constitute the main thesis of this work. PRAXIS, the ISP referential system proposed in this thesis, is believed to be complete as it includes a conceptual framework (PRAXIS/ec), an approach (PRAXIS/a) a method (PRAXIS/m) and a tool (PRAXIS/f). PRAXIS's conceptual framework is viewed as an important contribution to the study of ISP and it constitutes the PRAXIS's theoretical basis. Moreover, PRAXIS has been designed to cope with the necessities and the expectations of ISP practice.Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica (PMCT/C/TIT/ 456/90 - Planeamento de Sistemas de Informação); Universidade do Minho