Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Adoption and Impact of Mobile-Integrated Business Processes - Comparison of Existing Frameworks and Analysis of their Generalization Potential

The integration of mobile workplaces in the (electronically mapped) intra-enterprise value chain is a major and still increasing corporate IT issue. Although the usage of mobile technologies for this purpose is far behind expectations and numerous failures can be observed,still little work has been done on theory building in this area. In this contribution we identify and compare existing frameworks for adoption and impact of mobile technology to support mobile business processes. The hypotheses underlying these frameworks are challenged with experiences from three long-term case studies which are diverse in industry, company size and other factors in order to scrutinize their potential for generalization. The outcome is a set of hypotheses that show robustness against variation of major parameters and thus may be suitable to serve as a basis for a generalized and unified framework on mobile-integrated business processes.

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Information Technology Applications in Hospitality and Tourism: A Review of Publications from 2005 to 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale

Effectiveness of Corporate Social Media Activities to Increase Relational Outcomes

This study applies social media analytics to investigate the impact of different corporate social media activities on user word of mouth and attitudinal loyalty. We conduct a multilevel analysis of approximately 5 million tweets regarding the main Twitter accounts of 28 large global companies. We empirically identify different social media activities in terms of social media management strategies (using social media management tools or the web-frontend client), account types (broadcasting or receiving information), and communicative approaches (conversational or disseminative). We find positive effects of social media management tools, broadcasting accounts, and conversational communication on public perception

Analysing relationship quality and its contribution to consumer relationship proneness

Relationship marketing has been the dominant paradigm in the sphere of marketing in the last decades. However, aspects such as globalisation, development of information technologies, or the growing competitiveness pressure have caused the way of approaching relationship management with consumers to change. A consumer feels as the lead character and demands personalised treatment customised to his/her needs and specific characteristics. In this context, relationship quality (RQ) allows to understand the proneness of consumers to keep their commercial relations alive. Several are the studies that analyse RQ antecedents, but none has used a comprehensive management approach that includes resources and capabilities (such as market orientation or knowledge management) that a company has available for management in order to enhance said RQ. Furthermore, we analyse the effect of said perceived quality on the consumer’s proneness to maintain the relationship

Psychological contract and knowledge management mediated by cultural dynamics

Contact centres are the vital link in the value chain between the organisation and its customers because they offer essential front line sales and services of products. Evaluation of their success can be assessed in terms of customer retention, up selling and the promotion of the brand. This is brought into sharp focus if the centre is outsourced because of the impact of the strategic behaviour of the principal and its relation with its agents. The association of employees with the brand in outsourced operation is not as effective as in captive operations partly because communications from principal to agent are attenuated. Emotional connectivity, diagnostic skill set, requirement gathering, and knowledge are some of the most sensitive qualities required in agents working in the contact centres. These characteristics are found to differ according to whether this is in-house or outsourced operation and affect the psychological contract between the service provider and its employees. In addition, the employees are unlikely to achieve any rewards and are unable to offer any commitments to the customer in an outsourced operation; hence the “psychological contract” is breached. One of the consequences of this breach is on knowledge management. The knowledge of an employee regarding the products and services is lost with that employee’s attrition. Also employees’ then have little interest towards customer service and organizational welfare, which impacts on the customer centric goals of the principal. We argue that the psychological contract between employer and an employee and has positive influence on Knowledge Diffusion, mediated by cultural dynamics, which further contributes to the overall organizational effectiveness. This paper aims to investigate, as a pilot study, the elements of organisational culture and secondly its role in the diffusion of knowledge in contact centres, in-house and outsourced. We demonstrate how by deploying a blend of qualitative methods, it is possible to perceive the effect of each element of the cultural web on diffusion. Finally we propose a hypothesis of the role that Power Distance (Hofstede, 1980) can play, as a proxy for the Psychological Contract to leverage knowledge diffusion