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

A Survey on Economic-driven Evaluations of Information Technology

The economic-driven evaluation of information technology (IT) has become an important instrument in the management of IT projects. Numerous approaches have been developed to quantify the costs of an IT investment and its assumed profit, to evaluate its impact on business process performance, and to analyze the role of IT regarding the achievement of enterprise objectives. This paper discusses approaches for evaluating IT from an economic-driven perspective. Our comparison is based on a framework distinguishing between classification criteria and evaluation criteria. The former allow for the categorization of evaluation approaches based on their similarities and differences. The latter, by contrast, represent attributes that allow to evaluate the discussed approaches. Finally, we give an example of a typical economic-driven IT evaluation

Technical Debt Decision-Making Framework

Software development companies strive to produce high-quality software. In commercial software development environments, due to resource and time constraints, software is often developed hastily which gives rise to technical debt. Technical debt refers to the consequences of taking shortcuts when developing software. These consequences include making the system difficult to maintain and defect prone. Technical debt can have financial consequences and impede feature enhancements. Identifying technical debt and deciding which debt to address is challenging given resource constraints. Project managers must decide which debt has the highest priority and is most critical to the project. This decision-making process is not standardized and sometimes differs from project to project. My research goal is to develop a framework that project managers can use in their decision-making process to prioritize technical debt based on its potential impact. To achieve this goal, we survey software practitioners, conduct literature reviews, and mine software repositories for historical data to build a framework to model the technical debt decision-making process and inform practitioners of the most critical debt items

Technical Debt Decision-Making Framework

Software development companies strive to produce high-quality software. In commercial software development environments, due to resource and time constraints, software is often developed hastily which gives rise to technical debt. Technical debt refers to the consequences of taking shortcuts when developing software. These consequences include making the system difficult to maintain and defect prone. Technical debt can have financial consequences and impede feature enhancements. Identifying technical debt and deciding which debt to address is challenging given resource constraints. Project managers must decide which debt has the highest priority and is most critical to the project. This decision-making process is not standardized and sometimes differs from project to project. My research goal is to develop a framework that project managers can use in their decision-making process to prioritize technical debt based on its potential impact. To achieve this goal, we survey software practitioners, conduct literature reviews, and mine software repositories for historical data to build a framework to model the technical debt decision-making process and inform practitioners of the most critical debt items

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations

EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF USING AUTOMATIC STATIC ANALYSIS ON CODE QUALITY

Automatic static analysis (ASA) tools analyze the source or compiled code looking for violations of recommended programming practices (called issues) that might cause faults or might degrade some dimensions of software quality. Antonio Vetro' has focused his PhD in studying how applying ASA impacts software quality, taking as reference point the different quality dimensions specified by the standard ISO/IEC 25010. The epistemological approach he used is that one of empirical software engineering. During his three years PhD, he's been conducting experiments and case studies on three main areas: Functionality/Reliability, Performance and Maintainability. He empirically proved that specific ASA issues had impact on these quality characteristics in the contexts under study: thus, removing them from the code resulted in a quality improvement. Vetro' has also investigated and proposed new research directions for this field: using ASA to improve software energy efficiency and to detect the problems deriving from the interaction of multiple languages. The contribution is enriched with the final recommendation of a generalized process for researchers and practitioners with a twofold goal: improve software quality through ASA and create a body of knowledge on the impact of using ASA on specific software quality dimensions, based on empirical evidence. This thesis represents a first step towards this goa

Chief human resources officers on top management teams: an empirical analysis of contingency, institutional, and homophily antecedents

Having the director of human resources (HR) as a member of the top management team (TMT) and giving him/her the title of chief human resources officer (CHRO) indicates an important strategic and symbolic choice. Such decisions not only determine who participates in controlling an organization and setting its strategic direction, but also reflect the organizational structure. In this paper, we examine the antecedents of CHRO presence according to the contingency, institutional, and homophily theories. Based on a multi-industry sample of 215 firms that considers a 10-year period, we find that the presence of a CHRO is influenced by the rates of unionization, rapid declines or increases in numbers of employees, the employment of a new or outsider chief executive officer (CEO), and the institutionalization of the CHRO position in the industry or firm. However, we find no evidence of the presumed influence of knowledge intensity or the CEO or TMT human resource management (HRM) experience. Overall, we find that the institutional theory has the highest explanatory power regarding the existence of CHRO positions

Factores de éxito de una estrategia CRM

Programa de Doctorado en Administración y Dirección de EmpresasLínea de Investigación: Gestión del Conocimiento, Innovación y EmprendimientoClave Programa: DAECódigo Línea: 3El marketing de relaciones es uno de los grandes paradigmas estudiados durante las últimas décadas, tanto en el campo académico como empresarial. Aspectos como la intensa competencia, la globalización de los mercados y el desarrollo de la tecnología hacen que siga siendo necesario adaptar los principios relacionales y profundizar en diversas cuestiones que permitan lograr su implementación de forma exitosa. El propósito de este trabajo se centra en estudiar determinados aspectos que influyen en lograr el éxito de una estrategia relacional en el contexto competitivo actual. Para ello, inicialmente se toma como referencia el concepto de CRM, entendido no como tecnología, sino como una herramienta estratégica centrada en establecer, mantener y mejorar relaciones rentables a largo plazo con los principales clientes de la empresa. Además, se utilizan otros conceptos como calidad de la relación y propensión del cliente a mantener la relación. Todo ello contribuye a entender mejor esa orientación a largo plazo de la relación empresa-clientes, así como sus implicaciones para la gestión. El estudio se realiza desde una doble vertiente, empresa y consumidores, para poder tener una visión global basada en las percepciones de las dos partes implicadas en la relación. De esta manera podemos observar cómo puede lograrse la satisfacción del cliente, a la vez que la empresa mantiene en el tiempo una relación rentable. Para lograr este objetivo la tesis se estructura en cinco capítulos: El primer capítulo justifica el interés y oportunidad de la investigación, y presenta la estructura de la misma. El capítulo 2 se centra en analizar cuáles son los factores que, desde el punto de vista de los gerentes de las empresas, contribuyen a lograr el éxito del CRM en términos de lealtad, satisfacción e interés del cliente en la empresa. El capítulo 3 analiza, desde el punto de vista del consumidor, la influencia que la aplicación de una estrategia relacional tiene en su propensión a mantener la relación con la empresa a través de su percepción de la calidad de dicha relación. En el capítulo 4 se realiza un análisis cross-cultural para estudiar la existencia de posibles influencias culturales en la propensión del cliente a mantener la relación estudiada en el capítulo anterior. Finalmente, el Capítulo 5 presenta las principales conclusiones, implicaciones y propuestas de investigación para el futuro.Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla. Departamento de Organización de Empresas y MarketingPostprin