People in the E-Business: New Challenges, New Solutions

[Excerpt] Human Resource Planning Society’s (HRPS) annual State of the Art/Practice (SOTA/P) study has become an integral contributor to HRPS’s mission of providing leading edge thinking to its members. Past efforts conducted in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 have focused on identifying the issues on the horizon that will have a significant impact on the field of Human Resources (HR). This year, in a divergence from past practice, the SOTA/P effort aimed at developing a deeper understanding of one critical issue having a profound impact on organizations and HR, the rise of e-business. The rise of e-business has been both rapid and dramatic. One estimate puts the rate of adoption of the internet at 4,000 new users each hour (eMarketer, 1999) resulting in the expectation of 250 million people on line by the end of 2000, and 350 million by 2005 (Nua, 1999). E-commerce is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2003, and of that, 87 percent will go to the business to business (B2B) and 13 percent to the business to consumer (B2C) segments, respectively (Plumely, 2000)

Managing for local resilience: towards a strategic approach

The term resilience is increasingly being used to capture the challenges involved in managing in ‘hard times’. This article aims to provide one of the first empirical studies of the term’s application to local authority interventions around emergency planning and climate change: two areas in which resilience has been particularly emphasised in local policy making. Drawing upon research undertaken in the north east of England, the article considers how local managers have understood and applied the term, the extent to which it has been developed as a coherent policy agenda, and its strategic significance. In reframing the debate on resilience in terms of discourses of ‘recovery’ and ‘transformation’, the article examines how, in addition to informing policy realities on the ground, resilience is also a normative, politically laden term, within which conservative narratives of uncertainty, vulnerability and anxiety compete with a more radical focus on hope, adaptation and transformation. The study reveals concerns over the term’s longevity, tensions between the different interpretations of resilience, and the lack of a coherent strategic framework within which the different discourses on resilience could be considered and reconciled. However, the article also captures the growing importance of a resilience narrative that is seen to add value in a period of austerity, integrate key features of climate change adaptation and emergency planning, and act as a ‘strategic lynchpin’ in relation to other policy areas, such as economic resilience

Evolving issues in Australian emergency management

This article examines some the challenges facing emergency management organizations (EMO's) and policy-makers in Australia. It considers how EMO's will need to be ready to prepare for and, where possible prevent, a range of evolving threats into the future. Such an ability to anticipate capability needs via effective threat assessment and response planning is a needed evolutionary response

The Rise of the Resilient Local Authority?

The term resilience is increasingly being utilised within the study of public policy to depict how individuals, communities and organisations can adapt, cope, and ‘bounce back’ when faced with external shocks such as climate change, economic recession and cuts in public expenditure. In focussing on the local dimensions of the resilience debate, this article argues that the term can provide useful insights into how the challenges facing local authorities in the UK can be reformulated and reinterpreted. The article also distinguishes between resilience as ‘recovery’ and resilience as ‘transformation’, with the latter's focus on ‘bouncing forward’ from external shocks seen as offering a more radical framework within which the opportunities for local innovation and creativity can be assessed and explained. While also acknowledging some of the weaknesses of the resilience debate, the dangers of conceptual ‘stretching’, and the extent of local vulnerabilities, the article highlights a range of examples where local authorities – and crucially, local communities – have enhanced their adaptive capacity, within existing powers and responsibilities. From this viewpoint, some of the barriers to the development of resilient local government are not insurmountable, and can be overcome by ‘digging deep’ to draw upon existing resources and capabilities, promoting a strategic approach to risk, exhibiting greater ambition and imagination, and creating space for local communities to develop their own resilience

Service company's adaptation of supply chain to cope with volatile oil and gas market

The oil and gas market has great significance across the globe, but the unpredictability in this industry is a huge challenge that affects all the supply chains in this market. These conditions contribute to a competitive and diverse market where service firms struggle to keep productivity in order to lower costs and boost operating performance. This paper gathers data on the oilfield service industry and explore existing literature on service supply chain agility to discover empirically the application of strategies that can be implemented within the sector. The major difficulties and risks faced during an oil crisis were identified through analyses on the performance of the leading global service provider (Schlumberger). Global mobility and supplier related challenges were found to be the main factors that harm the company's capacity to deal with market fluctuations. And the constructive tactics developed to achieve a strategic edge over competition have been used as the foundation of this study. Through executives’ interview, internal documentation research and relevant literature review it was discovered that agility in Schlumberger was attained by establishing supply chain visibility and the development of flexible policies and processes. By leveraging internal capabilities and digital solutions to enhance the procurement activities and overcome the looming risks it´s possible to successfully operate in complex market. A recommendation framework was presented as supply chain managers’ benchmarking scheme. This framework highlighted approaches that can be taken in terms of suppliers, internal capabilities and customers as a way to contribute to greater supply chain agility

Large-Scale Agile Transformation: A Case Study of Transforming Business, Development and Operations

Today, product development organizations are adopting agile methods in units outside the software development unit, such as in sales, market, legal, operations working with the customer. This broader adoption of agile methods has been labeled large-scale agile transformation and is considered a particular type of organizational change, originating in the software development units. So far, there is little research-based advice on conducting such transformations. Aiming to contribute towards providing relevant research advice on large-scale agile transformation, we apply a research-based framework for evaluating organizational agility on a product development program in a maritime service provider organization. We found that doing a large-scale agile transformation involves many significant challenges, such as having a shared understanding of the problem, getting access to users, and getting commitment to change that needs to be done. In order to overcome such challenges, we discuss the need for a holistic and integrated approach to agile transformation involving all the units linked to software development.publishedVersio

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008

The decisive reset: attainable governance for revitalising democracy

To improve democratic legitimacy, successful resolution of public policy challenges has to emerge from highly pressurised political predicaments. Increasing civic functionality requires integrative Civil Service practice, building trust in adaptive oversight. With the task of effective governance stretching out-of-reach in straining institutional arrangements, a proposition is developed for an “Attainable Governance” reset to revitalise democracy. Motivated by the need for progress that is sensitive to the reality and risks of the present and embodying requirements to hold open unforeseen possibilities for future action, the groundwork is laid for a new “decision architecture” that improves policy-framing and decision-making. With a mission to compose a conceptual framework for “facing the future” in the United Kingdom, I make the case for refreshing democratic arrangements, including a proposed structural intervention to the policy-making system with a correlative cultural step-change in leadership. Laying out a novel framework, the analysis draws widely on strands of thinking in social theory and political philosophy, public administration and policy-making, systems thinking and design, planning and strategic management, anticipation and futures, economics, and sociology. Taking an “integral” methodological orientation, in three parts I: (1) diagnose the converging Predicament, (2) develop a conceptual Proposition, and 3) sketch-out an approach to leadership that facilitates operational adaption in Procedures for applied practice. Positing that we have to deal with systems-of-problems (“messes”) and system-of-systems (“systemic messes”) with an analytic primacy on expanding temporal considerations to factor in more anticipative insights, I take a Complex Adaptive Systems-informed stance. The need for a “Decisive Reset” to refresh democracy, featuring phased systemic reordering and tactical modularity to produce better public decision-making that is responsive and agile in the short-run, while actively gauging medium-term realities and future-proofing for long-run uncertainties, results in a new decision architecture and methodology

Understanding Barriers to Internal Startups in Large Organizations: Evidence from a Globally Distributed Company

Large global companies need to speed up their innovation activities to increase competitive advantage. However, such companies' organizational structures impede their ability to capture trends they are well aware of due to bureaucracy, slow decision-making, distributed departments, and distributed processes. One way to strengthen the innovation capability is through fostering internal startups. We report findings from an embedded multiple-case study of five internal startups in a globally distributed company to identify barriers for software product innovation: late involvement of software developers, executive sponsor is missing or not clarified, yearly budgeting and planning, unclear decision-making authority, lack of digital infrastructure for experimentation and access to data from external actors. Drawing on the framework of continuous software engineering proposed by Fitzgerald and Stol, we discuss the role of BizDev in software product innovation. We suggest that lack of continuity, rather than the lack of speed, is an ultimate challenge for internal startups in large global companies.acceptedVersio