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

IS/IT in developing and emerging economies

Copyright @ AMCIS 2007In spite of the rapid growth many developing and emerging economies are experiencing, with much of this growth supported by information technology (IT), published research dealing with IT in developing economies is still very limited. The objective of this paper is to direct attention to this apparent gap and provide an overview of the issues related to information systems (IS) and IT specifically in developing and emerging economies. Business and social conditions specific to developing and emerging economies and their potential effects on IS/IT implementations are discussed. After a brief review of papers presented at previous AMCIS conferences, some research areas that seem particularly in need of more attention are identified

The decision exploration lab:supporting the business analyst in understanding automated decisions

A Decision Management System (DMS) provides means to model and automate enterprise decisions and they are applied in a wide range of industries, among which health care, commerce, insurance, finance and transportation. These systems make millions of decisions each day without direct human supervision, impacting the life of millions of people and impacting economies at a large scale. The multiplicative effect of decision automation provides the opportunity tofine-tune the decision system. By analyzing its global and emerging properties rather than focusing on the details of each decision, the system as a whole can be better adapted to the reality it models.Like expert systems, DMSs provide a clear separation of decision logic, information related to individual decisions and decision execution. These data spaces contain a wealth of information related to the structure and functioning of a DMS. In this thesis various ways are explored to visualize and analyze this data in order to help a business user to gain a deeper understanding of automated decisions.To address the problem of understanding the global and emerging properties of automated decision making systems, we combine interactive analysis of the decision data with analysis of the decision logic. We present a visual analytics system, the Decision Exploration Lab (DEL), which provides a verbal analysis mode and a visual decision exploration mode. In verbal mode the user can make selections on past decisions using controlled natural language. In visual de-cision exploration mode, the decision data is analyzed using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The analysis results are visualized using interactive techniques to show the important structure of the decision data to the user. Correlated concepts can be clustered at a level of granularity that suits the needs of the business analyst. Clustered concepts can next be linked to therules of the decision logic that are relevant for the subset of decisions which match these concepts. We evaluated our approach with two use case scenarios from the car insurance industry. Apart from the above, we propose a number of technical contributions, enhancements and extensions to information visualization methods, for multivariate categorical data. Firstly, wepresent a generic algorithm to generate all well-known treemap layouts as well as other rectangular space-filling layouts. Secondly, we present explanatory and interactive visualization techniques to support interpretation and usage of MCA. Thirdly, we present labeling and scale adjustment techniques in order to improve the usability of 2D-plots

Managerial satisfaction with subsidiary performance; the influence of the parent MNE's capabilities and the subsidiary's environment

Multinational enterprise performance is one of the most researched topics in the strategic management literature over the last thirty years. Despite the proliferation of studies, the dispute over the relation between firms’ international investment activities and corporate performance has not yet reached a consensus. This paper’s contribution is threefold. First, we focus on entry by West European multinational enterprises into Central and East European countries. Second, we develop a multi-theory argument, combining insights from transaction cost, new institutional, behavioral, resource-based and international strategy theories. Third, we estimate the determinants of managerial satisfaction with subsidiary performance with questionnaire data for a sample of 198 subsidiaries.

Trust, Organizational Controls, Knowledge Acquisition from the Foreign Parents, and Performance in Vietnamese International Joint Ventures

Successful adaptation in strategic alliances "calls for a delicate balance between the twin virtues of reliability and flexibility" [Parkhe 1998]. On one hand, the joint venture must be flexible enough to respond to the uncertainties of competitive business environments because it is not feasible to plan for every possible contingency. Yet, on the other hand, unfettered flexibility invites dysfunctional behavior, such as opportunism and complacency. This delicate balance accompanies a parallel balance between trust and control of the joint venture. The primary goal of this study is to empirically examine this relationship in the context of Vietnamese international joint ventures (IJVs) by building on the model of knowledge acquisition and performance in IJVs established by Lyles and Salk [1996]. This study makes three major contributions to the literature. First it confirms several findings of the original Lyles and Salk study [1996]. Second, we strengthen Lyles and Salk's original model by incorporating multiple measures of both interorganizational trust and control as independent variables. Finally, this study represents one of the first in-depth examinations of business in the emerging Vietnamese economy.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39713/3/wp329.pd

Public Finance and Low Equilibria in Transition Economies; The Role of Institutions

This paper develops two stylised models of the transitional economy that challenge to some extent, the conventional approach to policy-reforms. In the first model, the absence of market-oriented institutions is responsible for the occurrence of a non-cooperative equilibrium, where the amount of public services provided by the state is too low, which, in turn, adversely affects the global performance of the productive sector. In the second model, the government, which aims to maximise tax receipts, will choose a taxation level that pushes too many firms out of the market; hence the global supply falls below its optimal level. In both models, strain and disruptions specific to transitional systems lead to abnormal responses of the real sector to standard policy measures. Efficient economic policies should explicitly take into account the institutional deficit.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39703/3/wp319.pd

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

Trade now looms larger than nuclear stockpiles

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292774722_Trade_Now_Looms_Larger_Than_Nuclear_StockpilesPublished versio

Chinese Enterprise Reform as a Market Process

The reform of China's enterprise system increasingly reflects the outcome of China's emerging property rights market. We distinguish between a centrally-directed reform strategy, with characteristics similar to those of a Pigouvian tax, and a market-driven reform process, which captures the essential features of a Coasian approach to social cost. The Coase Theorem postulates that eliminating transaction costs and attaching well specified property rights to public goods that generate externalities will allow uncoordinated economic agents to negotiate institutional arrangements that produce socially efficient allocation of resources. Extending Coase's reasoning to the case of socialist transition ' we argue that reforms that expand competition, move toward well-specified assignment of ownership rights to public enterprises, and reduce transaction costs will motivate the "ultimate" owners, including officials of national and sub-national government agencies, to reconfigure their assets or to combine their assets with those of other jurisdictions and/or private investors to create more efficient ownership arrangements. We review the extent to which China's reforms have established the conditions for an effective market in ownership rights to industrial property. We tabulate progress from 1 980 to present along the three major analytic dimensions inherent in Coase's analysis: competition, property rights, and transaction costs. We conclude that the sheer size and diversity of China's industrial economy will motivate a continuation of decentralized reform initiatives. To support this Coasian reform process, central and provincial governments need to expand initiatives to clarify property rights, particularly the right of alienation, reduce impediments to competition, and facilitate the reduction of transaction costs.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39466/3/wp76.pd

The Global Spread of Stock Exchange, 1980-1998

Nations opened local stock exchanges at a rapid pace during the late 1980s and 1990s, creating a channel for investment capital from wealthy industrial nations to "emerging markets" as well as a mechanism for institutional change in local economies. This study examines the local and global processes by which exchanges spread, examining all nations "at risk" during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that local factors influencing the creation of stock exchanges included the size of the economy (overall and relative to population size); the legacy of colonialism; and a recent transition to multi-party democracy. Global factors associated with creating exchanges included levels of prior investment by multinationals; IMF "structural adjustment" aid; centrality in trade flows; and regional "contagion." In contrast to prior work in financial economics, we find no evidence for the influence of legal tradition, and contrary to the implications of dependency theory, we find no sign that foreign capital penetration affects the creation of exchanges. We also find no consistent evidence for the influence of stock exchanges on inequality or human development at the national level, above and beyond their effect on economic and population growth. The results indicate that globalization is usefully construed as a process analogous to institutional diffusion at the organization level.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39725/3/wp341.pd