Towards designing a sustainable is-enabled service delivery system

This paper aims to bring into focus the concept of service sustainability. The normative literature advocates that services by companies, government institutions and service delivery are still posing great challenges to many organizations in this digital age. In highlighting the distinctive feature of service innovation, businesses will be able to maintain competitive advantage. In examining the literature on the service concept, successful companies have the customer at the forefront of their business strategy. As a result, the authors formulate suggestions on the most effective way an organization and the people concerned, can recast strategic thinking. to anticipate and adapt to ever increasing changing service environment. The contribution of the study is an IS-enabled Service Delivery Model (SDM) that places customer and staff as an integral part of the service delivery system with managed interactions and continuous quality control. This intends to support practitioners and researchers which could provide the former useful means of conceptualizing service, and raises an important issue to the latter in revisiting service quality research

Software-export strategies for developing countries: A Caribbean perspective

The globalization of the software industry is seen to be driven in part by skill shortages in industrialised economies, the movement of software development practices away from centralised to more distributed modes and the spread of information and communication technologies to less developed economies, where skilled labour is available at lower costs. As such, a software export industry is sometimes seen as a means by which some non-industrialised countries can create competitive advantage. While many studies have explored the software-exporting strategies used by the more successful of these countries, little research has been done in other locations that lack some of the basic resources deemed necessary for success in this area. This paper describes two Caribbean software-outsourcing ventures in order to explore possible software-export strategies available within such atypical contexts. The role of government and degree of integration of the software outsourcer into the local context are found to feature significantly

Competitive Positioning in International Logistics: Identifying a System of Attributes Through Neural Networks and Decision Trees

Firms involved in international logistics must develop a system of service attributes that give them a way to be profitable and to satisfy customers’ needs at the same time. How customers trade-off these various attributes in forming satisfaction with competing international logistics providers has not been explored well in the literature. This study explores the ocean freight shipping sector to identify the system of attributes that maximizes customers’ satisfaction. Data were collected from shipping managers in Singapore using personal interviews to identify the chief concerns in choosing and evaluating ocean freight services. The data were then examined using neural networks and decision trees, among other approaches to identify the system of attributes that is connected with customer satisfaction. The results illustrate the power of these methods in understanding how industrial customers with global operations process attributes to derive satisfaction. Implications are discussed

Critical review of strategic planning research in hospitality and tourism

Strategic planning remains one of the most popular management tools, but theoretical and empirical developments in the academic literature have been a slow burn. This paper addresses this gap and provides an up-to-date review of hospitality and tourism strategic planning research. We review strategic planning research from 1995 to 2013 in seven leading tourism academic journals, and adopt a modern and broad conceptualization of strategic planning. While there is some awareness of effective tourism strategic planning processes, academic research has not kept pace with practice. To stimulate a resurgence of research interest, we provide future research directions. We observe a methodological introspection and present some new research methodologies, which are critically important in researching the turbulent, chaotic and nonlinear tourism environment

Capabilities for growth

This study explores firm growth and its relation with firm-specific capabilities. Organisations can benefit from growth in many ways, including greater efficiencies through economies of scale, increased power, the ability to withstand environmental change, increased profits and increased prestige for organizational members. The second element of research in this study, firm-specific capabilities, refers to the ability to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments. The fields of growth and capabilities seem to be complementary. However, the exact relationship currently seems to be underdeveloped. In this study, an attempt is made to incorporate the development of capabilities in the process of organisational growth. The following issues are addressed: The way organisations strive to grow, the manner in which firm-specific capabilities are incorporated and translated into the corporate strategy and whether these companies have succeeded.

Value Capture from Organizational Advantages and Sustainable Value Creation

The impact of firm value capture strategies on the sustainability of the value creation process as a whole has been little discussed in the literature. Despite contributions by leading scholars on issues pertaining to value capture and value creation, moreover, we still lack a systematic framework of their determinants. Our purpose in this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for value creation and value capture, explore their relationship, and discuss pre-requisites for sustainable system-wide value creation. We then derive propositions and explore implications of our analysis on business strategy and public policy.Advantages, Value Creation, Value Capture, Sustainability, Policy

The Determinants of Value Creation at the Firm, Industry and National Levels: A Framework and Evidence

We aim to bridge three (plus one) levels of (strategic) management theory of value capture and sustainable value creation; micro (firm), meso (industry, region), macro (national) (and also global). We propose a framework for value creation by firms and explore firm strategies for value capture and their relationship to value creation. We construct requisite variables and test our framework for 17 OECD countries using panel data. We find support for our integrative framework. We also explore the issue of sustainability and its implications for managerial practises, corporate governance, public policy and global governance that promote sustainable global value creation.Global value creation and capture, sustainability, governance

Why IT Matters: An Empirical Study of E-Business Usage, Innovation, and Firm Performance

The article argues that IT continues to have strategic relevance for companies because it en-ables innovation. A conceptual link between the adoption of IT and innovation is established. This conceptual link allows a market-based, economic explanation for variations in IT payoffs among firms: The successful adoption of new IT leads to innovation. Depending on the be-havior of customers and competitors, a successful innovation can enable companies to gain competitive advantages. The economic theory of innovation suggests conditions that are nec-essary for firms to benefit from innovative activities. The relevance of IT as an important enabler of innovation is demonstrated using a very large sample of enterprises from different industries and countries in the European Union surveyed in late 2003. It is shown that a substantial share of firms use IT to introduce new processes into their business, or to offer new products or services to their customers. To study the rela-tionship between firm performance and innovation, I estimate an error component model that controls for unobserved market-specific effects and various firm-specific characteristics. The regression results indicate that innovative firms are generally more likely to exhibit increasing turnover and employment. In addition, firms that conduct product or service innovations are also more likely to be profitable. Furthermore, enterprises using IT to innovate perform at least as well as those innovating without IT. Yet, no significant relationship between process innovation and profitability is found, suggesting that firms might have problems to appropri-ate excess profits from process innovations, independent from whether they are enabled by IT or not. Possible reasons for this include time-lags between process innovations and profit gains, problems to effectively protect process innovations from imitation by competitors, or a lack of complementary resources. The results suggest that the returns to IT critically depend on whether and how IT investments are transferred into innovative activities. In addition, they suggest that IT will maintain its strategic importance as long as the IT industry remains inno-vative in developing new IT hardware and useful new business applications for it.Firm performance; Innovation; Information technology; Fixed effects logit

Orchestration of the Marketing Strategy under Competitive Dynamics

Constructing suitable marketing strategy and implementing it effectively is an art and science both like orchestration of a symphony. The discussion in this paper blends this analogy with the science of marketing demonstrating the levels of strategy development in a competitive marketplace. The paper presents the marketing-mix in contemporary context and argues that performance of a marketing firm can be maximized, when a firm develops a creative marketing strategy and achieves marketing strategy implementation effectiveness. The discussion in the paper reveals that marketing managers of different levels simultaneously operate within the firm and perceive the need for strategy development with varied preferences. A consequence of this is development of robust strategies and their effective implementation which, in turn, leads to increased market performance. Thus, it is important for researchers to investigate various strategy integration perspectives and this paper provides guidance by reviewing the existing literature.Marketing strategy, strategy integration, marketing-mix, customer value,strategy implementation, market competition, risk factors, brand building, customer centric strategy, routes to market