Introduction to Trust, Identity, and Trusted Systems in Digital Environments Minitrack

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Beyond enterprise resource planning projects: innovative strategies for competitive advantage

ABSTRACT A rapidly changing business environment and legacy IT problems has resulted in many organisations implementing standard package solutions. This 'common systems' approach establishes a common IT and business process infrastructure within organisations and its increasing dominance raises several important strategic issues. These are to what extent do common systems impose common business processes and management systems on competing firms, and what is the source of competitive advantage if the majority of firms employ almost identical information systems and business processes? A theoretical framework based on research into legacy systems and earlier IT strategy literature is used to analyse three case studies in the manufacturing, chemical and IT industries. It is shown that the organisations are treating common systems as the core of their organisations' abilities to manage business transactions. To achieve competitive advantage they are clothing these common systems with information systems designed to capture information about competitors, customers and suppliers, and to provide a basis for sharing knowledge within the organisation and ultimately with economic partners. The importance of these approaches to other organisations and industries is analysed and an attempt is made at outlining the strategic options open to firms beyond the implementation of common business systems

Managing the Dynamics of Platforms and Ecosystems : An Introduction for HICSS-56

publishedVersionNon peer reviewe

Colonising the Field ) Who,s Playing with Web-based Information Systems Development?

domain of systems and software development, in both practice and research. Surprisingly, while there would appear to be many common activities, the academic fields have traditionally had limited overlap or shared experience. The information systems school has largely focused on in-house systems, concentrating on the socio-technical approach toward systems development while software engineering attempts to apply engineering principles and formal methods to the production of software systems. However the fields collide where new, Web-based systems share both in-house usage and external commercial software characteristics. While it might be expected that practitioners would be informed by innovative development methods, research indicates that practitioners are not making use of new multimedia and web development method and techniques. The crossover between the fields of IS and SE resurrects up some old problems and new questions. This paper traces the roots of IS and SE; briefly contrasts education and research of each; and examines the differences and common areas of the fields. From a study of how each field is characterised an IS body of knowledge (ISBOK) is identified. How Web-based Information Systems relate to each field is discussed and from the analysis a simple classification framework is constructed, weighing a systems life cycle against quality. The paper concludes with a call for greater cross-fertilization between the fields. Finally the authors suggest important subjects that IS researchers should be studying and others that should be of interest to both SE and IS researchers

THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP ON ACHIEVING HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN THE EGYPTIAN CHEMICAL COMPANIES

Purpose: The main objective of the research is achieving human development in Egyptian chemical companies, increasing the rate of productivity and technological development through the strategic impact of technological entrepreneurship and building authority in the business world at local, regional and global level. Practical implications: The state seeks to adopt the technological entrepreneurship of Egyptian chemical companies in order to achieve human development in the light of the Strategy of Sustainable Development. Originality/value: The approach of technological entrepreneurship should be adopted in companies with the aim of developing sustainable human resources. The research paper covers the human development framework of chemical companies. Findings: The dimensions of technological entrepreneurship have a strategic role in building technological production plans and programmes for the chemical companies that achieve the highest performance rate of human developmen

Mastering Business Intelligence Complexity - A Service-Based Approach as a Prerequisite for BI Governance

Integrated approaches to management support – Business Intelligence (BI) – have become widespread. The respective solutions have evolved to highly integrated, complex solutions that cannot be treated as sequences of isolated projects anymore and require central coordination and regulation. As a consequence, companies have begun to implement BI governance structures. However, these initiatives face the challenge that there is still a lack of insight into how to capture and track the underlying service landscape. Based on a framework for service delineation, two case studies are analyzed and discussed. As a result, a service oriented concept for supporting BI governance is derived. It complements the framework with aspects of solution composition and decomposition as well as for lifecycle management and thereby enables a holistic perspective in BI governance approaches

Explaining Software as a Service Outsourcing: Economic and Social Considerations

Software as a service (SaaS) offers an innovative way to deliver software over the Internet to distributed organizations. While more and more SaaS providers are joining the market and competition among providers becomes more intense, we need to understand the considerations of potential clients. Built on transaction cost theory and social exchange theory, this study empirically investigates, with a national survey of IT/IS executives, the role of economic factors and the impact of social relationships on the economic factors in firms’ deciding to adopt SaaS. We found that cost savings are a critical consideration in SaaS and that social relationships exert a strong, positive direct impact on cost savings and positively moderate the impact of cost savings on SaaS. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the SaaS phenomenon and provides some managerial insights

Boosting Innovation for the Development of Smart-Service Factories of the Future: The Cases of the Federal State of Vorarlberg and its Neighbouring Regions

Factory of the Future is an initiative of the European Commission. It is highly narrative and describes the transformation of “ordinary” manufacturing operations and structures to fully-integrated cyber-physical manufacturing systems. Basing on case study research performed in the greater area of Vorarlberg, this article aims to explore how Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the field of manufacturing can evolve to smart-service Factories of the Future. It takes a mixed-methods approach with quantitative research (questionnaire) and qualitative case study interviews and provides findings about three main topics in service system engineering: “transformation of an operational need into a description of system performance parameters”, “integration of related technical parameters and assurance of compatibility of all physical, functional and program interfaces” and “integration of reliability, maintainability, safety, survivability, human and other such factors”. As it turns out, increased servitization measures, service management, service performance and service quality by development of service-oriented architectures (SOA) are key to evolve to a smart-service Factory of the Future

Three IT-Business Alignment Profiles: Technical Resource, Business Enabler, and Strategic Weapon

There is a growing recognition among alignment researchers and IT professionals that one size does not fit all. In this article, we provide an important extension of alignment research that shows three profiles linking IT to different business objectives. We address the need to identify the appropriate types of IT alignment by using a multi-method study including interviews and cases. Two dimensions define the three alignment profiles: internal IT-business integration and external market engagement. The technical resource profile calls for low levels of IT-business integration and IT-market engagement. The business enabler profile deploys IT in some business processes and begins engaging IT with customers and suppliers. The strategic weapon profile uses IT to mobilize and extend the enterprise, which requires extensive IT deployment, both internally and externally. Each profile differs in strategies, criteria, capabilities, and mental models. Importantly, IT decision-makers should not adopt stage-model thinking which assumes that technical resource profiles naturally progress up the chain. Rather, successful use of IT requires specifying the requisite alignment profile as an initial design decision so that appropriate levels of resource allocation and management involvement occur

Rebuilding Evolution: A Service Science Perspective

This paper explores a simple idea and asks a simple question: What determines the speed limit of evolutionary processes, and might there be ways to speed up those processes for certain types of systems under certain conditions? Or even more simply, how rapidly can complex systems be rebuilt? To begin with, the universe can be viewed as an evolving ecology of entities. Entities correspond to types of systems - from atoms in stars to organisms on Earth to ideas in the heads of people. Service science is the study of the evolving ecology of service system entities, complex socio-technical systems with rights and responsibilities – such as people, businesses, and nations. We can only scratch the surface in this paper, but our explorations suggest this is an important research question and direction, especially as we enter the cognitive era of smart and wise service systems. For example, it takes a child multiple years of experience to learn language and basic social interactions skills, but could machine learning algorithms with the proper data sets learn those capabilities in a fraction of the time