Executing Management Control through Decision Technology

When competition is tough and resources are scarce, management may seek ways to systematise their decision-making process so as to control their operations and resource allocations. Yet little is known about how decision technology is used as a means to administer managerial control. This research investigates how an organisation used decision technology to execute management control to manage the work activities of their employees in a group decision-making setting. It assesses the impact decision technology has had at the firm level focusing on the transformation of the formalised decision process and the individuals involved. The research is carried out using case study, where the data is collected from multiple sources including passive observations in board meetings and functional team meetings, and interviews with decision makers of different hierarchal levels. We found that the decision technology not only enabled management to execute management control vertically across different hierarchal levels but also horizontally over their fellow peers. We also learned that product development decisions that were previously avoided (due to fear of project failure) are now made. This is noted from the increased number of radical (for the firm) new products commercially launched

Executing management control through decision technology

When competition is tough and resources are scarce, management may seek ways to systematise their decision-making process so as to control their operations and resource allocations. Yet little is known about how decision technology is used as a means to administer managerial control. This research investigates how an organisation used decision technology to execute management control to manage the work activities of their employees in a group decision-making setting. It assesses the impact decision technology has had at the firm level focusing on the transformation of the formalised decision process and the individuals involved. The research is carried out using case study, where the data is collected from multiple sources including passive observations in board meetings and functional team meetings, and interviews with decision makers of different hierarchal levels. We found that the decision technology not only enabled management to execute management control vertically across different hierarchal levels but also horizontally over their fellow peers. We also learned that product development decisions that were previously avoided (due to fear of project failure) are now made. This is noted from the increased number of radical (for the firm) new products commercially launched

Leveraging simulation practice in industry through use of desktop grid middleware

This chapter focuses on the collaborative use of computing resources to support decision making in industry. Through the use of middleware for desktop grid computing, the idle CPU cycles available on existing computing resources can be harvested and used for speeding-up the execution of applications that have “non-trivial” processing requirements. This chapter focuses on the desktop grid middleware BOINC and Condor, and discusses the integration of commercial simulation software together with free-to-download grid middleware so as to offer competitive advantage to organizations that opt for this technology. It is expected that the low-intervention integration approach presented in this chapter (meaning no changes to source code required) will appeal to both simulation practitioners (as simulations can be executed faster, which in turn would mean that more replications and optimization is possible in the same amount of time) and the management (as it can potentially increase the return on investment on existing resources)

Mapping domain characteristics influencing Analytics initiatives: The example of Supply Chain Analytics

Purpose: Analytics research is increasingly divided by the domains Analytics is applied to. Literature offers little understanding whether aspects such as success factors, barriers and management of Analytics must be investigated domain-specific, while the execution of Analytics initiatives is similar across domains and similar issues occur. This article investigates characteristics of the execution of Analytics initiatives that are distinct in domains and can guide future research collaboration and focus. The research was conducted on the example of Logistics and Supply Chain Management and the respective domain-specific Analytics subfield of Supply Chain Analytics. The field of Logistics and Supply Chain Management has been recognized as early adopter of Analytics but has retracted to a midfield position comparing different domains. Design/methodology/approach: This research uses Grounded Theory based on 12 semi-structured Interviews creating a map of domain characteristics based of the paradigm scheme of Strauss and Corbin. Findings: A total of 34 characteristics of Analytics initiatives that distinguish domains in the execution of initiatives were identified, which are mapped and explained. As a blueprint for further research, the domain-specifics of Logistics and Supply Chain Management are presented and discussed. Originality/value: The results of this research stimulates cross domain research on Analytics issues and prompt research on the identified characteristics with broader understanding of the impact on Analytics initiatives. The also describe the status-quo of Analytics. Further, results help managers control the environment of initiatives and design more successful initiatives.DFG, 414044773, Open Access Publizieren 2019 - 2020 / Technische Universität Berli

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Grid-enabled Workflows for Industrial Product Design

This paper presents a generic approach for developing and using Grid-based workflow technology for enabling cross-organizational engineering applications. Using industrial product design examples from the automotive and aerospace industries we highlight the main requirements and challenges addressed by our approach and describe how it can be used for enabling interoperability between heterogeneous workflow engines

Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process

Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes

This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realised and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT business process of providing a customer quote for network services