MARKETING FLEXIBILITY ORIENTATION AND MARKETING PERFORMANCE: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY BUSINESSES IN THAILAND

Nowadays, several industries face extreme pressures related to globalization progress, fast changing technology, as well as the change in customer needs and behaviors. Marketing flexibility orientation is the key significant strategy for a firm used to response to these problems. This study aims to investigate the relationship between marketing flexibility orientation and marketing outcomes. The results were derived from a survey of 157 information technology and communication businesses in Thailand. The regression analyses shown that the dimensions of marketing flexibility orientation included marketing alliance enhancement, marketing knowledge integration, customer information exchange, and stakeholder learning competency have significant influence on enhancing marketing innovation, marketing excellence, marketing effectiveness, marketing satisfaction, and marketing performance

Resolving Wicked Problems Through Collaboration

Wicked problems yield to collaboration more than authoritarianism or competition. Significant new tools are available in the Internet to help. Included here with permission from IGI Global Publishers, from Handbook of Research on Socio-Technial Design and Social Networking SystemsWicked problems (messes) are tangled social situations that are too costly to stay in and too intransigent to get out of. Collaboration is essential to resolving them. This chapter examines five main ideas: (1) Messes and wicked problems are the most difficult in a hierarchy of difficult problems.(2) Why mess resolution usually involves disruptive innovation. (3) Why collaboration is essential and hard to achieve. (4) Collaboration is a practice generated in six kinds of conversations. (5) Someone who understands the practice of collaboration will find many information technology tools to help with the process: exchangers, coordinators, and games, and can design better tools

Education in the Age of Complexity: Building Systems Literacy

In the 21st century, transdisciplinary approaches to research and problem solving rooted in complexity theory and complex systems methodologies offer hope for understanding and solving previously intractable problems. However, in the face of daunting modern challenges like a broken health care system, growing social and economic inequity, and climate change, the knowledge and skills required to understand and ultimately solve problems across interdependent complex systems are distinctly lacking in our collective practice. The underlying premise of this study is that if modern society is to deal effectively with interconnected challenges across ecological, social, political, and economic systems, our education system must prepare students to grapple with complexity. This research expands upon previously identified core complex systems knowledge, skills, and dispositions to contribute rich description to a working definition of the term systems literacy, develop a theory of how one becomes systems literate, and offer access points for educators entering the world of complexity. The study employed complexity-informed grounded theory methods including data from semi-structured interviews with complex systems scholars and educators across a wide range of academic disciplines. Additional data was gleaned from texts and online resources produced by systems educators and complexity scholars. The three resulting journal articles were designed to consolidate much of what is known about complex systems into a package that is useful for educators, school leaders, and other stakeholders. Together, these articles contribute to an understanding of how curricula and instruction might better emphasize the dynamic nature of interdependent complex systems and the agency of individuals and collectives to innovate, engage in authentic problem solving, and participate in actively preserving and reshaping the world in which we live

Reconciling Discontinuities and Disruptions: The Construction of an Integrated Typology

Radical innovations are often characterized by a rapid shift from one dominant design to another. The theories of discontinuous and disruptive innovation present two important and independent explanations for why these shifts occur. This research tests the usefulness of combining these two theories into a single integrated typology. First, a typology is constructed that classifies shifts in dominant designs according to the theories of discontinuous and disruptive innovation. Next, the usefulness of this typology is tested with a taxonomy derived from 100 randomly selected shifts in dominant designs from across a broad range of industries. This research reconciles the theories of discontinuous and disruptive innovation and proposes an integrated typology to assist managers in determining the circumstances under which each theory is best applied. Additionally, the resulting taxonomy suggests anomalies—shifts in dominant design that are not well classified by either theory—that illuminate promising avenues for future research

A Framework for Supporting User-Centric Collaborative Information Seeking

Collaboration is often required or encouraged for activities that are too complex or difficult to deal with for an individual. Many situations involving information seeking also call for people working together. Despite its natural appeal and situational necessity, collaboration in information seeking is an understudied domain. The nature of the available information and its role in our lives have changed significantly, but the methods and tools that are used to access and share that information in collaboration have remained largely unaltered. This dissertation is an attempt to develop a new framework for collaborative information seeking (CIS) with a focus on user-centric system designs. To develop this framework, existing practices for doing collaboration, along with motivations and methods, are studied. This initial investigation and a review of literature are followed by a series of carefully created design studies, helping us develop a prototype CIS system, Coagmento. This system is then used for a large scale laboratory experiment with a focus on studying the role and the impact of awareness in CIS projects. Through this study, it is shown that appropriate support for group awareness can help collaborators be more productive, engaged, and aware in collaboration without burdening them with additional load. Using the lessons derived from the literature as well as the set of studies presented in this dissertation, a novel framework for CIS is proposed. Such a framework could help us develop, study, and evaluate CIS systems with a more comprehensive understanding of various CIS processes, and the users of these systems.Doctor of Philosoph

Securitisation and the Role of the State in Delivering UK Cyber Security in a New-Medieval Cyberspace

Both the 2010 and the 2015 UK National Security Strategies identified threats from cyberspace as being among the most significant ‘Tier One’ threats to UK national security. These threats have been constructed as a threat to the state, a threat to the country’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), a threat to future economic success and a threat to businesses and individual citizens. As a result, the response to this threat has historically been seen as being a shared responsibility with most potential victims of cyber-attack responsible for their own security and the UK state agencies operating as a source of advice and guidance to promote best practice in the private sector. A range of government departments, including the Cabinet Office, MI5 and GCHQ among others, have been responsible for the government’s own cyber security. However, despite a budget allocation of £860 million for the 2010 – 2015 period, progress on reducing the frequency and cost of cyber-attacks was limited and the 2010 strategy for dealing with cyber security was widely seen as having failed. This led to a new National Cyber Security Strategy (NCSS) in 2016 which indicated a significant change in approach, in particular with a more proactive role for the state through the formation of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and a £1.6 billion budget for cyber security between 2016 and 2021. However, cyber-attacks remain a significant issue for many organisations in both the public and private sector, and attacks such as the Wannacry ransomware/wiper attack, UK specific data breaches such as those witnessed in 2017 at Debenhams, Three, Wonga and ABTA, and breaches outside the UK that impacted UK citizens such as Equifax show that the frequency and impact of cyber security issues remain significant. The underlying cause of the insecurity of cyberspace is reflected in the metaphorical description of cyberspace as the wild-west or as an ungoverned space. This is a result of cyberspace features such as anonymity, problematic attribution and a transnational nature that can limit the effective reach of law enforcement agencies. When these features are combined with an increasing societal and economic dependence on information technology and mediated data, this increases the potential economic impact of disruption to these systems and enhances the value of the data for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. This thesis argues that cyberspace is not ungoverned, and that it is more accurate to consider cyberspace to be a New Medieval environment with multiple overlapping authorities. In fact, cyberspace has always been far from ungoverned, it is just differently governed from a realspace Westphalian nation state system. The thesis also argues that cyberspace is currently experiencing a ‘Westphalian transformation’ with the UK state (among many others) engaged in a process designed to assert its authority and impose state primacy in cyberspace. This assertion of state authority is being driven by an identifiable process of securitisation in response to the constructed existential threat posed by unchecked cyberattacks by nation states and criminal enterprises. The Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory has been used to inform an original analysis of key speech acts by state securitising actors that has highlighted the key elements of the securitisation processes at work. This has clearly shown the development of the securitisation discourse, and the importance of referent objects and audience in asserting the state’s authority through the securitisation process. Original qualitative data collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with elite members of the cyber security community has provided insights to the key issues in cyber security that support the view that cyberspace has New Medieval characteristics. The interview data has also allowed for the construction of a view of the complexities of the cyberspace environment, the overlapping authorities of state and private sector organisations and some of the key issues that arise. These issues are identified as being characteristic of a particularly complex form of policy problem referred to as a ‘wicked problem’. An understanding of cyber security as a wicked problem may aid in the identification of future possible policy approaches for cyber security policy in the UK

The Profession of IT Mastering the Mess

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1232743.1232763We frequently find ourselves immersed in intransigent situations whose resolution demands a disruptive innovation. There are useful strategies for these situations