Considerations for dealing with significant organizational change

Business enterprises are being challenged to confront change where there is impact on the enterprise due to some radical, financial, and/or organizational adjustment (significant change). By utilizing both a quantitative and qualitative research methodology and focusing on a single case study dealing with a Decision Support System (significant change), the critical success factors of previous research are confirmed, and two additional critical factors are revealed: (1) Flexible curriculum---the need for a comprehensive action plan, and (2) Perception of Personal Gain---the need to present a clear understanding addressing the aspirations of those involved and affected by the change initiative.;Learning to deal with change transformation can be enabled either by internal education and/or seeking external expertise. The focus of additional research is to explore the role of the external expert (consultant) and to affirm the benefits of using such expertise. Utilizing grounded theory research, five (5) stages of consultant/client interaction are identified to establish the prerequisite partnership. In addition to these stages, the optimization of the consultant/client relationship is reviewed through three (3) propositions: (1) an organization employing a consultant can expect to reduce the time going through the change transformation and regain productivity faster, (2) the consultant must become intimately involved with the organization to be effective, and (3) in order to be an effective consultant within the organization, experience is important, but not necessarily as a formal teacher/educator. The findings show that to optimize the client-consultant relationship and maximize the chances of success, there needs to be not only intimate interactions between the two parties, but experiences and the ability to teach. The need for the consultant to have formal credentials is found to be less important.;Regardless of the learning method and the actual change initiative, organizations that go through a significant change transformation need to look beyond the critical factors for success and implement a strategy to continue their quality efforts. It is recommended that an organization identify a methodology that develops a change management Philosophy; Towards this end, development of a framework based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Criteria for Performance Excellence is explored in-depth

Knowledge Management (km) is a KRY to Industrial Age to Imformation Age

Today, one of the most important ways to achieve competitive advantage is the implementation of knowledge management. Knowledge management (KM) is one of the most significant initiatives in dealing with global competition and new business challenges. To be successful in this process, we should know and manage factors and process of knowledge management like knowledge creation, acquisition, knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing. KM efforts typically to focus on organizational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, integration and continuous improvement of the organization. “Most managers now seem to understand that they will find competitive advantage by tapping employee†most essential humanity, their ability to create, judge, imagines and build relationship. As an essential component of knowledge management systems, visualizations assist in creating; transferring and sharing knowledge in a wide range of contexts where knowledge workers need to explore, manage and get insights from tremendous volumes of dada. This paper is based on various concepts of KM and how in each century every change their focus from to one point to another point to achieve the success and how KM becomes most important in today’s world

Unleashing the Effectiveness of Process-oriented Information Systems: Problem Analysis, Critical Success Factors, Implications

Process-oriented information systems (IS) aim at the computerized support of business processes. So far, contemporary IS have often fail to meet this goal. To better understand this drawback, to systematically identify its rationales, and to derive critical success factors for business process support, we conducted three empirical studies: an exploratory case study in the automotive domain, an online survey among 79 IT professionals, and another online survey among 70 business process management (BPM) experts. This paper summarizes the findings of these studies, puts them in relation with each other, and uses them to show that "process-orientation" is scarce and "process-awareness" is needed in IS engineering

A field study of team working in a new human supervisory control system

This paper presents a case study of an investigation into team behaviour in an energy distribution company. The main aim was to investigate the impact of major changes in the company on system performance, comprising human and technical elements. A socio-technical systems approach was adopted. There were main differences between the teams investigated in the study: the time of year each control room was studied (i.e. summer or winter),the stage of development each team was in (i.e. 10 months), and the team structure (i.e. hierarchical or heterarchical). In all other respects the control rooms were the same: employing the same technology and within the same organization. The main findings were: the teams studied in the winter months were engaged in more `planning’ and `awareness’ type of activities than those studies in the summer months. Newer teams seem to be engaged in more sharing of information than older teams, which maybe indicative of the development process. One of the hierarchical teams was engaged in more `system-driven’ activities than the heterarchical team studied at the same time of year. Finally, in general, the heterarchical team perceived a greater degree of team working culture than its hierarchical counterparts. This applied research project confirms findings from laboratory research and emphasizes the importance of involving ergonomics in the design of team working in human supervisory control

Incorporating service quality tools into Kansei Engineering in services: A case study of Indonesian tourists

Due to market dynamics and challenges, it is imperative for companies to put their concern on strategic marketing orientation. In facts, products and services of similar quality are ubiquitous in today’s global market. Basically, functionality and usability alone are no longer prominent success factors in product and service innovation because customers today concern themselves more on satisfying their emotions than merely their cognition. Kansei Engineering (KE) has shown its superiority in investigating and modelling customer emotion (“Kansei” in Japanese) for product development. In dealing with customer needs, service quality tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) and the Kano model, have been applied extensively. But none have been able to incorporate and model customer’s emotional needs. Some attention has been given to investigate this but, thus far, there is no formal methodology that can account for customer emotional needs in service design. To fill this niche, this study proposed an integrative framework of KE incorporating the Kano model and QFD applied to services. This study extended the work by Hartono and Tan (2011) and Hartono et al. (2012) and presented a survey on luxury hotel services involving more than a hundred Indonesian tourists as the subject of study. Luxury hotels are reported to have greater strength of emotion than any other hotel segment. This work confirmed that emotion is to be more important than cognition in impacting overall customer satisfaction. Practically, it gives insight on which service attributes deserve more attention with regard to their impact on customer emotion. Indonesian tourists shared a common response to the Kansei word “elegant” which correlates with their common cultural dimension of “power distance”. Performing a Kansei evaluation to understanding cultural backgrounds may yield valuable insights for international tourist marketing strategies and companies’ business sustainability

Looking for Reasons behind Success in Dealing with Requirements Change

During development, requirements of software systems are subject to change. Unfortunately, managing changing requirements can take a lot of time and effort. Yet some companies show a better management of changes in requirements than others. Why? What is it that makes some projects deal with changing requirements better than others? We pursue the long term goal of understanding the mechanisms used to successfully deal with change in requirements. In this paper we gather knowledge about the state-of-the-art and the state-of-practice. We studied eight software development projects in four different companies --large and small, inclined toward structured and toward agile principles of development--, interviewing their project managers and analyzing their answers. Our findings include a list of practical (rather than theoretical) factors affecting the ability to cope with small changes in requirements. Results suggest a central role of size as a factor determining the flexibility showed either by the organization or by the software development team. We report the research method used and validate our results via expert interviews, who could relate to our findings

A Survey on Evaluation Factors for Business Process Management Technology

Estimating the value of business process management (BPM) technology is a difficult task to accomplish. Computerized business processes have a strong impact on an organization, and BPM projects have a long-term cost amortization. To systematically analyze BPM technology from an economic-driven perspective, we are currently developing an evaluation framework in the EcoPOST project. In order to empirically validate the relevance of assumed evaluation factors (e.g., process knowledge, business process redesign, end user fears, and communication) we have conducted an online survey among 70 BPM experts from more than 50 industrial and academic organizations. This paper summarizes the results of this survey. Our results help both researchers and practitioners to better understand the evaluation factors that determine the value of BPM technology

Diversity management in Australian companies: complicance or conviction?

[Abstract]: The perceptions of managers regarding diversity management in a sample of Australian companies was measured by a Diversity Survey adapted from Gardenswartz & Rowe (1993). The survey measures 277 managers’ perceptions on symptoms of diversity related problems; openness to change of a company; the valuing and management of diversity in the companies; organisational barriers to diversity; individual attitudes towards diversity and organisational practices and policies. The majority of companies are primarily in the monocultural phase of evolution towards diversity sensitive workplace and need to be quicker to implement change initiatives such as diversity management. Companies in the multicultural phase and non-discriminatory stages of evolution are more open to change. Many individual managers indicate that they recognise and value diversity and are eager to redesign policies and practices to more effectively harness diversit