POSITIONING NIGERIAN SERVICE SECTOR TOWARDS VISION 2020: STYLIZED FACTS FROM BANKING SUB-SECTOR

The paper investigates the relationships between institutional enactments and the challenges of Nigerian commercial banks survival (1980-2006) towards policy option for realizing vision 2020. The divergence between government expectations and banks’ reality coupled with macroeconomics, and competitors’ activities could create failures in the sector. Using statistical data, the authors elucidate the impact of re-engineered interventions on banks’ survival over the period. The empirical results, among others, indicate that the high level unemployment rate in Nigeria poses a threat to banks’ survival. The statistical output also shows that government interventions could lead to a counterproductive effect on commercial banks’ strength, if not properly guided. Thus, for commercial banks to be well positioned as the nation approaches the year 2020, efforts to reduce the level of unemployment and ensure that government policies in the sub-sector are consistent and well articulated, would be rewarding

Managing Family Firm Survivability and Continuity Dynamics. A Comparison of UK-based Punjabi First- and Second-Generation Family Firms.

This study aimed at exploring the idiosyncratic elements of a family business (FB hereafter) and its impact on survivability and continuity dynamics in Punjabi-Indian family firms. In order to analyse these elements, family relationships were examined. Understanding the nature of family dynamics in ethnic minority-owned FBs based in the UK has rarely been subject to academic scrutiny. Using recent discussions surrounding behavioural theory literature unveiled family members, as key stakeholders of a family firm, play an important role in the success and survival of the FB. The stakeholder theory and mapping technique identified the extent of power, control and influence of family members according to the multiple roles they adopted in the FB. Key family stakeholders in the business, especially female founders and next generation children, controlled succession and other survivability decisions. The socioemotional wealth perspective (SEW) and sequentially the FIBER scale were also used to identify the importance of pursuing non-economic goals (e.g., generational succession) to meet the family’s affective needs and preserve its familiness resource. More explicitly the dark side of familiness was found in altruistic relationships that jeopardised family firm survival and continuity. Both recent behavioural theories provided significant insight into how Punjabi-Indian family firms managed survivability and continuity. A series of qualitative focus group interviews were undertaken with 10 Punjabi-Indian FBs. All FB cases included in this research were defined as being owned, managed and daily operated by family members. The study findings advances 3 main conclusions. First, three factors determined family firm survivability: business successoriented children, family members using the FB as a career safety net and perceiving the FB undesirable as a career choice. Second, the position of family members in ownership and management roles did not influence the extent of power, control and influence they had over the FB. Instead, family relationships and dynamics influenced FB survival and continuity. Lastly, women contributed to family firm survivability by being empowered from their previous business knowledge, experience, and Britishborn advantages. These attributes gave Punjabi-Indian women resource advantage which was essential in the establishment, success and survival of most of the FB enterprises. II Findings have shown, the lack of next generation involvement in Punjabi-Indian family firms represents problematic succession and continuity of the FB. This threatens the survivability and future existence of ethnic minority family businesses. As a result, this study contributes towards knowledge on survivability in ethnic minority family firms and advances SEW theory by proposing ‘relationships between family members’ as the sixth dimension of the FIBER scale. Currently the impact of family relationships is neglected in FB theory and literature thus, this new dimension acknowledges family relationships are a unique aspect of FBs which can either generate SEW or be destructive towards family firm survivability and continuity dynamics. Further practical contributions include recommending ethnic minority family business owners to offer tied transfer agreements to generate family stakeholder engagement towards generational succession, and the government to provide better financing opportunities to ethnic minority businesses, as well as implementing mentorship and/or business leadership programs to engage the next generation of FB successors. Overall, the aim of this research study was accomplished, and all research questions were answered

Model-Based Mitigation of Availability Risks

The assessment and mitigation of risks related to the availability of the IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations. Unfortunately, present standards for Risk Assessment and Mitigation show limitations when evaluating and mitigating availability risks. This is due to the fact that they do not fully consider the dependencies between the constituents of an IT infrastructure that are paramount in large enterprises. These dependencies make the technical problem of assessing availability issues very challenging. In this paper we define a method and a tool for carrying out a Risk Mitigation activity which allows to assess the global impact of a set of risks and to choose the best set of countermeasures to cope with them. To this end, the presence of a tool is necessary due to the high complexity of the assessment problem. Our approach can be integrated in present Risk Management methodologies (e.g. COBIT) to provide a more precise Risk Mitigation activity. We substantiate the viability of this approach by showing that most of the input required by the tool is available as part of a standard business continuity plan, and/or by performing a common tool-assisted Risk Management

Developing A Shared Vision: Strategic Planning As A Guide To Technology Funding

In December 2004 ACUTA and WTC sent a survey to 768 ACUTA primary members to determine what issues were important on campuses today and what issues respondents felt will be of importance in the next few years. Questions related to management, strategy, infrastructure, technology, organization, polity, and funding. One of the most interesting observations is that the current and five-year rankings are nearly identical- today\u27s concerns are also your concerns for the future. Here are the highlights of our findings: A cluster of five management issues were rated very close to the same importance. This cluster included developing a vision of the future; keeping up with current technology trends; keeping up with demand for services; creating new funding sources; and promoting the importance of the technology investment to senior officials. Four strategic issues also remained at the top of the list for the present and the future. These included: development of a strategic master plan; funding models; network survivability; and business continuity planning

Risk based resilient network design

This paper presents a risk-based approach to resilient network design. The basic design problem considered is that given a working network and a fixed budget, how best to allocate the budget for deploying a survivability technique in different parts of the network based on managing the risk. The term risk measures two related quantities: the likelihood of failure or attack, and the amount of damage caused by the failure or attack. Various designs with different risk-based design objectives are considered, for example, minimizing the expected damage, minimizing the maximum damage, and minimizing a measure of the variability of damage that could occur in the network. A design methodology for the proposed risk-based survivable network design approach is presented within an optimization model framework. Numerical results and analysis illustrating the different risk based designs and the tradeoffs among the schemes are presented. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Measuring Disparate Impacts and Extending Disparate Impact Doctrine to Organ Transplantation

This paper examines the economic and statistical foundations of proposed tests for discrimination. We focus on extension of disparate impact doctrine to new domains.

From Disaster Response Planning to e-Resilience: A Literature Review

Natural and man-made crises as well as IT-security issues foster the interest in robust and resilient business information systems. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are essential for successful e-business. If ICT technologies interrupt, the whole (e-) business continuity is threatened. ICT interruptions causing serious loss in organization’s reputation, trust and revenues. This circumstance should increase manager’s interest in the concepts of disaster recovery planning (DRP), business continuity management (BCM) and, the emerging imperative, resilience. This paper at hand presents the results of a database driven literature review on these concepts and its interrelation

Managerial decisions to recover from Covid-19 disruption: A multi-objective optimization approach applied to public transport operators

The resilience of transport systems, facing natural or man-made disruptions, has been widely discussed in literature in terms of recovery capabilities concerning infrastructures, suggesting solutions to provide users an acceptable level of service along the interrupted network. However, in the context of the Covid-19 outbreak, the disruption has stressed the resilience of transport systems not on the supply side but rather at organizational level for transport service providers. Indeed, the sudden and drastic decrease in users due to the restrictions imposed by governments to limit the pandemic spread has implicated severe economic consequences in the running of transport companies. In this paper, attention has been focused on the public transport sector to analyse the effects of different initiatives, which companies could undertake in response to the demand shock caused by the Covid-19 emergency. Notably, an optimization procedure has been developed with the aim of determining feasible Pareto-front solutions, which correspond to trade-off conditions for the concurrent maximization of the company profit and the minimization of outsourcing services. The time span necessary to implement the examined recovery measures has been considered together with the limitation to appropriate threshold values for the main cost and income items influencing the company operations management. The proposed approach has been applied to the case study of an Italian public transport company to appraise different post-Covid-19 resilience strategies