How Firms Learn From the Uses of Different Types of Management Control Systems

Many users of management control systems claim that a system’s effectiveness in creating business performance resides in its ability to facilitate learning and decision making. Yet this does not explain why users of management control systems have varying levels of success in terms of business performance with these tools. Our IMA-sponsored research project1 examines the following questions that relate management control system use, learning, and performance: • How are management control systems used? • How do organizations learn from management control systems? • What uses of management control systems and styles of learning characterize high performing firms? To answer these questions, we examine a set of management control systems that are in existence today: business intelligence systems. Business intelligence systems are computerized systems that identify, extract, and analyze business data (e.g., sales revenue by product and/or department and/or location). They facilitate learning and support decision making through the provision of various types of information. We examine three popular types of business intelligence systems and how they are used to facilitate learning in firms. The three types are: (1) dashboards and visualization, (2) query, analysis, and reporting, and (3) data management and data quality. We developed a survey to collect data that would help answer our questions

How Many Vendors Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb? Mitigating the Risks of Resource Dependence in Information Technology Outsourcing

As the scope and complexity of information technology outsourcing expand, the importance of the number of vendors adopted by a client is rising. What are the reasons why some companies contract with a single vendor while others contract with several? While there has been considerable research on this issue, we still lack a systematic understanding of why firms utilize different numbers of vendors. With the premise that clients’ contracts with their dominant outsourcing vendor create varying levels of resource dependence and therefore client risk, this study seeks to answer the following questions: First, to what extent do contractual conditions prompt clients to seek risk mitigation via an increased number of outsourcing vendors? Second, how do the respective resource levels of the client and vendor impinge on this relationship? From a resource-dependency perspective, we hypothesize a relationship between contract conditions (i.e., contract duration and type) and the number of vendors used by a client. We then explore client resource and resource-access conditions (i.e., MIS budget and vendor performance) that moderate this relationship between contract conditions and the number of vendors engaged by a client. The proposed model and hypotheses are tested using a sample of 311 organizations in Korea that had outsourced their IT functions to external service vendors. The empirical evidence sheds light on the role of resource conditions in the relationship between contract conditions and the number of vendors. The findings have significant implications for further research and practice

First come, first served: an analysis of pioneer and follower firms' market and nonmarket actions in the European mobile telephone industry

This study examines the relationship between erosion of the first-mover's market share and the differences in competitive behaviour of pioneer firms and followers. Particularly, we pay particular attention to market actions related to innovation, pricing and promotion, and to non-market actions related to judicial issues. The empirical study has been carried out with companies that are present in a dynamic context, such as the European mobile telephone industry. Our results show that when followers take more non-market actions than pioneers the negative effect on the firstentrant's advantage is more significant. On the contrary, we have not found a significant impact of innovating and pricing actions

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

Online Store Locator: An Essential Resource for Retailers in the 21st Century

Most retailers use their websites and social media to increase their visibility, while potential customers get information about these retailers using the Internet on electronic devices. Many papers have previously studied online marketing strategies used by retailers, but little attention has been paid to determine how these companies provide information through the Internet about the location and characteristics of their stores. This paper aims to obtain evidence about the inclusion of interactive web maps on retailers’ websites to provide information about the location of their stores. With this purpose, the store locator interactive tools of specialty retailers’ websites included in the report “Global Powers of Retailing 2015” are studied in detail using different procedures, such as frequency analysis and word clouds. From the results obtained, it was concluded that most of these firms use interactive maps to provide information about their offline stores, but today some of them still use non-interactive (static) maps or text format to present this information. Moreover, some differences were observed among the search filters used in the store locator services, according to the retailer’s specialty. These results provided insight into the important role of online store locator tools on retailers’ websites

The economics of apprenticeship training: Seven lessons learned from cost-benefit surveys and simulations

This text summarises the seven most important findings that have been gleaned using detailed cost-benefit surveys of apprenticeship training programmes in various countries and subsequent cost-benefit simulations for other countries over the last 20 years. The costs incurred by the firms providing training were measured, as were the benefits they can generate in the short term through the apprentices’ work in the company and the medium- term benefits obtained because apprenticeship programs help companies avoid costly recruitment from the labour market. These surveys and simulations mainly concern European countries. However, they have also been applied to non-European countries.1 Specifically, the following statements refer to cost-benefit surveys from Switzerland, Germany and Austria and cost-benefit simulations run for England, Italy and Spain. The cost-benefit measurements in the three German- speaking countries were also used for comparative studies, i.e. studies that investigated the causes and effects of the differences in the costs and benefits of apprenticeship training in the three countries (see point 2). The findings we draw from the cost-benefit measurements and the corresponding simulations are summarized in seven lesson

Dialectic tensions in the financial markets: a longitudinal study of pre- and post-crisis regulatory technology

This article presents the findings from a longitudinal research study on regulatory technology in the UK financial services industry. The financial crisis with serious corporate and mutual fund scandals raised the profile of compliance as governmental bodies, institutional and private investors introduced a ‘tsunami’ of financial regulations. Adopting a multi-level analysis, this study examines how regulatory technology was used by financial firms to meet their compliance obligations, pre- and post-crisis. Empirical data collected over 12 years examine the deployment of an investment management system in eight financial firms. Interviews with public regulatory bodies, financial institutions and technology providers reveal a culture of compliance with increased transparency, surveillance and accountability. Findings show that dialectic tensions arise as the pursuit of transparency, surveillance and accountability in compliance mandates is simultaneously rationalized, facilitated and obscured by regulatory technology. Responding to these challenges, regulatory bodies continue to impose revised compliance mandates on financial firms to force them to adapt their financial technologies in an ever-changing multi-jurisdictional regulatory landscape

Corporate Social Responsibilities, an Overview of Principles and Practices

[Excerpt] In this paper Dr. Murray, of the University of Melbourne, argues that the public discourse on Corporate Social Responsibility has evolved into a quite stylized debate which tends to focus on one particular facet of multinational economic behaviour. Namely the treatment of workers in manufacturing factories in the developing world producing goods for multinational enterprises with particular attention the manufacture of textiles, clothing and footwear. This has also brought with it renewed interest in the idea of the “sweatshop”, the concept of extreme exploitation of vulnerable workers in terms of living wages and dangerous working conditions. As a consequence more is known about this sector than just about any other, and theoretical work tends to deal with the subject of corporate selfregulation through the lens of the production and consumption of these arguably idiosyncratic goods. She argues that it is important to identify the potential distorting power of this emerging discourse and to broaden the attention to labour markets conditions in general

Why Social Enterprises Are Asking to Be Multi-stakeholder and Deliberative: An Explanation around the Costs of Exclusion.

The study of multi-stakeholdership (and multi-stakeholder social enterprises in particular) is only at the start. Entrepreneurial choices which have emerged spontaneously, as well as the first legal frameworks approved in this direction, lack an adequate theoretical support. The debate itself is underdeveloped, as the existing understanding of organisations and their aims resist an inclusive, public interest view of enterprise. Our contribution aims at enriching the thin theoretical reflections on multi-stakeholdership, in a context where they are already established, i.e. that of social and personal services. The aim is to provide an economic justification on why the governance structure and decision-making praxis of the firm needs to account for multiple stakeholders. In particular with our analysis we want: a) to consider production and the role of firms in the context of the “public interest” which may or may not coincide with the non-profit objective; b) to ground the explanation of firm governance and processes upon the nature of production and the interconnections between demand and supply side; c) to explain that the costs associated with multi-stakeholder governance and deliberation in decision-making can increase internal efficiency and be “productive” since they lower internal costs and utilise resources that otherwise would go astray. The key insight of this work is that, differently from major interpretations, property costs should be compared with a more comprehensive range of costs, such as the social costs that emerge when the supply of social and personal services is insufficient or when the identification of aims and means is not shared amongst stakeholders. Our model highlights that when social costs derived from exclusion are high, even an enterprise with costly decisional processes, such as the multistakeholder, can be the most efficient solution amongst other possible alternatives

Disclosure measurement in the empirical accounting literature: A review article

This is the first study to provide an extensive and critical review of different techniques used in the empirical accounting literature to measure disclosure. The purpose is to help future researchers to identify exemplars and to select suitable techniques or to develop their own techniques. It also provides in depth discussion of current measurement issues related to disclosure and identifies gaps in the current literature which future research may aim to cover