Last Wills

This short story collection, LAST WILLS, portrays four individuals' transitions into late adulthood. "Dan's Man Otto": an aging, socially estranged man attempts to cope with later-life struggles due to another man's fatal decision. "Yardsticks": a solitary woman confronts aging, for whom late adulthood becomes a sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility for parole. "Balance Notification Nine": a career man encounters young buck against old stag workplace competition. "Deathbed Testament": an aging daughter's struggle to develop, at last, a way to cope with a lifelong identity crisis.  M.A

Exploring the rise of blockchain technology: Towards distributed collaborative organizations

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are playing an increasingly important role for organizations that seek to build social and solidarity-based finance. Blockchain technology has emerged as a potential disruptor for the financial industry. However, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology may help develop organizations that seek to build social and solidarity-based finance

Top managers & information systems: ‘Crossing the Rubicon’!

In reviewing the influence of information systems on today’s organisations, it becomes evident that top managers play a critical role in their inevitable success or failure. Yet, despite these systems strategic relevance many studies reveal a dichotomous relationship between ‘management’ and ‘information systems’, a relationship kept polarised by organisational myths resulting in the emergence of differing community perspectives. Such division is borne out in the increasingly high rates of information systems failure within practice. As strategic stewards of the organisation, top managers are noted to play a vital role in supporting information systems. Support is said to be a multifaceted concept requiring both thought and action. This paper in reviewing the information systems management literature attempts to unravel the mystery that has shrouded this topic over the past five decades. The journey seeks to provide top managers with a roadmap before Crossing the Rubicon to support the introduction of information systems

Exploring enterprise social systems & organisational change: Implementation in a digital age

Information systems (IS), since their introduction into organisations over five decades ago, have promised to streamline business processes, integrate disparate systems, increase innovation, and offer greater competitive advantage. Over the past decades, the evolution of Information Systems have mirrored many of the challenges experienced by our work organisations. For example, throughout the 1980s a primary concern for many organisations was the attainment of competitive advantage within their respective industries (Porter, 1980). The IS field responded by developing systems that sought to provide management with timely information to assist in making better strategic decisions, e.g. executive support and decision support systems. In the 1990s, organisations began to look inwards searching for key strategic resources that would yield unique core competencies (Barney, 1991). Similarly, the IS field responded by building highly integrative enterprise-wide systems (Davenport, 1998), which would unite every pillar of the organisation with a single transparent view of firm competencies and business processes, viz Enterprise Systems. The first decade of the 21st century continued in this vein, with organisations extending their global reach through new and innovative business models (Johnson et al, 2008). Similarly, IS have responded with the emergence of digital technologies and their continued growth as transformative organisational systems enabling boundary-less corporate structures, 24/7 real-time customer-centric communication, collaborative supply chain environments, and virtual IS infrastructures delivered via cloud computing

Cyber resiliency for digital enterprises: A strategic leadership perspective

As organizations increasingly view information as one of their most valuable assets, which supports the creation and distribution of their products and services, information security will be an integral part of the design and operation of organizational business processes. Yet, risks associated with cyber attacks are on the rise. Organizations that are subjected to attacks can suffer significant reputational damage as well as loss of information and knowledge. As a consequence, effective leadership is cited as a critical factor for ensuring corporate level attention for information security. However, there is a lack of empirical understanding as to the roles strategic leaders play in shaping and supporting the cyber security strategy. This study seeks to address this gap in the literature by focusing on how senior leaders support the cyber security strategy. The authors conducted a series of exploratory interviews with leaders in the positions of Chief Information Officer, Chief Security Information Officer, and Chief Technology Officer. The findings revealed that leaders are engaged in both transitional, where the focus is on improving governance and integration, and transformational support, which involves fostering a new cultural mindset for cyber resiliency and the development of an ecosystem approach to security thinking. Managerial relevance statement Our findings provide interesting insights for managers particularly those in the role of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Security Information Officers (CSIOs), and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs). We propose a Cyber Security Strategy Framework (CSSF) which can be used by these information/technology managers to design an effective organizational strategy to develop cyber resilience in their organization. Our framework suggests that managers should focus on transitional and transformational support. The transitional support focuses on improving governance and integration whereas transformational support focuses on the emphasis of fostering a new cultural mindset for cyber resiliency and the development of an ecosystem approach to security thinking. Our findings provide good evidence showing how leaders can support more effective cyber security initiatives

Investigating the benefits and challenges of Total Quality Management implementation in the pharmaceutical companies

Pharmaceutical companies in Eastern European region are facing urgent quality tools implementation due to fierce global competition. The aim of this research is to provide current understanding of TQM in this region and provide further guidance on how to improve quality standards and techniques. The study follows a qualitative method and data was collected through 5 semi-structured interviews. The study highlights that TQM in pharmaceutical industry in this region is not well developed. The findings shows that there is lack of senior management commitment to TQM principles explanation and emphasises on its importance. Additionally, lack of governmental influence on quality standards and budgeting problems also affects TQM development. Moreover, there is a believe that TQM will not influence the overall performance of the company in the positive manner, since the development of such quality improvement method has to be efficiently budgeted and under current economic and political circumstances it is not possible.N/

4chan and Internet Folk Art

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

The nature of top management support : a grounded theory exploration of enterprise system implementation in the Irish Health Service

THESIS 8568The promise of a fully integrated enterprise has been an organisational dream for many decades. Such a dream would unite individual departments and functional areas into a single system. As a result management would have a single view of the organisation. Enterprise systems (ES) aim to make this dream a reality, with the promise of \u27seamless integration\u27 of the entire organisation. Such systems work from a central database, uniting back-office and front-office departments. Consequently, the demand for these systems has been significant over the past decade, with vendors now moving onto the small to medium sized enterprises due to market saturation amongst larger organisations. However, the pinch o f reality often shadows the m ost utopian of dreams. Despite promises of seamless integration, ES implementations have not been the most successful. Many organisations spend millions of euro over years committing to such initiatives; with return on investment either minimal or, all too often, none at all. In fact, some studies cite up to 90% failure rates with the implementation of these systems

Last Wills

This short story collection LAST WILLS portrays four individuals' transitions into late adulthood. "Dan's Man Otto": an aging socially estranged man attempts to cope with later-life struggles due to another man's fatal decision. "Yardsticks": a solitary woman confronts aging for whom late adulthood becomes a sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility for parole. "Balance Notification Nine": a career man encounters young buck against old stag workplace competition. "Deathbed Testament": an aging daughter's struggle to develop at last a way to cope with a lifelong identity crisis.