Digital Leadership

Customers are demanding services using evolving technologies, and firms need agility in the way systems are designed and delivered to quickly meet customer expectations. Such agility is in fact an organizational capability where a combination of internal and supplier/partner resources allow firms to quickly create customer value propositions and deliver value through digital services, that is, services using advanced digitization. Leadership that enables such a customer-centric and service-driven culture using technology is referred to as digital leadership. This chapter develops a 10-step methodology not only to show how an innovative value proposition moves from conception to implementation using an agile system and business architecture, but also to lead to the next set of innovations for review. This methodology, developed over four years iteratively using over 100 graduate student projects, is briefly illustrated through two case examples

A Different Model at a Differtent Time for a Different Client Privatization of Education Through Engagement and Partnership

The changing technological and business climate is making both industry and academic look for alternative ways to train business students in the information technology. Given the expense and inefficiencies involved in supporting separate training at various facilities that are often disconnected in purpose, the Applied Technology in Business (ATiB) Program with the School of Business at Oakland University makes both the corporate sponsors and the university share this “training burden” while students are still in school. This paper briefly talks about the program, its success thus far and the educational model it attempts to incorporate within the program

Organizational Receptivity to Change and Success in Process Reengineering

Although business process reengineering is a major corporate initiative today, the success rate of reengineering projects has been less than ideal. In an attempt to better understand the dynamics underlying this phenomenon, process reengineering is viewed as an organizational innovation. Based upon existing taxonomiesofinnovations,itischaracterizedasaradical,administrative,processinnovation. Drawingupon prior research in the management of such innovations, we postulate that a lack of success in process reengineering may be attributed to inadequate attention being paid to the environment into which it is introduced; we hypothesize that it is necessary to manipulate organizational receptivity to change prior to initiating process reengineering. A model that conceptualizes the determinants of such organizational receptivity to change is constructed. Using a case-study approach, the model is utilized to explain the apparent lack of success of a major business process reengineering effort. The model can potentially serve two purposes: as an a priori conceptualization of the types of organizational climates where process reengineering is likely to be successful, and as a guide to management action — to diagnose what the obstacles to process reengineering are and what changes in the organization might be appropriate

TECHNOLOGICAL SUPPORT FOR DECISION MAKING IN THE PRESENCE OF UNCERTAINTY AND EQUIVOCALITY

The informational and support requirements of ill-structured decision making activity are contingent upon the factors that have caused this lack of structure. This paper attempts to operationalize the notion of semi-structure by an examination of the effect of uncertainty and equivocality on the decision making process and suggests that the presence of the these dimensions creates different support requirements for the decision maker. These requirements are subsequently mapped onto the features of alternative types of technological support, with the intent of determining the efficacy of a particular technology for a particular type of decision making task. It is argued that a single technology may prove ineffective in supporting semi-structured decision making, and a rationale for technology integration is developed

Managing Projects in a Software Acquisition Environment - Issues and Challenges

There is evidence that organizations are increasingly acquiring software packages rather than developing them in-house to meet their information systems needs. However, there is no systematic approach to managing projects under this scenario. In this study, we examine project management under acquisition scenario

Engagement Leading to Empowerment-Digital Innovation Strategies for Patient Care Continuity

Digital innovations have started to extend value chain into the customer decision making process, enabling them to support two major types of customer services: empowerment prior to customer purchase, and engagement during and post-purchase. Service organisations such as health care firms, by virtue of their intense engagement with patients during in-patient care have a unique opportunity to empower patient’s health care choices once they become outpatients. The understanding patient ecosystems and social support networks during this engagement has important implications for the digital transformation of care related support to reduce health care costs and also empower patients to self-manage their health. The research uses a framework to develop alternative care support environments and, using four case studies, develop a research agenda for digital transformation to support the empowering of health care consumers by engaging them effectively inside the hospital

Designing Support for Customers on the Web - A Methodology and A Case Study

Firms have to use the Web to support a customer’s decision-making process, if they are to leverage this reach for competitive advantage. This paper attempts to look at how many well established DSS methodology issues can be applied, with modification, to firms building Webbased DSS, and illustrates some of the practical limitations and challenges by using a case study (i.e. developing a DSS for a “consulting” organization)

Bridging the Gap between Flexibility and Rigidity: Unifying Relationships with a Hybrid Link Architecture

Current knowledge systems lack an effective architecture to bridge the well-acknowledged gap between flexibility and rigidity - users’ preference of flexible expression and machine’s need for rigorous representation. This paper focuses on finding an adequate set of relationship types (or link types) and map flexible expressions from users to link types in propositional knowledge systems, in which knowledge elements are stored as “concept-relationship-concept” triplets. We call our approach “hybrid link architecture”. This architecture has two levels of presentations, an open link name layer and a closed link type layer. Between these two layers is a matching mechanism based on a psycholinguistic thesaurus to map names to types. The link types are derived by synthesizing literature of knowledge organization, semantic network, and educational taxonomies. A two-stage evaluation is conducted based on 39,706 triplets. The evaluation shows that the matching mechanism is accurate and the proposed link types are mutually exclusive and cover most link names in our dataset

Activity Based Justification for IT Investments

The activity based cost (ABC) approach has been used to relate costs and benefits to various cost pools that drive product profitability within an organization, so that relationships can be established between investments and product profitability. In this paper, using a particular case, we demonstrate the value of the ABC approach for IT investment justification under certain conditions, and discuss its implications

A Data Base for Operations Research Models

This paper develops the design of a data base system to support operations research models in the context of an integrated planning system involving a number of different users and computer programs. The requirements for such a system are described, a âÂÂnetworkâ data base schema is developed and the schema and command language are illustrated through a specific example.Information Systems Working Papers Serie