Balancing Acts: Culture as Commodity Among Business Consultants

Niagara: Scalable Load Balancing on Commodity Switches

Internet service providers rely on load balancers to distribute client requests for many web services over backend servers. Dedicated load-balancer appliances are expensive and do not scale easily with traffic demand. Instead, future load balancers should be built from smaller commodity components. Rather than rely exclusively on specialpurpose load-balancing software, we argue that data center...

Coordination among ERP consultants: controlling mechanisms

Consultants are deemed critical to the success of an ERP implementation because of the breadth and complexity of the system, the management of multiple modules, and the one-time nature of the project that limits desire to increase investment in a permanent workforce. However, consultants often fail to effectively coordinate their activities, making integration of the ERP problematic. Coordinati...

Trust as a Commodity

Trust is central to all transactions and yet economists rarely discuss the notion. It is treated rather as background environment, present whenever called upon, a sort of ever-ready lubricant that permits voluntary participation in production and exchange. In the standard model of a market economy it is taken for granted that consumers meet their budget constraints: they are not allowed to spen...

Internal Consultants as Agents of Change

Participatory Budgeting in Germany: Citizens as Consultants

This chapter examines the current landscape of participatory budgets in Germany, which currently includes just under 100 local authorities that are actively involved in participatory budgeting (PB). Based on the history of PB in Germany, it shows how German participatory budgets typically pursue the objective of making local government more responsive, which is the reason why most participatory...