BACKGROUND Hospitals and regional health authorities must set priorities in the face of resource constraints. Decision-makers seek practical ways to set priorities fairly in strategic planning, but find limited guidance from the literature. Very little has been reported from the perspective of Board members and senior managers about what criteria, processes and parameters of success they would ...

Business intelligence (BI) is currently the top technology priority of chief information officers (CIOs) and is a major growth area of business IT. BI systems are the IT-based systems that have the greatest impact on organizational strategy. Unfortunately, BI projects are subject to high failure rates and those that are implemented suffer from a utilization problem where only 10 to 20% of inten...

Humans both operators and managers contribute significantly to functional risk. Thus, even when risk analyses that omit human factors are good predictors of equipment failure, they are likely to be poor predictors of accidents. Engineering risk analysts could benefit from learning about and applying human reliability assessment methods, and risk analyses could benefit from addressing the risks ...

Substantial progress has been made to strengthen health information systems, with most efforts focusing on digitization, improving data quality and analysis, and identifying problems. But the ultimate goal is using information to solve problems, which requires building an information use culture over time. How? Humancentered design, role modeling by senior managers in use of data, and incentive...

South African managers in public service consistently face challenges related to managing a well-adjusted and productive diverse workforce. Following the notion that leadership authenticity fosters positive psychological employee capacity, the aim of this study was to explore the meaning essence of authenticity as lived in the work-life experiences of senior managers in public service. Five sen...

This paper identifies and examines strategic opportunities and challenges that a newly emerging technology presents to managers. With the recent advent of very powerful tools for implementing business-oriented expert systems, practical managerial applications of automated reasoning techniques are beginning to appear. Senior management should be aware of the strategic implications of this techno...

Based on 57 interviews with senior IT project managers in the UK Canada, USA and New Zealand, this article presents innovative practices they have developed during difficult projects. In our respondents’ view, traditional project management methods and techniques are only a starting point. Through their quotes, they show how one has to be creative and entrepreneurial to lead projects successfully.

It has become more and more important and difficult to minimize makespan in the global competitive markets. The purpose of this paper is to develop a decision support system to assist managers in making decisions for minimal makespan. There are too many and complex factors for senior managers to make suitable decisions. By traditional methods to allocate orders for minimum makespan, it often ma...

The management competency of leadership was measured on 34 middle and senior health managers from the Murray Health Service, using Situational Leadership Questionnaires. Using self-analysis, the managers found their leadership behaviours to be entrenched, inflexible and less effective than they might otherwise be. This conclusion was supported by results of the questionnaires completed on each ...

OBJECTIVE To explore the use of external approaches to quality improvement in health care organizations, through a descriptive evaluation of the process and impact of external reviews of clinical governance arrangements at health care provider organizations in the National Health Service (NHS) in England. DESIGN A qualitative study, involving the use of face-to-face and telephone interviews w...