Business strategies can be clustered in three different and mutually exclusive categories: customer intimacy, operational excellence, and product leadership and innovation. This paper links these strategies to three key forces in the “IT driver model”: availability, total cost of ownership, and adaptability. Application of the model reveals four areas in need of management attention: (1) incomp...

Recent global economic meltdown has opened many avenues of discussion and leaving various questions with its affects. One of them is fate of quality management and its necessity during and after the economic recession. It is established fact that management commitment is one of the most critical success factors to achieve best possible results of quality management implementation. So quality of...

In their struggle for operational excellence, global companies face challenges in finding a common denominator to streamline and align operations across the divisions and supply chains. They face a dilemma of allowing local flexibility to adjust to the varying market requirements versus central coordination needed to achieve business synergies. We approach this problem by suggesting a design fr...

Today’s market environment requires companies to adapt to new business models and to improve their operational excellence in terms of process efficiency and organisational effectiveness. Agility and flexibility build on high-quality corporate data and powerful corporate data management. This paper proposes a framework for corporate data quality management. The structure of the framework consist...

Organizational change is a fact of life. It is inevitable. And it is also difficult and stressful. In fact, many psychologists define stress as adaptation to change. Without change, however, there can be no improvement. In the business world, change places an essential role in the development of an organization. Indeed, change is prerequisite to excellence and no organization can maintain it wi...

External assessment is increasingly used worldwide to regulate, improve and market health care providers, especially hospitals. The commonest models are peer review, accreditation, statutory inspection, ISO certification and evaluation (usually internal) against the 'business excellence' framework. Each of these is progressively adapting to meet the changing demands of public accountability, cl...

Business process improvement (BPI) will be a high priority topic for CEOs in the near future. Currently available BPI approaches, however, lack means for adequately codifying, documenting and processing knowledge created in a BPI project. Therefore we developed RUPERT (Regensburg University Process Excellence and Reengineering Toolkit), which is a tool for managing knowledge in a BPI project, c...

While the field of electronic commerce has often focused on the rise and fall of “dot coms,” a major transformation is under way in many traditional organizations that are investing heavily in Internet technologies in order to improve financial performance. While anecdotes in the business press suggest that some firms have achieved unprecedented benefits by leveraging the Internet, there is no ...

AbstrAct This chapter explains knowledge management's (KM) role for competitive advantage as a means of new business requirement in the knowledge-based society. It argues that KM, combined with new information technologies, determines new approaches of business strategy, knowledge leadership, culture, management content, organizational structure, technology and innovation, which are key enabler...

nyu.edu), and Tülin Erdem is Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Marketing (e-mail: [email protected]. edu), Stern School of Business, NewYork University. Yi Zhao is Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Brand & Customer Management, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University (e-mail: [email protected]). Ying Zhao is Associate Profe...