An institutional theory perspective on e-HRM’s strategic potential in MNC subsidiaries

This paper extends the application of institutional theory to electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and strategic information systems (IS) more generally, in a multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiary setting. By adopting Scott’s (2001) institutional theory perspective, this paper explores the effects of host-country institutional factors on strategic e-HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries. More specifically, the aims of this paper were, first, to shed light on how regulative, cognitive and normative institutional dimensions affect Western-based e-HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries in China, and second, to examine how these institutional factors influence the strategic potential of e-HRM in this setting. Based on interview data collected from key informants in 10 MNC subsidiaries from Beijing and Shanghai, the findings illustrate how institutional pressures create both positive transformational and negative dysfunctional consequences for subsidiaries, and that subsidiary responses to these pressures can substantially affect the ability of IS to achieve its strategic potential. Although observed local adaptations were seen to restrict the strategic potential of IS, in some cases responses seem to have enabled the transposition of a new set of strategic IS practices to this non-Western setting.     

Designing a hybrid system dynamic model for analyzing the impact of strategic alignment on project portfolio selection

One of the key challenges in project organizations is the alignment of portfolio management with major corporate strategies. Usually, project-based organizations use shared resources to control and plan the project portfolio. Therefore, the exploitation of shared resources and project planning decisions made in this regard can change the progress of projects and affect the success rate of the projects. In this article, the integration of system dynamics with multi-objective decision making is applied to address project portfolio selection. The project portfolio has been modeled using four basic dimensions including technology, complexity, innovation and time sensitivity. The aim is to plan and control the progress of project portfolio while maximizing the strategic adaptation subject to the changes of the human resources. For this purpose, a two-stage MO-PSO with TOPSIS is proposed for portfolio selection problem that can solve real-world instances of the problem in a reasonable time. The result of the sensitivity analysis indicated that the proposed decision support system (DSS) provides insights into the impact of strategic alignment on project portfolio selection. According to the simulation results, the integrated methodology of this research can assist in choosing the suitable projects to achieve a project's strategic goals following the organization strategy.     

Understanding software project risk: a cluster analysis

Understanding software project risk can help in reducing the incidence of failure. Building on prior work, software project risk was conceptualized along six dimensions. A questionnaire was built and 507 software project managers were surveyed. A cluster analysis was then performed to identify aspects of low, medium, and high risk projects. An examination of risk dimensions across the levels revealed that even low risk projects have a high level of complexity risk. For high risk projects, the risks associated with requirements, planning and control, and the organization become more obvious. The influence of project scope, sourcing practices, and strategic orientation on project risk dimensions was also examined. Results suggested that project scope affects all dimensions of risk, whereas sourcing practices and strategic orientation had a more limited impact. A conceptual model of project risk and performance was presented.     

No time to waste: the role of timing and complementarity of alignment practices in creating business value in IT projects

Despite significant research progress, alignment-related issues are among the top concerns of executives. Previous studies mostly focus on a company-wide strategic level of alignment; while this ‘top-down’ view has benefits, it largely ignores the operational practices that help achieve alignment in IT projects as well as the impact that timing and complementarity of practices have on achieving alignment. In our research we apply four alignment practices – communication, shared understanding, management commitment and IT investment evaluation – to individual IT projects rather than at a company level; specifically, we look at the role of timing and complementarity for these alignment practices throughout different project phases. A detailed analysis of six IT projects carried out at three companies in the telecommunications industry reveals that IT projects creating higher business value employ all four alignment practices immediately from the start. No project was able to recover from failing to establish these four alignment practices in the first phase. While supporting the importance of complementarity of alignment practices, our findings also add the importance of the earliness of this complementarity.     

Does risk matter? Disengagement from risk management practices in information systems projects

Risk management and ‘routine-based reliability’ is considered fundamental to project performance. Existing theories of project risk management do not fully explain why project managers stop practicing risk management information systems (IS); however, constructs drawn from organisation theory offer insights into how and why such disengagement occurs. The study examines risk management practices in 21 IS projects within 10 organisations. By focusing on risks that resulted in significant events and mapping backwards over time the practices associated with those risks, we identify that in all but five projects the manager had disengaged from prescribed risk management before executing risk responses. In most projects, the majority of formally identified and assessed risks remained unallocated and untreated. A laddering technique was used to help explain why this transpired. We found five key underlying beliefs that governed project managers’ risk management attitudes and actions.     

Modelling IT projects success with Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

IT projects have certain features that make them different from other engineering projects. These include increased complexity and higher chances of project failure.To increase the chances of an IT project to be perceived as successful by all the parties involved in the project from its conception, development and implementation, it is necessary to identify at the outset of the project what the important factors influencing that success are.Current methodologies and tools used for identifying, classifying and evaluating the indicators of success in IT projects have several limitations that can be overcome by employing the new methodology presented in this paper. This methodology is based on using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) for mapping success, modelling Critical Success Factors (CSFs) perceptions and the relations between them. This is an area where FCM has never been applied before. The applicability of the FCM methodology is demonstrated through a case study based on a new project idea, the Mobile Payment System (MPS) project, related to the fast evolving world of mobile telecommunications.     

Synthesizing Agile and Knowledge Discovery: Case Study Results

This research adopts a framework that synthesizes Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD), Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM), and agile practices. The application of this framework is demonstrated through an institutional case study of three knowledge discovery projects: Persistence, Retention, and Donor projects. Results from the case study suggest that (a) interaction and iteration are foundations for the success of a knowledge discovery project, especially one with a strong business focus; (b) agile practices facilitate the interaction and iteration nature of a knowledge discovery project; (c) adding business understanding and deployment steps from CRISP-DM to KDD explicitly helps data miners stay focused on the ultimate goals of the project—the needs of the business and the users.     

The New Product Development Improvement Motives and Practices of Miles and Snow's Prospectors,Analysers and Defenders

Marketing, strategic management and contingency theory suggest that different strategies require different practices. The new product development (NPD) literature, however, hardly addresses the product development practices needed to support different strategies. An analysis of eight prospectors, twenty‐seven analysers and seven defenders ( Miles and Snow, 1978 ) suggests that the NPD improvement motives and practices of these three types of strategies are less different than we expected. Our explanation for this finding is that the three strategic types are growing towards each other, forced by changes in competition and enabled by new technologies and management concepts.     

Marketing Activities to Support ‘Moderately Novel’ Product Innovation: Insights from the Chemical Industry

Scholars often follow a contingency approach to study which marketing activities are suitable for a particular type of product innovation project, thereby making a distinction between incremental and radical innovation only. ‘Moderately novel’ projects, which have intermediate levels of newness, have therefore not been given due attention. This paper focuses on market intelligence generation and the creation of cross‐functional linkages as marketing activities that are important in the context of moderately novel product innovation. In addition, the organizational position of the marketers involved in these activities is dealt with. Based on the analysis of four successful projects in the chemical industry, we argue, firstly, that moderately novel innovation projects have their own particular sets of marketing practices and, secondly, that differences exist between projects aiming at a new market segment and projects in which novelty is not related to market segment but to other market dimensions. These differences are especially salient in early project phases. These findings are pertinent to research on the role of marketers in product innovation, and to the study of organizational ambidexterity.     

A model of information systems development project performance

abstract. Performance in information systems development (ISD) projects can be critical to business success. But, while project performance has been the subject of much debate, there has been little empirical research into its determinants. A survey of IS projects in the UK and New Zealand is analysed to test hypotheses concerning performance in terms of both project completion and budget (time-cost) variances. Subsequently, a secondary analysis of the findings is used to build a more complete empirical model of project performance. The paper helps to develop the theory of IS development project performance and also has significant implications for practice. Discussion of the findings highlights the importance of project team dynamics, risk management, senior management support for strategic projects and user participation in ensuring successful IS project performance.     

A theory of distances in software engineering

ContextCoordinating a software project across distances is challenging. Even without geographical and time zone distances, other distances within a project can cause communication gaps. For example, organisational and cognitive distances between product owners and development-near roles such as developers and testers can lead to differences in understanding and interpretation of the business requirements. Applying good software development practices, known to enhance alignment and coordination within development projects, can alleviate these challenges.ObjectiveThe aim of our research is to identify and describe underlying factors which can explain why certain practices support aligning and coordinating software development projects.MethodWe have inductively generated a theory analysing empirical data consisting of 15 interviews from 5 different companies. The systematic and iterative analysis was based on an initial hypothesis that distances affect development, and on results from previous research.ResultsWe present a theory of distances that explains how practices improve the communication within a project by impacting distances between people, activities and artefacts. We also present a theoretical model of how specific alignment practices affect different types of distances.ConclusionsThe results provide a basis for further research and can be used by software organisations to improve on software practice.     

Incorporating Events into Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Because Web-scale processes are inherently cross-organizational, they require the robust enactment of interactions among autonomous parties. However, specifying the processes involved is difficult. To overcome this obstacle, the authors use a business protocol that lets the applicable events and responses vary based on where the process is deployed and the infrastructure and IT applications installed therein. Treating events and business logic as separate concerns also yields clearer models and improves reusability. The authors describe the architecture and tools and outline a methodology by which each participant in a process can define, detect, and respond to events.     

Solving a comprehensive model for multiobjective project portfolio selection

Any organization is routinely faced with the need to make decisions regarding the selection and scheduling of project portfolios from a set of candidate projects. We propose a multiobjective binary programming model that facilitates both obtaining efficient portfolios in line with the set of objectives pursued by the organization, as well as their scheduling regarding the optimum time to launch each project within the portfolio without the need for a priori information on the decision-maker's preferences. Resource constraints, the possibility of transferring resources not consumed in a given a period to the following one, and project interdependence have also been taken into account. Given that the complexity of this problem increases as the number of projects and the number of objectives increase, we solve it using a metaheuristic procedure based on Scatter Search that we call SS-PPS (Scatter Search for Project Portfolio Selection). The characteristics and effectiveness of this method are compared with other heuristic approaches (SPEA and a fully random procedure) using computational experiments on randomly generated instances.

Statement of scope and purpose

This paper describes a model to aid in the selection and scheduling of project portfolios within an organization. The model was designed assuming strong interdependence between projects, which therefore have to be assessed in groups, while allowing individual projects to start at different times depending on resource availability or any other strategic or political requirements, which involves timing issues. The simultaneous combination of project portfolio selection and scheduling under general conditions involves known drawbacks that we attempt to remedy. Finally, the model takes into account multiple objectives without requiring a priori specifications regarding the decision-maker's preferences.The resolution of the problem was approached using a metaheuristic procedure, which showed by computational experiments good performance compared with other heuristics.     

A decentralized architecture for software process modeling andenactment

Many development teams, especially distributed teams, require process support to adequately coordinate their complex, distributed work practices. Process modeling and enactment tools have been developed to meet this requirement. The authors discuss the Serendipity-II process management environment which supports distributed process modeling and enactment for distributed software development projects. Serendipity-II is based on a decentralized architecture and uses Internet communication facilities     

A multi-agent system for the decentralized resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem

A restart evolution strategy (RES) for the resource‐constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), as well as its integration in a multi‐agent system (MAS) for solving the decentralized resource‐constrained multi‐project scheduling problem (DRCMPSP) will be presented. To evaluate the developed approach, problem instances of the RCPSP taken from the literature with up to 300 activities are used, as well as 80 generated instances of the DRCMPSP, with up to 20 projects and with up to 120 activities each. For 73 instances of the RCPSP, the RES found better solutions than the best ones found so far. In addition, the MAS is suitable for solving large multi‐project instances decentrally. The results for the DRCMPSP instances show that the presented decentralized MAS is competitive with a central solution approach.     

Moving closer to the fabric of organizing visions: The case of a trade show

This paper examines the fabric of authorized discourses about Information Technology (IT), i.e. of “organizing visions” (OVs), through the investigation of the discourses, practices, and sociomaterial contexts that make up their micro-social underpinnings. The case of a trade show allows us to explore the production of everyday discourses and practices about IT by gathering many of the parties involved in the fabric of organizing visions. Through a combination of direct observations, interviews, pictures, documents and a survey, we identify and analyze a number of micro-social practices related to the fabric of IT discourses. The trade show we studied was not a context in which new IT buzzwords and concepts emerged, but, rather, it was a setting where existing discourses about IT were repeated, refreshed, and materialized. Our three main findings reveal intriguing relationships between practices, discourses, and sociomaterial contexts: (1) practices and artifacts contribute to enclose the production of discourses; (2) practices and discourses aim at refining and updating an existing discourse about IT; and (3) many actors in the trade shows engage in discourses and practices that materialize the IT artifact. This research adds to the conceptualization of the dynamics of OVs through a better understanding of how they are affected by the relationships between the discourses and practices of multiple actors and by the sociomaterial context in which they take place. It draws several strategic implications concerning the dynamics of OVs at the industry level, how actors influence the fabric of OVs, as well as the roles and combination of artifacts, discourses and practices to build OVs.     

Strategic alternatives in telecare design: Developing a value-configuration-based alignment framework

In telecare adoption, the lack of a strategic vision and of consistency in design choices have been identified as critical problems. Existing IS alignment literature only offers limited answers to these problems and does not acknowledge the different value configurations that telecare technology can enable. This paper, therefore, integrates work on strategic value configurations with the strategic IS alignment model in order to widen the latter’s applicability. Based on the value configurations and related service management literature, a framework involving three distinct alignment configurations is developed for telecare. An analysis of two Dutch telecare projects shows how the proposed alignment profiles can explain the contrasting project outcomes more effectively than the traditional strategic alignment model would have done. The discussion reflects on the generalizability and contribution of an extended strategic alignment model.     

A differential game of joint implementation of environmental projects

This paper proposes a two-player, finite-horizon differential game model to analyze joint implementation in environmental projects, one of the flexible mechanisms considered in the Kyoto Protocol. Our results show that allowing for foreign investments could in some cases increase the welfares of both parties involved in the project. Further, imposing an environmental target constraint does not necessarily deteriorate the payoffs of both players.     

Undersizing software systems: third versus fourth generation software development

A critical component of information systems (IS) project management is completing projects on time; however, most software development efforts have completion time overruns. This study examines the prior research in IS project management for assessing the completion time for new software development projects and discusses a project management phenomenon where the expected time for project completion is undersized. At one firm two groups of software development projects are examined: (1) Cobol projects (third generation) and (2) Natural (fourth generation). It was found that both the Cobol and Natural projects experienced similar overruns. Undersizing is posited as the explanation.     

A multi-agent system for distributed multi-project scheduling: An auction-based negotiation approach

Simultaneously running multiple projects are quite common in industries. These projects require local (always available to the concerned project) and global (shared among the projects) resources that are available in limited quantity. The limited availability of the global resources coupled with compelling schedule requirements at different projects leads to resource conflicts among projects. Effectively resolving these resource conflicts is a challenging task for practicing managers. This paper proposes a novel distributed multi-agent system using auctions based negotiation (DMAS/ABN) approach for resolving the resource conflicts and allocating multiple different types of shared resources amongst multiple competing projects. The existing multi-agent system (MAS) using auction makes use of exact methods (e.g. dynamic programming relaxation) for solving winner determination problem to resolve resource conflicts and allocation of single unit of only one type of shared resource. Consequently these methods fail to converge for some multi-project instances and unsuitable for real life large problems. In this paper the multi-unit combinatorial auction is proposed and winner determination problem is solved by efficient new heuristic.The proposed approach can solve complex large-sized multi-project instances without any limiting assumptions regarding the number of activities, shared resources or the number of projects. Additionally our approach further allows to random project release-time of projects which arrives dynamically over the planning horizon. The DMAS/ABN is tested on standard set of 140 problem instances. The results obtained are benchmarked against the three state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms and two existing centralized methods. For 82 of 140 instances DMAS/ABN found new best solutions with respect to average project delay (APD) and produced schedules on an average 16.79% (with maximum 57.09%) lower APD than all the five methods for solving the same class of problems.