Abstract. Understanding how to implement SPI successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, there has been no systematic attempt to synthesize and organize the prescriptions offered. The research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper provides a synthesis of prescriptions for successful quality management and process improvement found from an extensive review of the quality management, organizational learning, and software process improvement literature. The literature review was confirmed by empirical studies among both researchers and practitioners. The main result is an instrument for measuring the key factors of success in SPI based on data collected from 120 software organizations. The measures were found to have satisfactory psychometric properties. Hence, managers can use the instrument to guide SPI activities in their respective organizations and researchers can use it to build models to relate the facilitating factors to both learning processes and SPI outcomes.

Abstract: Recognizing the substantial development of information quality research, this review article analyzes three major aspects of information quality research: information quality assessment, information quality management and contextual information quality. Information quality assessment is analyzed by three components: information quality problem, dimension and assessment methodology. Information quality management is analyzed from three perspectives: quality management, information management and knowledge management. Following an overview of contextual information quality, this article analyzes information quality research in the context of information system and decision making. The analyzing results reveal the potential research streams and current research limitations of information quality. Aiming at bridging the research gaps, we conclude by providing the research issues for future information quality research and implications for empirical applications.

There are many ways in which eLearning can be applied in tertiary education. Because the applications can be technologically complicated, and because their use does not always match well with traditional modes of teaching and learning, much care needs to be taken in the design, creation and implementation of eLearning solutions. UCOL has developed a quality assurance system that assists its eCampus team to provide effective eLearning solutions. Based on a set of four quality assurance procedures that facilitate five distinct applications of eLearning, the system combines flexibility with an effective design structure. The system further benefits from its clear step-by-step processes and self-correction through planned project reflection time.

This article extends the model of corporate entrepreneurship designed by Covin and Slevin (1991) into intrapreneurship and exopreneurship. Intrapreneurship is closely related to corporate entrepreneurship that is creation of new products within the large organization using existing employees. On the other hand exopreneurship is the generation of innovation outside the boundary of organization using external agents known as exopreneurs. The modes to intrapreneurship have been in the dispersed and focused forms (Birkinshaw, 1996). Exopreneurship process can be attained through franchising, external venture capital, subcontracting and strategic alliance (Siti Maimon and Chang, 1995). This article reviews the different conditions that trigger intrapreneurship and exopreneurship and established prepositions to identify the dissimilarity of both processes that build up corporate entrepreneurship in large organizations. INTRODUCTION AND THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER There is a number of leading...

Yvonne Wolfmayr-Schnitzer. The work could not have been performed without the programming of Marianne Schöberl and Wolfgang Klameth, the project management by Dagmar Guttmann, and the research assistance of Traude Novak and Eva Sokoll. Table of contents 1. The necessity to compete in quality.................................................................................1 2. Quality: definitions and main indicators chosen.............................................................4 2.1. Quality and its links to competitiveness........................................................................4 2.2 Link to competitiveness.................................................................................................6 2.3 The three main indicators for quality.............................................................................7 3. Europe as provider of quality: a contested quality premium.......................................11 3.1. The unit value as an indicator of quality.....................................................................11 3.2. Unit values differ widely across Europe.....................................................................11 3.3. The quality premium in European exports..................................................................16 3.4 Relation to other indicators (GDP per capita)..............................................................18

This paper develops a method to measure the intensity of quality competition in different industries. Quality competition as opposed to price competition is a competitive environment (“mode”) in which demand depends on characteristic of goods like reliability, design, durability, flexibility etc., all these elements become important if the buyer is willing to spend more more for a good, if this characteristics is added. Additionally we measure quality by the more conventional indicator of the “unit value”, and finally by a set of sixteen indicators which comprise qualitative elements. The topic is specifically interested for the countries of the European Union, since the European Union is a high wage region. See figure 1 for per hour labor costs in European countries, in Japan and in the US. A substantial portion of the high wages, as well as the costs for the social system, education, health and environment can be balanced by higher productivity. Cost increases have been successfully curbed by increasing the efficiency of institutions and markets through the reduction of transport costs, trade barriers and currency costs. Nevertheless, cost restraints have a limit, and- as far as factor rewards (wages, profits) are concerned – to a certain extent also contradict the final goal of competitiveness, namely to increase the welfare of European citizens. In addition, new competitors with much lower costs are arriving, be it the emerging economies or the accession countries. These

have been performed without the programming of Marianne Schöberl and Wolfgang Klameth, the project management by Dagmar Guttmann, and the research assistance of Traude Novak and Eva Sokoll.

I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of PhD is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work.

Advocates of Business Process (BP) approaches argue that the real value of IT is that it provokes innovative changes in business processes. Despite the fact that many BP and IT academics and practitioners agree on this idea, BP and IT design are still performed separately. Moreover, there is very little research that is concerned with studying the ways in which IT supports BP. The ASSESS-IT project examined this domain and proposed the use of simulation techniques to achieve BP and IT integration. The outcome of this project gives indication that describing the dynamic behaviour of IT could be very helpful for BP modellers in predicting the impact that the insertion of IT may have on organisational processes. This paper describes the rationale of the simulation framework used in the ASSESS-IT project and analyses the results obtained when applying this framework to a case study in order to reflect about the advantages and limitations of this approach and to identify possible areas for further research in this domain.

I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Doctor of Philosophy is entirely my own work, that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: ________________ _ (Candidate) ID No.: __________ _ Date: ______________ I Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Dr. Markus Helfert, for his guidance, support and encouragement. Without his supervision this thesis would have never existed. As an old Chinese proverb is saying "once a teacher for me, always a teacher for me", I am so gratifying and enjoying to have ironed his "always a teacher " in my entire life. I really want to thank my family without whom I would never have gone this far. In the rest of my life, I can never finish paying back the love and care I owed to my parents. Besides, my sincerest thanks go to my beloved sister, Dr. Ge Wei, who has all the time supported me in different walks of my life. I am so lucky to have a sister like her. Many thanks also go to all my dear friends, who are Xu Qing, Thoa Pham, Howard