The successful application of advanced information technologies and systems relies on a good understanding of the target organizational environment. Modelling techniques are needed for expressing complex social and organizational relationships and to help reason about them. The i* modelling framework supports the modelling of strategic relationships among organizational actors. Actors depend on each other for goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished. Networks of strategic dependencies can be analyzed for opportunities and vulnerabilities. Means-ends reasoning is used to help explore alternatives. Examples at different levels of enterprise modelling are given. 1 Introduction The use of appropriate modelling techniques is crucial to the success of complex systems. The vision of enterprise integration is predicated on the complex inter-working of many human, organizational, and technological systems. Models for enterprise integration therefore need to p...

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A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an organization of coordinated autonomous agents that interact in order to achieve particular, possible common goals. Considering real world organizations as an analogy, this paper proposes architectural styles for MAS which adopt concepts from organizational theories. The styles are modeled using the i* framework which o#ers the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency and specified in Formal Tropos. They are evaluated with respect to a set of software quality attributes, such as predictability or adaptability. In addition, we conduct a comparative study of organizational and conventional software architectures using the mobile robot control example from the Software Engineering literature. The research is conducted in the context of Tropos, a comprehensive software system development methodology.

"Business model" is one of the latest buzzwords in the Internet and electronic business world. This paper has the ambition to give this term a more rigorous content. The objective is threefold. The first one is to propose a theoretical e-business model framework for doing business in the Internet era. The second one is to propose a multi-dimensional classification-scheme for eBusiness Models, as opposed to the actual tendency in academic literature to use two-dimensional classifications. The final objective is to define critical success factors, based on a field study in order to find out and compare the performance indicators used by e-business firms which are competing with similar businesses models. Keywords: e-business, business model, classification, key success factor, e-business measurements, benchmarking, value creation This is a preprint of an article published in Thunderbird International Business Review (site) 2001, Thunderbird eBusiness Model Design, Classific...

We present an integrated approach to requirements engineering for organizational IT to help ensure IT-business strategy alignment. A single, unified model to enable validation of system requirements against business strategy is proposed. We use VMOST analysis to deconstruct business strategy. We then model strategy using a goal-oriented requirements engineering notation; this is done within the framework for modeling an organization’s business strategy proposed by the Business Rules Group. We use Jackson’s problem frames to represent business model context. Our approach is illustrated via an e-business case study of Seven-Eleven Japan taken from the literature.

In most companies two factors play a crucial role: managing the knowledge that is necessary for doing business and managing the hardware and software infrastructure that supports the business processes. Usually, business processes and infrastructure are not optimally aligned. We investigate how principles from knowledge management can be applied to enable the creation, consolidation, conservation and continuous actualization of knowledge about valuable software systems ("software assets") that are part of the infrastructure. Our point of departure is a generic framework for knowledge creation proposed by Von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka. We investigate the explicit and tacit knowledge about software assets that may exist in an organization and specialize the framework to obtain a strategy for creating new knowledge about these software assets. By applying this strategy, one can optimize the quality and the flexibility of the software assets while reducing costs.

The Quick Response (QR) program is a hierarchical suite of information technologies and applications designed to improve the performance of retailers. Consultants advise retailers to adopt the program wholesale, implying that more and higher levels of technology are better than less technology and lower levels. Academicians, on the other hand, argue that good technology is “appropriate” technology. That is, firms should adopt only those technologies that suit the specific strategic directions pursued by the firm. Who is right? Which approach to investing in IT yields better performance results? Surprisingly, this cross-sectional survey of 80 specialty retailers found more support for the practitioners ’ claims than for the academicians’. Adoption of the QR program at a minimal level was associated with higher performance, although there was no performance impact due to higher levels of QR use. Firms did appear to match their IT usage to their business strategies, but there was no linkage between strategic alignment and firm performance, and there was surprisingly little variation in business or IT strategy. In short, the findings of our study suggest that both practitioners and academicians need to refine their theories and advice about what makes IT investments pay off.

Abstract: Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization's future course of action. Depending on the organization's beliefs about environmental analyzability and the extent that it intrudes into the environment to understand it, four modes of scanning may be differentiated: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, enacting, and searching. We analyze each mode of scanning by examining its characteristic information needs, information seeking, and information use behaviors. In addition, we analyze organizational knowing processes by considering the sensemaking, knowledge creating and decision

This article outlines a framework for the analysis of economic integration and its relation to the asymmetries of economic and social development. Consciously breaking with state-centric forms of social science, it argues for a research agenda that is more adequate to the exigencies and consequences of globalization than has traditionally been the case in ‘development studies’. Drawing on earlier attempts to analyse the cross-border activities of �rms, their spatial con�gurations and developmental consequences, the article moves beyond these by proposing the framework of the ‘global production network ’ (GPN). It explores the conceptual elements involved in this framework in some detail and then turns to sketch a stylized example of a GPN. The article concludes with a brief indication of the bene�ts that could be delivered by research informed by GPN analysis. KEYWORDS Globalization; economic development; business networks; institutions; embeddedness. The analysis of economic development has been bedevilled by a series of analytic disjunctions that have resulted in work either at macro or meso levels of abstraction or, where empirical investigations have probed micro level processes, the larger analytic picture has often been absent, merely implicit, or at best weakly developed. While there are notable exceptions to this general rule (for instance, Armstrong and McGee, 1985) behind it lies half a century and more of scholarship in development economics (irrespective of its paradigmatic stripe) and in the political economy and sociology of development. 1 What is more, from the beginnings of ‘dependency ’ approaches to development in the 1940s through to debates over the respective roles of states and markets in the East

■ For over 30 years, researchers have investigated the relationship between corporate internationalization and performance. While most recent findings indicate that the link may exhibit a non-linear form, researchers disagree on the exact shape of the statistical curve. ■ In this study, the relationship was examined through cross-sectional and longitudinal statistical analyses of data from 84 German manufacturing companies during the 5-year period 1993–1997.