Business Commons^™

Building A Systems View Of Strategic Discourse Across Organizational Meetings, Brendan O'Rourke, Martin Duffy

Books/Book Chapters

The purpose of this paper is to explore and expand the theoretical resources available to conceptualise organisational strategy meetings as a ‘system’, rather than as singular strategic events or episodes.

The paper begins by reviewing the Meetings literature to explore the existing theoretical guidance on conceptualising meetings as a collective and integrated set of activities, rather than as singular events in isolation of each other. The Systems literature is reviewed to identify concepts which may be adopted to enable a systematised view of meetings. The central focus of the paper is to explore the theoretical ways through which organisations’ meetings …

Identifying Barriers To Internal Supply Chain Integration Using Systems Thinking, Franciscus Bakker, Tillmann Boehme, Dirk Pieter Van Donk

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This exploratory site-centred research investigates barriers to internal supply chain integration in practice, using systems thinking. A multi-method procedure termed the Quick Scan Audit Methodology is applied to four engineering to order case companies from two different country settings to identify and categorize the actual barriers to internal supply chain integration. The study establishes that the case-significant barriers to internal supply chain integration chiefly relate to behavioral / cultural factors and the organizational arrangement / structures imposed on employees. A cross-case comparison reveals two major clusters of supply chain integration barriers termed “fire-fighting” and “functional-silo mentalities”. The fundamental structures of …

Social Networks, Social Learning And Service Systems Improvement, Andrew Sense, Matthew Pepper

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This article illustrates and qualitatively explores the value of understanding the social networks present in a service operation through a case study of a local government service network that manages regional development applications. It also examines how social learning underpins service systems performance improvement and how it is instrumental in creating a richer environment for ongoing service network innovation and development. It is argued that gaining a better understanding of these social networks and the social learning potential in a system offers substantial and highly practitioner-friendly avenues to progress service systems capability development. These fi ndings clearly place an emphasis …

Informing Destination Recommender Systems Design And Evaluation Through Quantitative Research, Ulrike Gretzel, Yeong-Hyeon Hwang, Daniel Fesenmaier

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - Destination recommender systems need to become truly human-centric in their design and functionality. This requires a profound understanding of human interactions with technology as well as human behavior related to information search and decision-making in the context of travel and tourism. This paper seeks to review relevant theories that can support the development and evaluation of destination recommender systems and to discuss how quantitative research can inform such theory building and testing. Design/methodology/approach - Based on a review of information search and decision-making literatures, a framework for the development of destination recommender systems is proposed and the implications …

New Performance Measurement And Management Control Systems, Ted Watts, Carol J. Mcnair-Connolly

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - Focusing on how performance management systems support control, this article seeks to provide two "next-generation" performance scorecards - the Performance Wheel, suitable for most organizations and the Small Business Performance Pyramid, which acknowledges the unique requirements of small business. This development considers the historical development, increasing variety and often the poorly integrated status of performance measurement systems - one of business management's most important tools.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper considers the issues of various performance measurement models - the Performance Pyramid, the Results and Determinants mode, the Balanced Scorecard - through the integration of perspectives, metrics and terminology. …

Australian Online Public Information Systems: A User-Centred Study Of An Evolving Public Health Website, Helen Hasan, Joseph Meloche, Sumayya Banna

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

The strategic, transformational nature of many information systems projects is now widely understood. Large-scale implementations of systems are known to require significant management of organisational change in order to be successful. Moreover, projects are rarely executed in isolation - most organisations have a large programme of projects being implemented at any one time. However, project and value management methodologies provide ad hoc definitions of the relationship between a project and its environment. This limits the ability of an organisation to manage the larger dynamics between projects and organisations, over time, and between projects. The contribution of this paper, therefore, is …

Strategic Discourse Across Organizational Meetings:Towards A Systems Perspective., Brendan K. O'Rourke, Martin Duffy

Conference Papers

Strategic Discourse across Organizational meetings: Towards a Systems Perspective Abstract This paper presents a tentative theoretical conception of how organizational meetings may be viewed as a system rather than as individual events. Perspectives from process metaphysics(Langley and Tsoukas, 2010), meso-discourse analysis (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000, 2011) and systems thinking (von Bertalanffy, 1969) are adopted, to explore and expand the theoretical resources available to conceptualise a ‘system of meetings’. The primary data draws from 130+ hours of recorded meeting proceedings, spanning 58 meeting events, from multiple sub-groups within a medium sized company.