How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Knowledge-intensive firms are composed of multiple communities with specialized expertise, and are often characterized by lateral rather than hierarchical organizational forms. We argue that producing knowledge to create innovative products and processes in such firms requires the ability to make strong perspectives within a community, as well as the ability to take the perspective of another into account. We present models of language, communication and cognition that can assist in the design of electronic communication systems for perspective making and perspective taking. By appreciating how communication is both like a language game played in a local community and also like a transmission of messages through a conduit, and by appreciating how cognition includes a capacity to narrativize our experience as well as a capacity to process information, we identify some guidelines for designing electronic communication systems to support knowledge work. The communication systems we propose emphasize that narratives can help construct strong perspectives within a community of knowing, and that reflecting upon and representing that perspective can create boundary objects which allow for perspective taking between communities. We conclude by describing our vision of an idealized knowledge intensive firm with a strong culture of perspective making and perspective taking, and by identifying some elements of the electronic communication systems we would expect to see in such a firm.

Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Everybody knows that digital technology has revolutionized our economy and our lifestyles. But how many of us really understand the drivers behind the technology – the significance of going digital; the miniaturization of electronic devices; the role of venture capital in financing the revolution; the importance of research and development? How many of us understand what it takes to make money from innovative technologies? Should we worry about manufacturing going offshore? What is the role of India and China in the digital economy? Drawing on a lifetime’s experience in the industry, as an engineer, a senior manager, and as a partner in a global venture capital firm, Henry Kressel offers an expert personalized answer to all these questions. He explains how the technology works, why it matters, how it is financed, and what the key lessons are for public policy.

Competing for the Future

In the last fifteen years, academic research on information systems (IS) outsourcing has evolved rapidly. Indeed the field of outsourcing research has grown so fast that there has been scant opportunity for the research community to take a collective breath, and complete a global assessment of research activities to date. This paper seeks to address this need by exploring and synthesizing the academic literature on IS outsourcing. It offers a roadmap of the IS outsourcing literature, highlighting what has been done so far, how the work fits together under a common umbrella, and what the future directions might be.In order to adequately address the immense diversity of research on IS outsourcing and outsourcing in general, we develop a conceptual framework that helps us to categorize the literature. In particular, we look at the research objectives, methods used and theoretical foundations of the papers. In identifying the major research objectives, we view outsourcing as an organizational decision process and adapt Simon's stage model of decision making. This allows us to identify five major sourcing issues, from which at least one is covered by each academic article. These are the questions of why to outsource, what to outsource, which decision process to take, how to implement the sourcing decision, and what is the outcome of the sourcing decision. In analyzing the literature, we identify and structure the main explanatory factors and theoretical relationships within each of these sourcing stages. Based on our discussion of the research objectives, theoretical foundations and research approaches taken in the literature, we show how the various research streams hang together and we come up with a number of implications for research. Moreover, we identify a number of emerging sourcing issues. We believe that research on these "new" phenomena such as offshore outsourcing, application service providing and business process outsourcing would benefit from 'standing on the shoulders' of what has already been accomplished in the field of IS outsourcing.

Information systems outsourcing: a survey and analysis of the literature

Web-based information systems are increasingly being used for decision support applications. However, few empirical studies have been conducted on web-based decision support systems (DSS). This experimental research endeavors to understand factors that impact decision-making satisfaction in web-based decision support systems. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) approach, the analysis reveals that information quality and system quality influence decision-making satisfaction, while information presentation does not have an effect on decision-making satisfaction.

https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=msis_faculty_pubs

An empirical investigation of decision-making satisfaction in web-based decision support systems

O UTSOURCING is the contracting of various systems to outside information systems (IS) vendors. Ever since the Eastman Kodak--IBM partnership was reported in 1989 [15], outsourcing has emerged and has been recognized as a key method of managing IS. In previous studies of outsourcing [4, 5, 12, 15, 17, 20], two gaps are noticeable. The first relates to the fact that requirements for outsourcing are not uniform, and managers have different approaches to the process. Yet most previous research studies have phrased their inquiries unidimensionally in terms of the extent or degree of outsourcing: either as a binary variable or as size of contract in terms of the percentage of total IS budget [5, 15]. Neither unidimensional gauge is sufficiently expressive; neither allows representation of diverse patterns of outsourcing. Second, even though the IS industry had not used the term “outsourcing” explicitly in the past, outsourcing is not a new concept and has existed for many years in one form or another. Even though firms have repetitively used outside vendors for years, researchers have neither considered prior relationships in their studies of IS outsourcing nor studied the intentions of client firms to continue the partnership with the outsourcing vendors in the future. In this study, IS outsourcing decisions are investigated at two levels. The first level deals with the initial outsourcing decision of client firms. The second level pertains to the intention to continue the relationships with current outsourcing vendors in the future. The following three research questions are explored at these two levels (in contrast to the singlelevel approach taken by most researchers): • What are the dimensions of outsourcing decisions? Two dimensions, extent of substitution by vendors and strategic impact of IS applications, are proposed in order to conceptualize the diverse types of outsourcing relationships between clients and vendors. Based on these two dimensions, four types of outsourcing relationships are proposed. • What are the determinants that affect the dimensions of outsourcing decisions at the first level? The concepts derived from incomplete contracts [2, 9] and transactions cost economics [23, 24] theory are used with information technology (IT) organizational contexts and processes as a foundation to study the determinants of the two dimensions of outsourcing decisions. Information Syst

A two-level investigation of information systems outsourcing : Information systems outsourcing

A two-level investigation of information systems outsourcing

A longitudinal study at four companies provides valuable insights about the evolution of IT outsourcing relationships.

A relationship perspective on IT outsourcing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore social media’s impact on organizational knowledge quality through the theoretical lens of social capital and resource exchange. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theory-confirming, quantitative study using panel data collected through a Web-based survey. Findings – The results show that while social media affects structural capital and cognitive capital directly, it only affects relational capital indirectly through structural and cognitive capital. Moreover, overall social media and the enhanced social capital do help promote organizational efforts in knowledge management, which subsequently leads to a higher level of organizational knowledge quality. Research limitations/implications – All survey respondents were from the USA, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The authors also call for more research in establishing the time sequence in the proposed causal relations and in the individual-level mechanism through which social media...

/pdf/better-knowledge-with-social-media-exploring-the-roles-of-1gu1mitnsd.pdf

Abhijit Chaudhury

Papers

An empirical investigation of decision-making satisfaction in web-based decision support systems

A two-level investigation of information systems outsourcing : Information systems outsourcing

A two-level investigation of information systems outsourcing

A relationship perspective on IT outsourcing

Better knowledge with social media? Exploring the roles of social capital and organizational knowledge management