Creativity and management control – the diversity of festival budgets

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the budget, when split into a network of projects, can act as a management tool to balance control with creativity. Design/methodology/approach – A case study is used to discuss the budget in a large Norwegian festival. Simons’ (1995) concept of interactive use of budgets is applied for the analysis of empirical findings. Especially, the authors focus on the design and use of the budget and how it is aligned with the specific characteristics of festivals as economic organizations. Findings – The findings support earlier research which focusses on the need to balance between control and dynamic changes to successfully manage festivals. This study gives a detailed knowledge on how managers use budgets to combine management control with creativity and dynamic adaptions. Originality/value – This study contributes to a detailed understanding of how managers can use budgets as tools to stabilize between uncertainty, creativity and control.

A case for open, viable print accounting

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the design and business characteristics of the system pertaining to efficient and viable public services, the technical perspective and also usage results from the productive prototype. When the academic library of our institution turned to consider cost-effective solutions that would combine management and accounting for both printing and photocopying, it was realized that there are no open-source or enterprise platforms that can support such characteristics. Instead of relying on commercial solutions, the construction of a service was planned by means of integrating community-based projects and developing any missing components. Design/methodology/approach – The implementation of the system was based on the identification of appropriate open-source modules and on the development of ones that do not exist but are necessary to realize business procedures for credit reception, control and billing. Thus, the system integrates software for the management of printers and print tasks, for accounting for printing tasks, for user catalogues, for authentication modules and for the control of low level I/O operations. The aforementioned systems were integrated along with the following new modules that were developed to create a complete service. Findings – Our prototype has been operating at our University since May 2011. The system was installed at four sites in reading rooms of the library. Three of them are located in different departments within the University campus, while the fourth is located in the last reading room that has not yet moved within the campus. In two years, more than 28,000 pages were printed and charged. The steady rise in the number of served requests leads us to the conclusion that the system can cope with the heavy use of photocopying machines. Originality/value – The prototype described in this paper is a complete productive platform that is capable to accept money or credit over the counter or by using money receivers and provide billing and management for printing and photocopying. The system does not depend on any vendor technology, offers control, monitoring, receipts and reports and because it relies on open source can minimize the total costs of ownership. Scrutiny of the bibliography and market did not find any systems that could meet the aforementioned characteristics.

Enterprise Systems

Well-managed information is the basis of any successful enterprise. The current increase in information management capacity generates opportunities for a new stage of development, making it critical for companies to significantly increase information, intelligence and technology management competences to successfully exploit these new opportunities. However, information technology (IT) development has, in many cases, not been balanced by an enhancement of information management competences within organizations. One way of successfully exploiting opportunities is through the business philosophy of Enterprise Systems (ES), defined as organizational arrangements that combine management science and IT to enhance a company’s decision-making capabilities. ES have helped streamline business processes and improve the overall performance of organizations. This chapter presents an overview of the development of ES from the 1970s to the present day, and presents an S-curve analysis of the diffusion of ES innovations. The sources of ES innovation are then discussed in terms of enablers (technological, entrepreneurial and venture capital) and drivers (developers and innovators). The differences between vendors in terms of their ES solutions are then briefly presented, and the role of ES in creating a competitive advantage is discussed.