Virtual Center for Entrepreneurship Development

This chapter shows a preliminary approach for building a virtual center for entrepreneurship development that will be implemented in a university research network in Romania. The authors argue the most relevant aspects that conduct us to an organizational information system design, implementation and management with double role: education/training (entrepreneurial skills development for students) and research (about the entrepreneurship phenomena at regional and national level but in relation of the global economy). The following items are presented: (1) the training needs for business creation - based on a preliminary market research developed with subjects with technical and economical background and that allow the identification of the entrepreneurial knowledge; (2) the university entrepreneurial education as a process of knowledge transfer; (3) preliminary design and architecture of the virtual center for entrepreneurship. Finally, some relevant conclusions and the future researches directions are presented.

The Social Cost of Social Value Creation

Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Myspace, Craig’s List and their foreign equivalents, such as the Chinese QQ and Baidu, for example, are ostensibly complex, and – more troublesome - their attitudes are becoming increasingly contradictory, controversial, and conflicted: For one, Tom Malone’s decade-old predictions of a decentralized network of a multitude of small, cooperating firms did not materialize; to the contrary and counter to the spirit of the democratic nature of information and information technology, these e-giants are defining their own industries and defying regulation, submitting the participants in their respective markets to proprietary rules via three central tenets: regulatory capture, regulatory arbitrage, and regulatory opportunism. In the present critical chapter the authors explore these traits of the Complex Information Technology-Intensive firms and formulate elements of a framework for their ambiguous nature that may lead to social cost exceeding their initially glorified social value creation.

Analysis of IT Governance on Spanish Organizations

Corporate governance is a key element today in organizations and companies. IT Governance, as a part of corporate governance, plays its role in aligning IT with the business and obtaining the maximum value, minimizing the risks. Several frameworks and guidelines have been published in order to set the basis for this discipline. The recent release of the ISO 38500 (ISO 2008) ads an effort to standardize the different elements of IT governance. Despite these efforts, none of the different frameworks or guidelines is focused on the specific characteristics of small and medium companies (SMOs), although the authors consider that their conclusions are universal. Furthermore, there is no research so far that analyzed the status of IT governance in Spanish organizations. The aim of this work is to do a research to identify the state of the art of IT governance in the Spanish small and medium organizations.

Collaborative Demand and Supply Planning Networks

The focus of manufacturing planning and control has gradually expanded from (in-house) production activities towards all manufacturing and logistic activities in the supply chain. Planning of in-house operations is still very important, but the trends towards increased use of outsourcing and mass customisation require that customers and suppliers are able to exchange information frequently to cut down costs and lead time while quickly adapting their manufacturing and logistics operations to market/customer requirements. Many vendors offer systems to plan and control in-house operations, whereas only a few large vendors (such as Oracle, SAP and I2) offer supply chain planning systems. This limits the ability for SMEs to exploit the supply chain planning options. This chapter discuss current supply chain planning solutions and presents a more simple and adaptive concept to be used in both SMEs and larger enterprises. The research presented in this chapter is funded by the EU Union via the EmpoSME, ValuePole projects, and by the Research Council of Norway via the SFI Norman project.

Multisite PLM Platform

Today, product development is a result of a collaborative design process in network. Taking into consideration this fact, a National Research Network for Integrated Product and Process Engineering (INPRO) has been created. The present chapter presents the relevant items for building a PLM multisite platform for collaborative integrated product development based on the common researches developed in the INPRO project and network. The authors argue this approach by presenting the collaborative distributed design process, the product model and the PLM multisite platform for collaborative integrated product development. Based on these was built a collaborative multisite platform that join together the methodology, methods and tools for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Knowledge Management (KM) and Human Resources Management (HRU), examples of good practice. The core of the proposed approach is the product lifecycle model which is the base for the proposed collaborative product development methodology and the multisite PLM platform architecture. The presented research results were gained from our implication in the project “National Research Network for Integrated Product and Process Engineering – INPRO” (contract no. 243 / 08.09.2006). The model of building such collaborative design environment was inspired by the Virtual Research Laboratory for a Knowledge Community in Production (VRL-KCiP) a Network of Excellence project (contract no. FP6-507487). From 2008 the authors extended their research at the European level, in the context of a Lifelong Learning Programme, Leonardo da Vinci - Transfer of Innovation (contract nr. FR/08/LLP-LdV/TOI/117025), “Certified Integrated Design Engineer – iDesigner” in which they used the collaborative platform for the students and researchers professional qualification and certification.

Information Systems Outsourcing

Information Systems (IS) Outsourcing has emerged as a strategic option to be considered and has been increasingly adopted by managers. However, many contracts still fail during their initial years, meaning that Outsourcing has also been subject to strong criticism. There are advantages to Outsourcing but also significant risks associated to it, and the assessment of both is therefore of great relevance for informed decision-making. The objective of this chapter is to determine to what extent a common view about risks and benefits associated to IS Outsourcing is shared by the Portuguese market players: Service Providers, Clients and Opinion Makers. In order to accomplish this, an on-line Delphi study was conducted, combined with the Q-sort technique, which allowed to obtain the perspective of each player on the risks and benefits IS Outsourcing. Comparing these perspectives it was possible to understand that the market players don’t share the same point of view.

A Process for Estimating the Value of ITIL Implementations

As World economy lingers it is increasingly more important to justify any investment so that available corporate funds are spent wisely. However, estimating the value of ITIL investments is not an easy task, which means that most CIOs do not invest in large-scale ITIL projects as much as it would be desirable. Instead, CIOs prefer to embark on quick win implementations (e.g. solely implement the incident management process). In this chapter t propose an ITIL Value Estimator. This estimator is based on an estimation process that quantifies the project’s total cost, along with each process’ benefits. The outcome of the ITIL Value Estimator is a Monte Carlo simulation whose result provides CIOs with a justification of the value of large-scale ITIL implementations, which can be used to gain the upper hand during the decision-making process.

Information Systems Projects In Contact Centers

Over the past decade, Contact Centers have experienced exceptional growth. In UK and USA Contact Centers employ about three percent of the working population. Contact Center’s projects are complex because occur in a multidisciplinary area with multiple actors and constraints. Information systems play a decisive role in these projects. However, several studies indicate a low success level of information and communications technology projects leading to research opportunities for their improvement. In their previous research the authors have identified a framework with the key factors to be considered in these projects. Due to the highly dynamic reality of the Contact Centers, the framework must evolve in order to maintain its usefulness for project managers and other center professionals. Focus groups are interactive discussion groups used for generating knowledge and hypotheses, exploring opinions, attitudes and attributes. In this way, the study presented in this chapter aims to verify, expand and actualize the existent framework, using a focus group with professionals in the area.

INOVA Framework

Nowadays, the WWW is playing a vital role in the business world. Most enterprises are becoming digital. Content management systems provide an effective method to improve the development of web applications and make the maintainer’s job easier. The purpose of this work is to study the benefits that the use of web technologies can suppose for a SME company when they are applied to integrate their work techniques and procedures. The authors have also tried to use it to provide their customers with several services, and to make easier the company expansion process. The framework developed includes a security system for the access to the contents based on the RBAC model. The use of the INOVA framework has provided a benefit as much for INOVA itself, as for its customers, by including in a centralized way document resources and toolkits that can be accessed remotely.

ERP System Selection Criteria

The chapter proposes a possible model of criteria for ERP system selection. The proposed model consists of four groups of ERP system selection criteria: the ERP systems benefits criteria, the system quality criteria, the vendor related criteria and the ERP system package criteria. The data was collected in companies in Slovenia. Research results have confirmed internal consistency of ERP selection criteria in each group. For each criterion the importance is evaluated by small, medium-sized and large companies. Beside that also company size, implemented information strategy, representation of the IT department on the board level in the company and turnover impact on importance of each criterion is evaluated and presented. The model presented in this chapter could be useful for ERP system providers to better understand companies’ needs and to provide systems tailored for individual needs of the company. The model could also be useful for companies considering ERP system implementation to avoid high costs of failed implementations.