Enterprise Architecture's Identity Crisis

This chapter outlines the rational foundations of the enterprise architecture discipline to date and describes ways and situations in which the traditional approaches of enterprise architecture fail to account for a number of contemporary market and economic situations and organizational behaviors. It characterizes new methods and approaches loosely based on systems thinking, with examples from the Australian e-government experience, and argues that the discipline must re-invent itself to incorporate a post-rational perspective to stay relevant. The chapter concludes with narratives of how the new enterprise architecture must engage with business to stay relevant over the next decade and beyond.

How to Measure Performance in Cooperatives?

The cooperatives produce around 10% of Italian GDP. They should face two aims: the respect of the cooperative principles and their pursuit in line with the economic effectiveness principle. Cooperatives operate on the principles of the International Cooperative Alliance: one member-one vote, free and voluntary membership, and limited remuneration of the underwritten capital. In order to represent the social and the economic impact of the cooperatives actions, the evaluations of the outcome produced should bear in mind both dimensions above-mentioned. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all the purposes. The aim of the paper is to hypothesize a comprehensive evaluation model that allows to estimate the cooperative excellence. The emerging model will be made up of two parts representing the social and the economic excellence in turn divided in “internal” and “external” variables depending on the stakeholder considered. In the second part of the paper, the model will be tested on eight Italian cooperatives.

Approaches towards Measuring Success in Public Elementary Schools

This chapter examines new directions in theory and practice of measuring schools' success. Relevant literature is synthesized to provide a holistic picture of current knowledge of the topic, highlighting meanings, principles and consequences. The chapter discusses the nature of success in schools. The major aim of the research is to analyze the most popular approaches towards measuring the success of schools, including effectiveness, efficiency, performance, and accountability. This chapter suggests measuring the success in public elementary school, based on extended set of measures and indicators. The expanded set of measurements could increase the validity of inferences about schools' effectiveness as well as efficiency and offer relevant information to principals and teachers about how to improve the school's performance.

Governing the Public Sector E-Performance

Over the past several decades the demand for accountability in the field of public administration has been growing exponentially in Europe. The particular emphasis for this theme was the stimulus for the significant adoption and use of information technology systems in the public sector. Thus, the main focus of European countries has been e-government that provides process reform of the manner in which governments work, share information, and deliver services to external and internal clients. Therefore, accountability has become more critical for improving the economic, financial and organizational management of public matters. The need for accountability has pushed the Italian legislature to produce a sequence of legislative and regulatory interventions towards increased transparency in public administrations. This paper presents an account of the likely consequences that performance monitoring systems have, through e-government technology, on public service transparency and accountability. This research utilizes a study on the Brunetta reform (from the Ministry of Public Administration) to foster public sector productivity; that study's key principles are efficiency, meritocracy, accountability, and transparency.

Determinants for the Goodness of Performance Measurement Systems

The supply of adequate information is one of the main functions of Performance Measurement Systems (PMS), but also one of its drawbacks and reason for failure. Not only the collection of indicators is crucial, but also the stakeholders' understanding of their meaning, purpose, and contextual embedding. Today, companies seek a PMS without a way to express the goodness of a solution, indicating its ability to deliver appropriate information and to address these demands. The goal of this chapter is to explore the mechanisms that drive information and knowledge supply in PMS in order to model a way to express this goodness. Using a grounded theory approach, a theory of visibility of performance is developed, featuring a catalog of determinants for the goodness of PMS. Companies can conveniently use them to assess their PMS and to improve the visibility of their performance.

Nonprofit Fundraising Transformation through Analytics

The authors present the experiences of a professor and a team of students who found that social media and predictive analytics go hand-in-hand when designing effective marketing campaigns (in this case, fundraising for a community of nonprofit organizations). The students of a medium-sized southwestern private university assisted a large southwestern city with the social media marketing efforts for the city's first Big Give fundraising. The organizers then told the students that the internal goal for the 24-hour event was $1.5 million USD. The campaign resulted in 21,361 gifts made for a grand total of $2,095,606.50 USD (approximately 40% greater than was forecasted). It was estimated by the organizers that the most significant contributing factor to the greater performance of the campaign was the social media efforts of the students. The average number of donations raised by the 467 organizations that participated was 45.52 for an overall average of $3,527.09 USD.

Building and Analyzing of Enterprise Network

Social business moves beyond linear, process-driven organizations to create new, dynamic, networked businesses that focus on customer value. Enterprise network (EN) is used to support social business by maximizing current and future opportunities and facilitate network-enabled processes, which can lead to value co-creation. EN is a multi-level hypergraph model with enterprises, employees, products and other related entities. In this paper the authors refine the EN model and present the foundation of EN to support social businesses. Then they introduce a case study on China automobile supply network (CASN). For the similarity with social networks, they verify power-law and small world theories in EN with statistical results on this data set. These theories are fitful in EN, but some new characteristics exist. The structure of EN consists of star-shaped clusters and the authors extract ego networks taking suppliers and manufacturers as the ego respectively. With the structure and distribution features of EN, they present the enterprise business similarity analysis method based on common-neighbors. And they also introduce the tentative work to detect Dunbar circles in EN. To analyze the data in a more intuitional and effective way, the authors use some data visualization tools to process the data in EN.

Big Data Virtualization and Visualization

With the recent explosion of internet usage as well as more and more devices are being hooked up with the cloud, big data is becoming a phenomena to tackle with. Big data management was initially a question of concern for only the big commercial players such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. But it has now become a concern for others, too. According to recent estimates, big data will continue to grow from terabytes into exabytes and beyond. This data needs to be made available for an organization's own use as well can be made available for scientific and commercial needs to the interested entities. This can include different user segments such as academia, industry etc. Academic use of big data is for further research and enablement of big data over cloud, working with it in containers, usage in virtualized environments etc. This generates a need for a sustainable infrastructure which can hold and maintain big data with opportunities for extended processing.

Key Performance Indicators for the Organized Farm Products Retailing in India

The Non-livestock products include Horticulture products (flowers, fruits, nuts, vegetables and medicinal plants) and Agriculture products (Crops like; rice, cotton, wheat). These items share the maximum sale of the farm products. Unfortunately, the farm production in India has witnessed a huge wastage. It has attracted the attention of many practitioners and policy makers. Witnessing the opportunity many organized retail players have entered the arena to sell farm products. However, the supply chain (SC) performance measurement has remained the major challenge as “No measurement no improvement”. Many organizations are searching for an efficient SC performance measurement system. Our study recommends that the SC performance shall be improved by developing a SC strategy based on a limited set of key performance indicators (KPI). Otherwise, managers shall waste time and resources on the undesirable performance indicators. We have identified and classified the KPI for non-livestock retailing SC management into five groups. These are 1) Customer Attraction Metrics (product quality, product personality, process quality); 2) Inventory Metrics (fill rate, customer response time, return adjustment, spoilage adjustment, and Vendor managed inventory); 3) Attractiveness Metrics (inventory cost, distribution cost, Return on investment, stakeholder value, sales profit and channel flexibility); 4) Transportation Metrics (shipping errors, and volume flexibility); and 5) Customer Metrics (lead time, delivery flexibility, and backorder flexibility). This grouping shall help the practitioners to focus on a limited set of KPI for better management of supply chains.

Price Determination in Public Offering and Evaluation Methods

The latest financial situation in capital markets in advanced economies, emerging markets, and the Euro zone illustrates that volatility and risks related to global economic activity and global financial markets have impact on local capital markets and directly affects the value of company stocks even though an investor diversified his/her risk by investing in a portfolio. The initial public offering process, performance evaluation methods, and price determination became key factors for companies and investors. In this chapter, advantages and disadvantages of IPO, pricing methods and performance evaluation methods are assessed.