Exploring the Secret of Successful University Brands

This chapter contributes to the topical area of higher education marketing by exploring how branding adds value to universities. The primary focus of exploring branding concepts associated with successful higher education brands in a UK context was chosen for this work with a view to later comparison with other countries such as the United States, where branding of universities has a longer practical and academic history. The concept of “successful” brands was explored through the extant literature, and the subsequent research identified constructs underpinning a successful university brand. These constructs were then tested among a larger sample of UK university stakeholders. The findings explored the variables associated with successful university brands and suggested significant relationships among these variables. A further stage involved qualitative exploration of current perceptions and practices in HE branding, designed to maintain currency and build ongoing research possibilities. Overall, the chapter offers suggestions for both academia and practice on what underpins a successful university brand, and the variables associated with these brands.

Selection of Market Entry Strategies

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the selection of market entry strategies in the African mobile telephony industry with a view to developing appropriate business strategies and identifying risk factors. Using the survey methodology, the study focuses on six key enterprises, which account for over 60% of mobile phones in Africa. The empirical evidence suggests that market size in terms of population of the destination country and not psychic distance is the most important market selection criteria for enterprises entering Africa. The dominant entry market strategy for these enterprises is strategic alliances. Focused strategy is uncommon on the continent. More interestingly, and contrary to extant literature, political risk was not considered a market entry barrier. In any case, politically unstable countries tend to bring in higher returns. These findings are critical in informing investors engaged in or with intentions to enter Africa and in enriching international literature. The Stages model and the DMP framework individually are unable to explain the choice of market entry strategy in Africa. The key contributions of this study are both theoretical and practical insights on the process of internationalisation.

How Can Success of IT Implementations Be Measured?

The number of applied Business Intelligence (BI) systems is rapidly increasing worldwide, serving a broad range of sectors and business applications. BI systems serve a broad range of sectors and business applications by performing functions that consist of managing clients, resources, and employees through the collection and analysis of data that assist in describing these business entities and the various attributes of these objectives. Even though BI solutions have been implemented worldwide and the experience gained in implementation projects has largely enriched the academic research in this field, IT literature still lacks a uniform methodology for assessing the effects that BI systems have on business processes and organizations. Additionally, should any part of the BI implementation project fail to satisfy user needs or achieve the benefits expected from them, it is important to identify the failure's extent and sources in order to avoid financial and operational losses in similar projects. This chapter presents an analytical framework to help measure the success of implementations of various types of Business Intelligence systems, including Online Analytical Processing, Knowledge Management, and Decision Supporting tools. The framework and methodology presented here serve as a basis for evaluating the possible effects of technical, organizational, and personal factors on the success, partial success, or failure of BI system implementations. The framework is demonstrated via a case study analysis of a BI system implementation in an energy firm.

Holistic View on Unknown Unknowns in Project Risk Management

The overall value of any risk management system could be qualitatively assessed by its capability to identify and manage relevant risks. This actually means that its value is reciprocal to the relevant risks it fails to identify (unknown unknowns). This chapter outlines comprehensive thinking processes and comes up with practical recipes on dealing with unknown unknowns, including handling unknown unknowns in probabilistic cost and schedule risk models. Four dimensions of unknown unknowns are discussed: novelty of a project, phase of project development, type of industry, and various types of psychological and organizational bias. “Regular” and “Supercritical” categories are introduced to further discuss various realizations of unknown unknowns such as “broiler black swans,” “game changers,” “show stoppers,” “corporate risks,” etc.

An Integrated Model of Success in IT Outsourcing Relationships

Possible remedies for the failure of IT outsourcing in the public sector include the improvement of knowledge-sharing processes over organizational boundaries between partners, who may learn more about the problems that occur while looking at possible solutions together. Ensuring the right flow of knowledge in the two directions is central to the success of IT outsourcing operations. However, these solutions do not fully acknowledge the different interrelationships between the main factors affecting knowledge transfer in outsourcing relationships in a dynamic way. In this chapter, the authors apply previous research on modeling knowledge-sharing across boundaries to IT outsourcing contracts during the transition phase where both partners initiate an IT outsourcing relationship. Simulation experiments suggest that four reinforcing processes play key roles in the progress of the outsourcing relationship: trust, outsourcers' and providers´ knowledge, commitment, and interfacing. The authors propose future research directions to conduct empirical test of the conceptual model in the context of the Mexican Public Administration.

ERP Misfit-Reduction Strategies

The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a breed of configurable package systems that aims to disseminate transactional information of the entire organization to users in a timely and efficient fashion under a uniform system environment. However, ERP systems often fail to live up their claim to improve operational efficiency and strategic effectiveness due to misfits between the standard-built ERP systems and the adopting organizations. Anecdotal evidences from subjective studies suggest modification of ERP systems and adaptation of organizational structure could mitigate the misfits between ERP systems and the adopting organizations. Nevertheless, empirical and rigorous studies capable of proving these conjectures are scarce. The purpose of this chapter is to empirically validate and examine: 1) the negative impacts of the misfits between ERP systems and organizations and 2) to what extent the two misfit-reduction strategies, namely system modification and organizational adaptation, are able to mitigate the impacts of these misfits. The Task-Technology Fit (TTF) model is adapted as the theoretical framework of this study capable of incorporating moderating variables. Three-hundred-and-five sets of questionnaires collected from ERP systems users in the manufacturing sector of Malaysia were analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. Findings of this study indicate that different types of misfits, namely input misfit, process misfit, and output misfit, have different impacts on ERP systems performances. More importantly, this study found that the appropriateness of misfit-reduction strategies is contingent to the types of ERP misfits. Precisely, system modification can effectively mitigate input and process misfits, while organizational adaptation can be used to counteract input and output misfits.

Strategic Turning Points in ICT Business

This chapter is based on the study “Strategic Processes and Turning Points in ICT Business: Case Nokia” (Rusko, 2012), in which the analysis reached no further than Spring 2011. Those days, one important strategic turning point was just beginning: the era of CEO Stephen Elop (September 2010) and collaboration with Microsoft (February 2011). Although the long-term perspective, strategic turning points, and path dependency are also important in this study, the focus has moved towards the prevailing era of Nokia and its competitors. Compared to the initial version, smartphones and their operating systems play a more important role in this study.

How Can Information Systems Improve Sustainable Procurement Policies?

Sustainability has become a central corporate concern as well as a key factor of success in terms of both image and productivity. In turn, the purchasing function is crucial to the definition and implementation of a sustainability policy within the firm. This chapter combines a literature review with a qualitative study to show how information systems can and will contribute to the development of corporate sustainable purchasing policies. The chapter traces the development of new and innovative modes of sustainable purchasing management. Purchasing functions and information system departments work together to reduce the environmental footprint of technology and to exert greater influence on collaboration and teamwork by building an economic environment that is more viable and livable and also fairer.

Incorporating Culture and Competition for Status into Quantitative Financial Epidemiology Models

This chapter extends the financial epidemiology literature as it applies to the acquisition of consumer debt. A recent manuscript provided a very simple model to illustrate how conspicuous consumption within a community (in the vernacular, “keeping up with the Joneses”) can lead to situations where a contagion of financial insolvency may occur (Friesner, McPherson, & Hackney, 2014). However, that model simply illustrates the feasibility of modeling both conspicuous consumption and financial contagions in a single framework. It does not explicitly incorporate most of the epidemiological, socio-cultural, and psychological factors that drive decisions to use debt to finance conspicuous consumption. In this chapter, the authors build a much more detailed model of financial epidemiology that includes (or can be extended to include) most of the salient ecological characteristics advanced by financial economists (neoclassical or heterodox) and epidemiologists. The model can be used to illustrate specific characteristics that promote (or inhibit) consumer behavior that pushes the household into financial exigency. The results can therefore provide a more informative basis for policy makers to reduce the prevalence of bankruptcy or other financial insolvency within a community as a whole.

Modeling Choice between Competing Technologies

Even though there is a rich and extensive literature on the individual adoption of technologies, limited attention has been placed on the choice of one among competing alternatives, which the authors posit as an essential antecedent to the individual acceptance decision that has been considered in the past. In this chapter, they compare two levels at which the choice can be made—expectations and intentions—and then review and contrast four different comparison mechanisms that can integrate the evaluations made at each level as predictive of actual choice. These were investigated by asking business professionals to assess and evaluate technologies for potential adoption within their domain of expertise, and then a second study was conducted to further validate the results thus obtained. The authors also extensively discuss the implications of this research for future work on the processes leading to adoption of information technologies.