The Apple business model: Crowdsourcing mobile applications

Much to Apple's chagrin, the ‘suicide express’ at the Foxconn manufacturing complex in China has been widely reported. While outsourcing the manufacture of technology components is neither new nor unique, the external sourcing of digital content is integral to the success of Apple's business model. In 2008, Apple opened up their platform to third-party IT developers, leveraging their expertise for the supply of applications. Apple's rapid dominance of the mobile market led to the emergence of a business model that weaves together Internet-enabled mobile devices with digital content, brought together within a closed proprietary platform or ecosystem. Applying a Global Production Network analysis, this paper reports on fieldwork among Apple mobile application developers in Sweden, the UK, and the US. The analysis shows that although some developers experience success, financial returns remain elusive and many encounter intense pressure to generate and market new products in a competitive and saturated market. Crowdsourcing allows Apple to effectively source development to a global base of software developers, capitalizing on the mass production of digital products while simultaneously managing to sidestep the incurred costs and responsibilities associated with directly employing a high-tech workforce.     

Accounting Students' IT Application Skills over a 10-year Period

This paper reports on the changing nature of a range of information technology (IT) application skills that students declare on entering an accounting degree over the period from 1996 to 2006. Accounting educators need to be aware of the IT skills students bring with them to university because of the implications this has for learning and teaching within the discipline and the importance of both general and specific IT skills within the practice and craft of accounting. Additionally, IT skills constitute a significant element within the portfolio of employability skills that are increasingly demanded by employers and emphasized within the overall Higher Education (HE) agenda. The analysis of students' reported IT application skills on entry to university, across a range of the most relevant areas of IT use in accounting, suggest that their skills have continued to improve over time. However, there are significant differential patterns of change through the years and within cohorts. The paper addresses the generalizability of these findings and discusses the implications of these factors for accounting educators, including the importance of recognising the differences that are potentially masked by the general increase in skills; the need for further research into the changing nature, and implications, of the gender gap in entrants' IT application skills; and the low levels of entrants' spreadsheet and database skills that are a cause for concern.     

ICT,BUSINESS SERVICES AND LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH

This paper focuses on the diffusion of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) in relation to information and communication technology-based innovations and their effect on productivity growth. Intermediate purchases of KIBS by any other industry determine the extent of KIBS diffusion. This diffusion is seen as part of the broader process of organisational innovations. We find a significant positive relation between this measure of KIBS diffusion and the intensity of information technology (IT). Not only do use of IT and KIBS both contribute positively to labour productivity growth, we also find that the combination of these two inputs adds further to productivity growth for the aggregate economy.     

云环境下IT企业联盟信息平台设计

随着社会的不断发展,信息产业在社会中的地位越来越显著,建立IT产业联盟可以使IT企业之间进行寻求资源互补、推动技术创新、实现知识共享。本课题是基于云环境的条件下建立的信息平台,通过采用B/S架构的数据库形式来进行存储信息,利用云计算的数据存储大量化、透明化等特点解决用户所需,无论是企业还是个人都可以在本平台找到自己所需要的项目、求职等信息,最终达到企业与企业、企业与个人、个人与个人之间联盟处理问题的效果并解决一些实际的问题。     

The complementarity of IT and HRM capabilities for competitive performance: a configurational analysis of manufacturing and industrial service SMEs

ABSTRACT

Building on the resource-based view (RBV) perspective, we analyse the combined effects of two highly-valued organizational resources, namely information technology (IT) capabilities and human resource management (HRM) capabilities, on the competitive performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Three resource configurations are derived from data on 227 SMEs (121 from the manufacturing sector and 106 from the industrial services sector) through a cluster analysis. These resource configurations are labelled IT Capabilities-dominant Configuration (ITC), e-Business Capabilities-dominant Configuration (e-BC), and HRM Capabilities-dominant Configuration (HRC). This last configuration is the best-performing, followed by the e-BC, with the ITC as the worst-performing. The results also show that manufacturing and service firms are very unevenly distributed within HRC and ITC configurations, suggesting notable differences between the two sectors regarding their respective IT and non-IT capability-building. The fact that service SMEs are overwhelmingly represented (93%) in the worst-performing configuration and completely absent (0%) in the most effective configuration while displaying the strongest IT infrastructure capabilities confirms that the IT productivity paradox is aggravated in service SMEs and calls for further research on this issue.     

How information systems help create OM capabilities: Consequents and antecedents of operational absorptive capacity

In contemporary business environments, the ability to manage operational knowledge is an important predictor of organizational competitiveness. Organizations invest large sums in various types of information technologies (ITs) to manage operational knowledge. Because of their superior storage, processing and communication capabilities, ITs offer technical platforms to build knowledge management (KM) capabilities. However, merely acquiring ITs are not sufficient, and organizations must structure information system (IS) designs to leverage ITs for building KM capabilities. We study how technical and strategic IS designs enhance operational absorptive capacity (OAC) – the KM capability of an operations management (OM) department. Specifically, we use a capabilities perspective of absorptive capacity to examine potential absorptive capacity (POAC) and realized absorptive capacity (ROAC) capabilities – the two OAC capabilities that create and utilize knowledge, respectively. Our theory proposes that integrated IS capability, – an aspect of technical IS design – is an antecedent of POAC and ROAC capabilities, and business-IT alignment – an aspect of strategic IS design – moderates the relationship between integrated IS capability and ROAC capability. Combining data gleaned from a multi-respondent survey with archival data from COMPUSTAT, we test our hypotheses using a dataset from 153 manufacturing organizations. By proposing that IS design enables an OM department's KM processes, i.e., the POAC and ROAC capabilities, our interdisciplinary theoretical framework opens the “black box” of OAC and contributes to improved understanding of IS and OM synergies. We offer a detailed discussion of our contributions to the literature at the IS-OM interface and implications for practitioners.     

Factors affecting trust between Korean IT firms and their Chinese counterparts

Trust is important in that it facilitates relational exchanges by permitting partners to transcend short-run inequities or risks to concentrate on long-term profits or gains. This study investigates what factors affect the trust between distribution-channel members, principally those between Korean IT firms and their exporting partners in China. We suggest that factors affecting trust include reputation, size, expertise, length of the relationship, communication, and satisfaction with previous outcomes of conflict episodes. Data were collected through a survey of 128 Korean IT firms, which have export-transaction relationships with Chinese buyers. The data strongly support the research hypotheses. As hypothesized, the results of data analysis show that reputation, communication, and satisfaction with previous outcomes tend to enhance trust. Additionally, we noticed that trust seems to decrease as the experience of conflict episodes increases.     

Taiwan's Entrepreneurs and International Coordination: Evolution of Global Production Network in Electronics and IT Industries

Abstract

This study applies the concept of coordinating entrepreneurship to explain the emergence of global production network. More specifically, this study explains and illustrates how Taiwan-born technopreneurs move between Silicon Valley and Taiwan's Hsinchu, thereby promoting Taiwan's computer and information technology (IT) industries. With their entrepreneurial spirit and social network, Taiwan-born technopreneurs even turn Dongguan, a farming village in south China, into a modern IT industrial city. This paper concludes that as a result of the coordinating efforts of these entrepreneurs, electronics and computer plants scattered around the globe are integrated into a global production network, as illustrated by IT firms in Silicon Valley, Hsinchu and Dongguan.     

基于比较的汽车制造管理系统能力提升创新途径研究

中国制造型企业普遍缺少工作研究过程,制造系统基础能力相对较弱。随着国家确定的工业化与信息化相融合政策引导,企业制造管理系统过度强调信息化而弱化工业工程在基础管理中的作用。文章研究信息技术与工业工程技术在制造管理过程中的关系和融合创新途径,通过F、B公司的对比,实例验证了途径的有效性和应用价值。     

经济全球化发展形势下IT企业的新型管理模式探讨

伴随着国民经济的快速发展,全球经济一体化高速发展达到了前所未有的顶峰。在当前经济全球化发展形式环境下,IT企业也出现了新型的管理模式。过去的一段时间里面,苹果公司在全球市场上的占有率达到了五分之二的份额。在紧张有序的扩张过程中,由于苹果公司有了相当数量的"苹果粉"从而使得销售渠道基本稳定,并且也催生出了基于这个销售渠道的新管理模式。而我国企业的管理模式还是陈旧的,基本不变的,产品在升级换代后并没有得到根本上的改观,同时生产成本的严重浪费,导致了利润率普遍不高,很难成为跨国际的大公司,大企业。