A new way of thinking about IT project management practices: Early empirical results

Despite decades of efforts to improve the management of Information Technology (IT) projects, failure rates remain high. This article first reviews literature about information systems success and IT project success. Most of the improvement efforts have focused on advancing variations of the traditional project management paradigm, such as embodied by the Project Management Body of Knowledge. This article describes a new way of thinking about managing IT project called Value-Driven Change Leadership (VDCL), and reports the results of an initial empirical exploration to identify project success factors stemming from VDCL as well as the traditional paradigm. The results are based on data collected from 16 medium-sized IT-intensive projects at eight Chicago-based organizations from six different industries. The results, although not based on a large sample, point to several project management practices associated with project success that stem from both the traditional paradigm as well as VDCL. For example, traditional practices managing stakeholders’ expectations, scope, and schedule are associated with project success, as are practices stemming from VDCL, such as managing the end-product’s architecture, business value added, and the organization change associated with systems implementation. The results of this study also suggest that further research into new ways of thinking about IT project management may be fruitful.     

IT project portfolio governance: The emerging operation manager

Today's information technology (IT) organizations are under pressure to meet or improve IT service levels for critical business functions. Various industry standards, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) standard, have gained wide acceptance as comprehensive methodologies for improving the effectiveness of IT management. The role of IT operations management is subsequently changing from a component orientation (such as networks, systems, storage, database, and applications) to managing business‐oriented, end‐to‐end IT services. This article presents a detailed analysis of available literature in order to identify the most appropriate competencies and necessary skill sets that will be needed by an operation manager for strategic business alignment.     

The impact of sourcing enterprise system use and work process interdependence on sourcing professionals’ job outcomes

We examine sourcing professionals’ work context to conceptualize how they use sourcing enterprise systems (SESs) and to understand when SES use results in positive/negative job outcomes. We differentiate between SES use for supplier selection and supplier governance, identify sourcing professionals’ work process interdependence as a moderator for the impacts of SES use on job satisfaction, and suggest job satisfaction mediates the impacts of SES use on job performance. We conducted a field study of sourcing professionals’ SES use at one of the largest consumer product companies in the United States, which has implemented an SES to innovate its sourcing professionals’ work processes. Based on our analysis of the survey and qualitative data we collected, we found the impacts of both types of SES use (1) to be negative on job satisfaction when work process interdependence was high, (2) to be positive on job satisfaction when work process interdependence was low, and (3) to be mediated by job satisfaction for job performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature at the intersection of information systems and operations management as well as for the information technology enabled innovation of sourcing processes and, more generally, complex business processes.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.     

Critical success factors for mutual collaboration with suppliers in IT outsourcing industry: a case study of a top IT outsourcing company in Korea

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, information technology (IT) outsourcing companies face enduring demands to reduce cost while increasing productivity. This pressure leads many IT outsourcing companies to rely on outsourcing arrangements with IT personnel suppliers. In order to maximise efficiency, outsourcing companies have focused on fostering high-performing suppliers through improved collaboration and mutual relations. However, it is very difficult to advance to a long-term partnership using the existing outsourcing process because of insufficient collaboration between IT outsourcing companies and their suppliers. Based on collaboration perspective of supply chain management (SCM), this study identifies the critical success factors for collaborative strategic partnerships and presents an evaluation framework for assessing and managing suppliers. We have developed an organisational process model for Supplier relationship management (SRM)-based collaboration which includes some of the key constructs from the previous studies and interviews with the IT outsourcing industry people. In this study, we will identify four types of strategic suppliers and suggest approaches for improving collaborative relationship between an IT outsourcing company and its partner companies. In addition, to validate the feasibility of the proposed model, we applied it to a well-known Korean IT outsourcing company ‘A’.     

浅谈IPv6技术的发展前景及影响

IPv6作为新一代互联网的核心协议,必将取代IPv4。本文通过对IPv6特点和发展现状的简要描述,论述IPv6现状及前景,IPv6终将代替IPv4,以适应时代发展的需要。所以IPv6技术越来越受到人们的关注与讨论。     

全球应用开发外包项目特点及对接包商项目招聘人员的要求

随着精细化分工的发展,由专业人员或机构来从事专门的业务的方式已经渗透到各个行业,服务外包的发展在各个领域内日趋成熟。IT业务外包作为这股潮流中一个非常重要的部分,在全球内发展迅猛。     

The Nexus between IT Investment and Banking Performance in Korea

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of ‘Asian Value (AV)’ discourse upon the future of ASEM. The contention here is that such discourse within ASEM is contributing to the construction of a still unidentified Asian region. Moreover, AV discourse has been initiated by individual Asian leaders in order to enhance Asia's bargaining position vis‐à‐vis Europe, emphasizing the cultural differences between the two regions.     

日本信息化的相对落后与日本政府的对策

在全球性信息化革命的浪潮中,日本的信息化虽然也迅猛发展,但与欧美各国及亚洲“四小”相比较,还处于相对落后的状态。主要表现为IT基础设施、电子商务交易、社会信息化、软件开发等方面的落后和软件人才不足。而落后的原因则是由于经济长期停滞、产业结构调整滞后、电信市场竞争不足以及宏观经济体制落后的影响等。日本政府制定了《IT国家基本战略》,并通过财政措施扩大公共投资、改革税制、放宽网上交易等限制;完善交易合同规则以及消费者保护措施制度等,为改变其相对落后的状态,采取了一系列积极的对策。     

Do formal contracts and relational governance function as substitutes or complements?

Relational exchange arrangements supported by trust are commonly viewed as substitutes for complex contracts in interorganizational exchanges. Many argue that formal contracts actually undermine trust and thereby encourage the opportunistic behavior they are designed to discourage. In this paper, we develop and test an alternative perspective: that formal contracts and relational governance function as complements. Using data from a sample of information service exchanges, we find empirical support for this proposition of complementarity. Managers appear to couple their increasingly customized contracts with high levels of relational governance (and vice versa). Moreover, this interdependence underlies their ability to generate improvements in exchange performance. Our results concerning the determinants of these governance choices show their distinct origins, which further augments their complementarity in practice. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.