Nils-Göran Olve

Control systems in multibusiness companies:: from performance management to strategic management

This article discusses the role of control systems in multibusiness companies. The focus is on formulation and implementation of corporate and business unit strategies. Three widely used categories of control models are discussed: (1) models for performance management, (2) models for value-based management, and (3) models for strategic management. The discussion is based upon central normative texts and examples from applications in Nordic companies. The description and discussion of the control models and their features should facilitate decision-making on the design and use of control systems in multibusiness companies.

Economic analyses for ICT in elderly healthcare: questions and challenges

Elderly healthcare is a likely arena for extensive change in years to come, and information and communication technology (ICT) will be an important enabler of such change. Before investing in new systems and practices, there will be a call for evaluations. To date, economic evaluations of ICT applications in healthcare have been rare, and a literature review did not turn up any examples of such evaluations of elderly care. The options for elderly care will often have to transcend organization boundaries, as the point of many ICT initiatives now being discussed is to make healthcare institutions, home care, and self-administered care interact in new ways. Analysts performing evaluations of such complex changes will have to be very specific about such classic issues in economic analysis as defining alternatives, the basis for comparison, and combining different indicators into an overall evaluation.

Locating ICT's benefits in elderly care

The impact of information and communication technology (ICT) is indirect and depends on redesign of practices and structures also outside health care. Improvements will only be realized if all parties involved can coordinate their efforts to take advantage of new technology. A ‘package’ of changed work practices and structures extending across organizational boundaries needs to be designed and implemented. This is very different from the common conception of introducing new ICT tools. Calls for ‘evaluation of benefits’ before new ICT systems are introduced need to recognize this complexity. This article investigates how analysis and economic evaluations can be used to improve decision-making when new applications are proposed. This is done by drawing parallels with experiences from other industries. We conclude that the entire ‘change package’ should be analysed for its consequences on the well-being of care recipients, and the requirements it presents for capital investments and changed labour inputs, in particular changed competence needs. Some concepts and structures are suggested for such evaluations.

Mapping Health Outcome and Costs when Coordinating Local Information System Redesign.

As costs for healthcare are rising in society, information systems are often seen as enablers of new cost-saving healthcare processes. But an on-going deployment of a wide range of new kinds of systems requires close attention to interoperability between new and legacy systems. Another challenge is to assure that the healthcare professions are given realistic opportunities to play an active part in designing the new ways of working that the new, integrated systems are designed to support. We argue that a feasible way to approach such a user participation in design of work processes and systems is to extend well known user-survey and strategy-mapping methods with the new value-based healthcare approach which invites health professionals to participate in strategic assessments of health outcome and costs along the care chain in which they work. We also argue that such a combination of practical research methods resonates well with Techno-Anthropologys foregrounding of ethical considerations to inform the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of interactional competencies in health informatics research.

Increasing the Bandwidth in Telework Control

This chapter focuses on information providing activities in geographically dispersed organizations, and how these activities can be visualized, planned and monitored. Our belief is that the management control systems influence what is regarded as important in an organization (Simons, 1995). The organization can consequently redesign their management control systems to manifest the importance of information sharing.