Sagnika Sen

Strategies for effective web services adoption for dynamic e-businesses

Web services hold the promise for the so-called dynamic e-business movement. Currently, many organizations are either in the process of adopting Web services technology or seriously evaluating this option. One of the major concerns of senior management in this endeavor is the cost of adopting Web services. In this paper, a model is proposed to evaluate an organizations position in a technology adoption space by evaluating its current level of information technology (IT) sophistication. The model identifies critical factors necessary for the successful adoption of Web services technology along three dimensions--intranet, extranet, and Internet. A simulation experiment is conducted to find the most cost-effective strategy for allocating resources to pursue Web services adoption. Alternative strategies are evaluated under three scenarios with different combinations of significance levels (weights) and diffusion levels of the critical factors. Our results suggest that different strategies should be employed, while organizations consider their existing organizational IT status and focus area. This study provides useful guidelines for management to utilize available resources effectively in the process of adopting Web services technology.

Incenting Managers Towards the Triple Bottom Line: An Agency and Social Norm Perspective

Research to date has identified CEO pay structure as an important factor in the environmental and social performance of the organization, but has not considered how pay may influence these sustainability efforts at the middle-management level. We address this void with an experimental manipulation of direct and indirect pay incentives for an environmental sustainability project and production cost savings project. Counter to our predictions, investment in sustainability versus cost savings is significantly lower when incentives for both projects are equivalent, and investment is only comparable when incentives for the sustainability project are superior. Further investigation using qualitative data attributes this to differences in the salient social norms that individuals hold and an apparent undervaluing of the indirect incentive derived through sustainability’s contribution to cost savings. The results shed light on primary ways in which human resource management practices may be used to embed support for sustainability initiatives throughout the organization.

Demand Heterogeneity in IT Infrastructure Services: Modeling and Evaluation of a Dynamic Approach to Defining Service Levels

A key feature of service-oriented models of information technology is the promise of prespecified quality levels enforceable via service level agreements (SLAs). This poses difficult management problems when considerable variability exists in user preferences and service demand within any organization. Because variance in expectations impact service levels, effective pricing and resource allocation mechanisms are needed to deliver services at the promised quality level. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for SLA formulation that is responsive to demand fluctuations and user preference variance, with the objective of maximizing organizational welfare of the participants. This formulation features a dynamic priority based price-penalty scheme targeted to individual users. An analytical model is presented and evaluated for effectiveness of a proposed dynamic priority-based pricing scheme vis-a-vis a baseline fixed-price single-quality level SLA. Simulations using data from an existing SLA is used to provide evidence that the proposed dynamic pricing scheme is likely to be more effective than a fixed-price approach from a system welfare perspective.

Demand Information Sharing in Heterogeneous IT Services Environments

In an information technology services outsourcing arrangement, variance in demand volume and individual user preferences pose significant challenges to the provider organization in making resource allocation decisions. Such variations affect service levels, especially under fixed resource constraints. We explore the possible role of periodic demand information sharing and subsequent resource-level adjustments as a means of addressing issues arising from demand variation. As information exchange alters the dynamics of the relationship between the customer and provider organizations, incorporating information sharing in service-level agreements requires modifying current pricing schemes. A pricing heuristic is developed and tested under varying levels of information accuracy and granularity. The heuristic is shown to provide better economic welfare for both participants in comparison to the baseline pricing strategies considered. Also, it is shown that information, even at a coarse level of granularity, is very effective in providing stable service levels—a finding that is encouraging for enhanced collaborations between customer and provider organizations in outsourcing arrangements.

Interdependencies in IT Infrastructure Services: Analyzing Service Processes for Optimal Incentive Design

Information technology (IT) infrastructure outsourcing arrangements involve multiple services and processes that are interdependent. The interdependencies pose significant challenges in designing appropriate incentives to influence a providers effort-allocation decisions. By integrating process modeling fundamentals with multitask agency theory, we enumerate the base set of possible interrelationships among different IT service processes and derive corresponding optimal incentives. Our results demonstrate the impacts of risk profile, random noise, value-cost ratio, and process structure on optimal incentive rates. We find that the current practice of treating IT services as essentially independent is optimal only in limited settings where both the service provider and customer are risk neutral. Interestingly, incongruent performance measures require optimal incentive rates to respond in complex ways to the strength of coupling between services and the complementarity and substitutability of services. We also analyze more complex process scenarios using different combinations of the base set. The results demonstrate that, while the findings from the base set largely hold, the value-cost ratio of the services and the performance measure congruity can pose unique challenges in determining incentive rates.

Case studies in research: A value-based approach to the ex-ante evaluation of IT enabled business process improvement projects

In this study, we propose a value-based management approach for assessing the potential for process improvements enabled by an information technology (IT) solution. Based on activity based management concepts, we perform a granular, process level analysis on workflow structure and associated resource consumption to provide quantifiable measures of potential improvement prior to system implementation. The proof of concept of this approach is illustrated in a southern United States county in need of integrating different government branches through an ERP implementation. Based on prior research, we first provide a catalog of non-value added (NVA) activities that can be used in management control and governance procedures for the systematic identification of process inefficiencies. Next, by breaking down processes to the level of atomic activities, we show that minimizing NVA activities provides a systematic means to mitigate process inefficiencies. A significant observation is that different NVA activities may impact process performance to varying degrees. Consequently, line items in the request for proposals (RFP) should be weighted accordingly during the vendor selection process, contrary to the common practice of treating all line items equally.

Ensuring reliability in B2B services: Fault tolerant inter-organizational workflows

In the age of Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration, ensuring reliability of workflows underlying inter-organizational business processes is of significant importance. There are, however, quite a few challenges towards achieving seamless operation. Such challenges arise from heterogeneity in infrastructure and coordination mechanism at participant organizations, as well as time and cost associated with recovery from failure. Our research presents foundations for a reliable scheme for recovery from failure of workflow processes spanning through multiple business entities. First, a system model is adapted from the mobile computing literature that serves to establish the requirements to be enforced by each participating organization. In our model, we adopt the Maximal Sequence Path (MSP) approach from Yoo et al. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2132:222–236, 2001), as a means of decomposing workflows into mobile agent-driven processes that communicate via web services at each organization. This decomposition ensures defining logical points within the dynamics of a workflow instance for locating accurate and consistent states of the system for recovery in case of a failure. Then, a set of algorithms for various business scenarios are developed and presented as practical solutions. These algorithms are shown to create checkpoints such that the system is always in a globally consistent state. As such, these algorithms constitute a set of standards that can be incorporated in business process management suites that support reliable inter-organizational collaboration.

Dynamic decision support through instantiation of UEML representations

The resulting system inherits (on demand) from representations developed and maintained by partners engaged in business alliances.

Employees and sustainability: the role of incentives

Purpose – Organizational sustainability has become a priority on many corporate agendas. How to integrate sustainability efforts throughout the organization, however, remains a challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine two factors that potentially enhance incentive effects on employee engagement in environmental objectives: explicit organizational values for sustainability and the performance objective’s complementarity with incented financial objectives. Design/methodology/approach – The authors employed a quasi-experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, including a status quo condition against which the treatments were contrasted. Participants (n=400) were comprised of a cross-section of US employees from a wide range of occupations and industries. A post hoc qualitative analysis provided additional insights. Findings – Incentive effects were enhanced (i.e. preference for the environmental objective was significantly higher) when the environmenta...

An Activity Based Framework for Business Process Evaluation: Case Study of a County's Evaluation of an Integrated Court System

Organizations often need to invest in a variety of Information Technology (IT) projects to improve their business processes. Traditional methods of investment justification largely depend on qualitative judgment and lack in their capability to provide a quantifiable assessment prior to project initiation. In this article, based on Activity Based Management (ABM); we propose a standardized process improvement framework. The proposed framework enables quantitative assessment of the impact of different activities on performance. Based on the assessment, process improvement initiatives can be undertaken to reduce the impact of specific Non-Value-Added activities on performance measures. Pre and post implementation evaluation of such measures can be used to gauge process improvement. We elaborate the framework using a case study in a southern United States county where the different departments in its judicial system needed an integrated IT solution to track its cases as it progresses through the justice system.