Journal of Information Technology Management
Volume:1 Issue: 1, 2008

In today’s business world, organizations are continually striving to streamline their operations, increase their ability to respond to the market conditions and find new opportunities to differentiate themselves from their competitors; these conditions have caused them to focus more on business processes and customers. Every research has just discussed one dimension of this process, but they have failed to provide a comprehensive and integrated model including all the dimensions and indicators of business process and the interactions and interconnectedness among them. This paper reviews the literature related to business processes to identify the dimensions and indicators of business processes and then employ an advanced methodology called interpretive structural modeling approach to design an integrated and total business process orientation model. The results indicate that the comprehensive model of business process orientation includes six interactive and interconnected dimensions: structure, belief and attitudes, framework, operations strategy, performance management and process productivity: Reach ability matrix, driver power- dependence matrix and calibration diagram show that process belief and attitude is the key dimension affecting other dimensions. On the other hand, process productivity has the highest level of dependence on other dimensions and functions as an output for business process orientation modeling.

In the recent years, asset based view & consequently intellectual capital strategy in technology acquisition strategy has been seriously considered by scholars of management science especially in the field of management technology. One of the reasons of this research is to identify & explain strength & weakness of each technology acquisition strategy & explanation of its relationship with intellectual capital. Result of this field study shows significant difference within present & desirable technology acquisition strategy. At the end by using a multi attribute decision making based on survey of intellectual capital & technology acquisition questionnaire, we ranked different technology acquisition strategy. It seems a holistic approach in organizational assets including tangible & intangible assets (social capital, intellectual capital etc…) can be a better framework for selecting technology acquisition strategy.

The role of information sharing in achieving competitiveness has been the hub of attention of many recent researches at different level of company business and supply chain. In this research, the impact of information sharing on competitive strategies and the performance of supply chain is emphasized. To do so, regarding to competitive advantage of steel industry in Iran, the steel supply chain consists of the three companies of "Mobarakeh Steel", "Khuzestan Steel", and "Isfahan Steel" was selected and the opinion of 95 managers and experts of these companies were surveyed. Int the next stage, the structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. The results indicate that there is a meaningful and positive relation between information sharing on competitive strategies of supply chain and also the same relationship between competitive strategies of supply chain and performance of supply chain.

Nowadays, Outsourcing relationship in the area of information technology for local organizations is not an option, but a necessity strategy. By outsourcing, organizations can focus on core functions, decrease their operational costs and technology risk, and to use external sources to achieve the organizational objectives. In this research, local organizations in Zanjan province which have outsourcing experience in the area of information technology, were selected as statistical population, to study the effect of knowledge sharing based on outsourcing with regards to contingency approach. Findings of this research showed that knowledge sharing with regards to situational variables, leads to influence success of IT outsourcing. To put it in other words, relationship between knowledge sharing as independent variable and success of IT outsourcing as a dependent variable, is influenced by partnership and organizational capabilities. Therefore, IT outsourcing is a successful strategy if partners through partnership to share their organizational knowledge and by enhancing their organizational capabilities to use the transferred knowledge in an effective way.

The paper reveals the findings of a case study in "Raja Passenger Trains Company". This company has been established in 1996 and is affiliated to the Railways of Islamic Republic of Iran. Raja Company is currently resorting to the skills and experiences of over 3000 staff, and the number of passengers has been increased since its establishment. One of the Raja's policies to facilitate ticket sales is to provide a computer-based ticket reservation system and selling ticket through Internet. The findings of our research show high level of customer satisfaction in many indicators yet weak in some others, paper concludes with some suggestions to improve the quality of Internet ticket sales in Raja Company.

These days, achieving IT-business integration and gaining competitive advantage essentially rely on successful development of information technology strategic plan. According to the importance of the subject, whether or not a company achieves its goals effectively and implement IT master plan successfully depends on the investigating all the factors affecting on IT-business alignment. This investigation is the primary step. Therefore in this research we sought to propose a conceptual model to evaluate the organizational readiness for establishing such alignment. In this regard firstly we conduct a thorough literature review to study previous models and frameworks related to such subjects. After that the Luftman’s model is chose as a core and basic model till we used benchmarking to revise it with compare to the other frameworks and models. Finally the proposed model was used in a case study to evaluate the organizational readiness for establishing IT-business alignment.

In today?s competitive, complex and rapidly changing business world, based on information, it is very essential to have timely and accurate insight of business conditions and activities to check whether they are healthy and according to business norms. Information obviously plays a critical role to have this insight and it can only be of avail, if it is directional, focused, timely and easily accessible and also if it gives both the macro/strategic and the micro/operational view of the company. Due to the advancement in information technology, state-of-the-art technologies like business intelligence (BI) have been developed to provide us the above features. This paper provides reader an insight of BI and its strategic importance. It also explains how BI can be effective technology in industries like banking to overcome critical issue like fraud discovery and detection. The methodology, based on BI, in the form of model named BI model for fraud discovery and detection has been devised and suggested at the end of paper along with it its details for overcoming the above mentioned issue in more effective and efficient manner.

In this study, a hybrid algorithm is presented to tackle multi-variables robust design problem. The proposed algorithm comprises neural networks (NNs) and co-evolution genetic algorithm (CGA) in which neural networks are as a function approximation tool used to estimate a map between process variables. Furthermore, in order to make a robust optimization of response variables, co-evolution algorithm is applied to solve constructed model of process. Results of CGA are compared with genetic algorithm (GA). This algorithm is tested in a case study of open-end spinning process.