Technology management for doing business in the knowledge based economy

Abstract

This minitrack is the continuation of the former minitrack on Technology Management: Systems and Processes. The purpose of the mini-track is to stimulate applications of systems sciences to the management of technology (MoT) by providing a forum for the exchange of new research findings and concepts related to MoT and the creation of value. The scope includes both systems for managing technology (cases and models of success, the identification of critical success factors in MoT) and the social and psychological factors, models, and processes of organizational change and technology implementation throughout the value chain. The unifying theme is that of managing technology strategically so that an organization creates value for its stakeholders and learns from its implementation of technologies, particularly information technologies.In their paper 'Physical Retailing takes on Internet Retailing: A Preliminary Model of Threats and Opportunities for the Book Industry' Kaarst-Brown and Evaristo present a model of Internet adoption based on perceived threats and opportunities in five categories. These five areas of potential threat or opportunity include perceptions about firm characteristics, web-retailing experience, the competitive environment, internal resources and external resources. They propose that the combination of these perceptions influence very specifically the choice to adopt, Internet presence, and the nature to strategy of the site.The paper 'Building the record keeping system. Process improvement triggered by management of Archival documents ' by van Bussel, Ector, van der Pijl and Ribbers is resulting from a research project at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, in which the fields of organization, information and archival studies have been integrated. We argue that the archivistic concept of the record keeping system, in information-intensive organizations, can be used as an instrument for improving the performance of the document-flow in a business process, and, as a result, on the process.Guest speaker Pauline Sheldon is Professor at the School of Travel Industry Management, University of Hawaii. She will talk about the application of IT in the tourism industry.In 'Aligning business and information technology through the Balanced Scorecard at a major Canadian financial group: its status measured with an IT BSC Maturity Model' van Grembergen and Saull describe the implementation of an IT balanced scorecard in a Canadian financial group.Finally Gottschalk and Solli-Saeder present ' Integration between Business Planning and Information SystemsPlanning: An Analysis of Technology Exploration and Exploitation in Different Value Configurations'. This paper evaluates ten integration mechanisms and four integration stages in Norwegian companies. Most of the organizations practiced sequential and reciprocal integration. Furthermore, this paper investigates technology exploration and exploitation in different value configurations.Thus, most papers focus on the way new information technologies can be aligned with the business needs. Remarkably the control process of IT does not get very much attention. Only one paper focuses on the balanced scorecard as a tool for controlling IT. This is in contrast with the large amount of interest for control frameworks like ITIL in the European situation and the growing importance of the COBIT framework for strategic control of IT in the field of IT auditing. At the end of this minitrack, we would like to discuss with the participants whether these trends need more attention in coming HICSS conferences.