BACKGROUND Developing effective methods for measuring the health impact of social franchising programs is vital for demonstrating the value of this innovative service delivery model, particularly given its rapid expansion worldwide. Currently, these programs define success through patient volume and number of outlets, widely acknowledged as poor reflections of true program impact. An existing m...

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of cooperative relationships, networks, and coopetition. The different types of agreements and the main theoretical approaches of cooperation are presented. The chapter explores the evolution of cooperation within inter-organizational networks and the emergence of other networks such as business ecosystems. The concept of coopetition, defined as the abilit...

In today's competitive environment, one of the new tools in the field ofinformation technology is business or organizational dashboards that are as abackup in the process of strategic management of organizations. The aim ofthis study is building a prototype of a hospital dashboard on the principles andguidelines of dashboards and evaluating it based on End UserComputing Satisfaction (EUCS). The...

Investment is a major determinant of economic growth, both in reference to the level of the capital stock and its productivity, but has been deficient in poor developing countries. A particular concern for poor countries has been relatively low levels of foreign direct investment (FDI), and a low impact of such investment on growth. The paper focuses on sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries and o...

In the evolving service market there is a good chance for companies to update their IT environment or cut their IT costs by outsourcing some parts of their IT processes. This implies meeting the challenge of service quality. For common services this can be handled by changing the service provider. But this is not valid for enterprises that want to outsource rather complex and individually compo...

A trading partner agreement can be used to regulate the cooperation of organizations. It is typically written in natural language which gives rise to misunderstandings when partners interpret it differently. In addition it is often compiled in an unsystematic way so that we might easily overlook a situation the contract should have covered. It is therefore desirable to have a method that can su...

The issue of business process design for a complex web service provision is gaining attention and has been addressed in a number of recent works. We argue that calculation of global quality of service and protection, which then is negotiated with a client as service and protection level agreements, for complex web services must be based on business process. The quality of service in web service...

As discussed in Merton (1993, Sections 5 and 6) and here in the section to follow, the effective delivery of many financial services depends critically on the credit-worthiness of the provider financial institution. Such service activities are said to be 'credit-sensitive'. The intermediary's credit standing can cause significant extemality-like effects on the various business activities of the...

Many proposals to model service level agreements (SLAs) have been 1 elaborated in order to automate different stages of the service lifecycle such as 2 monitoring, implementation or deployment. All of them have been designed for 3 computational services and are not well–suited for other types of services such 4 as business process outsourcing (BPO) services. However, BPO services sup5 ported by...

The vision of a worldwide computing grid evokes the scenario of electronic markets for grid services. For such a market, explicit formal statements of both obligations and guarantees regarding grid services in a business relationship are needed; these are referred to as service level agreements (SLAs). The objects of our investigation are current specifications and standards for SLAs. We addres...