There are many complicated and seemingly intractable problems in the health care sector. Past ways to address them have involved political responses, economic restructuring, biomedical and scientific studies, and managerialist or business-oriented tools. Few methods have enabled us to develop a systematic response to problems. Our version of soft systems methodology, SSM+, seems to improve prob...

FODAcom is a customization of the FODA domain analysis method for the Italian telecommunications authority, for application within its IT2000 restructuring program. This paper describes recent experience gained in the application of the method within a business unit of Telecom Italia. Three analysis models that were constructed for the Service Provisioning Control (SPC) domain are presented and...

Case Management is emerging as an important paradigm for Business Process Management. The Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) model is a recent case management approach that substantially influences OMG’s emerging Case Management Modeling Notation standard. We study the problem of outsourcing part of a GSM schema to another party, and develop a framework that supports splitting and outsourcing of GSM s...

The Industrial Restructuring Project (IRP) was initiated at the beginning of 1996 as the KwaZulu-Natal Industrial Restructuring Project (KZN IRP). The project initially focused exclusively on KwaZulu-Natal, but is now aimed at supporting industrial policy in South Africa at the national, provincial and local levels. It is facilitated by international experts and is based at the School of Develo...

We develop a theory of cyclical unemployment, which relates the processes of job creation and job destruction over the business cycle, to the processes of restructuring, innovation and implementation arising from a model of endogenous cyclical growth. Due to a moral hazard problem, production workers are paid efficiency wages and experience involuntary unemployment. The model captures two key c...

Restructuring of the Brazilian financial sector was consolidated through the combination of mass lay-offs, automation, and outsourcing, in addition to business re-engineering with leveling of hierarchical echelons, labor casualization, and multi-function jobs. In order to comply and deal with the new demands, bank employees had to increase their schooling, become multi-functional and expert sal...

This case study presents the implementation of information systems in a context of global enterprise restructuring. Based on the background of the second organisational restructuring of Acer Group, it evidences the combinations of corporate strategy and information technology (IT) practices and shows how this enterprise shifts and reallocates its resources in order to concentrate on the most pr...

Recent seminal developments in organization economics, namely the decision rights approach, offer an opportunity to shed new light on an old question, the design of effective institutions. Drawing on conclusions about how and why firm organizational boundaries change, the decision rights approach is used in this article as an analytical lens to develop a new method for assessing institutional a...

The Asia-Pacific region generates over half of global economic activity (54.2%) and about 43.7% of global trade, and is the most dynamic region in the global economy. At the core of this is an increasingly dynamic, vibrant and entrepreneurial small-medium sized enterprise sector. Advances in information and communications technology, market liberalisation and moves towards closer regional econo...