Software organizations have been struggling for decades to improve the quality of their products by improving their software development processes. Designing an improvement program for a software development process is a demanding and complex task. This task consists of two main processes: the assessment process and the improvement process. A successful improvement process requires first a succ...

As a new means of management, empowerment has received the attention of small and mediumsized enterprises. Managers in small and medium-sized enterprises empower front-line salespeople, which will make front-line salespeople grasp the moment of truth, improve the on-site contact quality between salespeople and customers, increase customer satisfaction, bring the improvement of sales performance...

The software industry is an important economic activity in industrial countries. Nowadays the investment in this field measured in millions of dollars, the IT organizations varies in their size and role. An area of concern to IT organizations is implementing and adopting Software Process Improvement (SPI) models. For many years, researchers have developed several SPI model, most of which like C...

This whitepaper discusses the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises. Furthermore it contains subjects like internationalization of SMEs in the time of globalization, reasons for internationalization, SMEs’ motives for internationalization, different forms and models of SMEs internationalization and dealing with internationalization by SMEs. INTERNATIONALIZATION OF SMES IN T...

Where participation of small enterprises in vocational education and training decreases, it risks obsolescence of their knowledge base compared to competitors. Currently we are participating in two projects that aim to address the issue of how to boost take-up of informal learning at the workplace: Learning Layers and BOOST. Previous projects [e.g., ROLE] show the importance of having personali...

Today many large, medium and small software companies experience difficulties in establishing quality improvement initiatives, although we can observe that unlike large companies, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) find it particularly difficult to adapt these quality initiatives. This is further complicated since most software quality initiatives, such as, e.g., CMM and SPICE, primarily...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce to small and medium enterprises, a quick and easy adaptation of strategic planning and deployment methods being used by large corporations world wide. A system of analyses coupled with powerful, yet easy to perform thinking tools will be explained through a case studies of manufacturing and service companies. This system will help executives and manager...

The theory of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) has been developed almost exclusively from the study of large deals by large firms. In this paper we argue that the behaviour and success of M&As by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) may be significantly different. Accordingly, we revisit established M&A theories, and develop a theoretical framework, and several testable hypotheses, regardin...

This paper investigates the role of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the context of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). The paper reports on research findings from a case study that has been conducted in 14 SMEs, operating in steel manufacturing and woodworking. By dividing the enterprises into three different groups; medium-sized, small, and micro enterprises, this study pro...