The rate of failure of IT projects has remained little changed in survey after survey over the past 15-20 years-over 40-50%. This has happened in spite of new technology, innovative methods and tools, and different management methods. Why does this happen? Why can't the situation be better? One reason is that many think of each IT effort as unique. In reality many IT projects are very similar at a high, strategic level. Where they differ is in the people and exact events-the detail. If you read the literature or have been in information systems or IT for some time, you have seen the same reasons for failure and the same problems and issues recur again and again. In this book IT Management experts Ben Lientz and Lee Larssen show you how to identify and track the recurring issues leading to failure in IT projects and provide a proven, modern method for addressing them. By following the recommendations in this books readers can significantly reduce the risk of IT failures and increase the rate of success. Benefits of using this approach: * Issues are identified earlier-giving more time for solution and action. * Issues are resolved more consistently since the approach tracks on their repetition. * You get an early warning of problems in IT work-before the budget or schedule fall apart. * Management tends to have more realistic expectations with an awareness of issues. * Users and managers have greater confidence in IT due to the improved handling of issues. * Since the number of issues tends to stabilize in an organization, the IT organization and management get better at detecting, preventing, and dealing with issues over time-cumulative improvement. * Giving attention to issues make users more realistic in their requests and acts to deter requirement changes and scope creep.

The ever increasing public demand and the setting-up of national and international legislation on safety assessment of potentially dangerous plant require that a correspondingly increased effort be devoted by regulatory bodies and industrial organizations to reliability data in order to produce safety analyses. Reliability data are also needed to assess availability of plant and services and to improve quality of production processes, in particular, to meet the needs of plant operators and/or designers regarding maintenance planning and production availability. The need for an educational effort in the field of data acquisition and processing has been stressed within the framework of EuReDatA, an association of organizations operating reliability data banks. This association aims to promote data exchange and pooling of data between organizations and to encourage the adoption of compatible standards and basic definitions for a consistent exchange of reliability data. Such basic definitions are considered to be essential in order to improve quality. To cover issues directly linked to the above areas, space is devoted to the definition of failure events, comon cause and human error data, feedback of operational and disturbance data, event data analysis, life-time distributions, cumulative distribution functions, density functions, Bayesian inference methods, mutivariate analysis, fuzzy sets and possibility theory.

This cutting-edge book presents the theory and practice of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), which is used for strategically investigating disputes in any field to enable informed decision making. It clearly explains how GMCR can determine what is the best a particular decision maker (DM) can independently achieve in dynamic interaction with others. Moves and counter-moves follow various stability definitions reflecting human behavior under conflict. The book defines a wide range of preference structures to represent a DM's comparisons of states or scenarios: equally preferred, more or less preferred; unknown; degrees of strength of preference; and hybrid. It vividly describes how GMCR can ascertain whether a DM can fare even better by cooperating with others in a coalition. The book portrays how a conflict can evolve from the status quo to a desirable resolution, and provides a universal design for a decision support system to implement the innovative decision technologies using the matrix formulation of GMCR. Further, it illustrates the key ideas using real-world conflicts and supplies problems at the end of each chapter. As such, this highly instructive book benefits teachers, mentors, students and practitioners in any area where conflict arises.

Anthony Von Mickle is President of The Investment Forum, a real estate and equity investments group based in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Based upon his interests, through formal education and practical research, he has learned that actively pursuing what you want, regardless of your personal background, is a key ingredient to the attainment of accumulated wealth in residential real estate investments. Wealth can be acquired in this field by anyone willing to do the work and formulate this goal. Real Estate for Real People: A Guide to Achieving Profitability in Residential Real Estate Investing is a guide to help long-term investors seeking profit in residential real estate investments. Von Mickle stresses the initial accumulation of preliminary information which helps prevent problems down the line. For example, examine zoning and planning details of the economic development office in the counties in which you wish to invest in property, obtain tax assessment information and detail an exit strategy. Von Mickle provides valuable tools that can help secure profitable residential real estate investments. Learn from an expert who has extensively studied extremely wealthy people and successfully utilized their common traits of passion, timing, fear, and leverage. He shares how anyone can use these traits to their financial advantage.

While many nations are still struggling from the global financial crisis and regaining their financial security, investors are considering alternative options for investing their money; and the secure financial sector is China appears as a viable option. International Cross-Listing of Chinese Firms examines the successful techniques and strategies that Chinese companies are using within their financial practices. It highlights the foreign-based multinational enterprise theories related to the major international stock markets. By providing the latest theories and research, this book will be beneficial for business practitioners, researchers, and managers interested in the relationship between cross-listing and firm valuation of Chinese firms.

This research study attempts to provide a comprehensive CSR literature review, analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues from the strategic decision-making (SDM) perspective, and investigate the process of managers' CSR- related SDM in China. In particular, it utilizes content analysis to examine selected CSR articles from published studies, in order to evaluate the trends in CSR theory development as well as to identify the variables, constructs, and relationships within CSR theory. The review indicates that CSR should be involved in organizational strategies. Therefore, this study reviews the relevant theoretical and empirical literature in the SDM area. Firstly, it summarizes the broader context of strategic decisions and points out factors in the external environment and organizational characteristics that influence the SDM process of managers. Secondly, it articulates the influences of individual characteristics on the SDM. Thirdly, it examines the process of SDM using the rational and bounded rationality theory of decision making. Finally, on the basis of the SDM model, the author generates a research model which proposes the links between vital and influential factors from an integrated perspective. This book also provides a detailed description of how to choose a proper method for the CSR-related SDM research, the process of survey design, sampling methods, and survey administration. In particular, the author utilized a policy-capturing method to develop a series of scenarios concerning CSR activities and an explanation of this method is provided. It reports research findings of this study and provides an extensive and thorough discussion and compares it with previous empirical studies. The conclusion summarizes the research findings and their theoretical and practical implications.

In this timely report, a number of chief executive officers talk frankly about how they've managed to increase profits and improve market shares for their companies without government intervention even in the face of economic hard times and foreign competition. Drawn from companies in both well-established and fast-growing non-traditional industries, these success stories represent a broad range of experience and expertise. In addition, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Alan M. Kantrow offer their own perspectives on corporate success. "How to Compete Beyond the 1980S" clearly shows that, through the increased imagination and efforts of individual corporations and institutions, America's lagging productivity can be revived.

This book tells you everything you need to know, everything you need to think about, and everything you need to do to be a successful manager. It covers all aspects of management, giving you the confidence to tackle things thoroughly and help develop your own managerial competence. Every one of the checklists in this book is fast, focused and has been specially written for busy managers like you. Quickly access hundreds of essential tips and tricks, discover vital insider knowledge and winning strategies, and learn everything you need to know to be a brilliant manager. * Make the best informed decisions every time * Understand the problems that you might face every day * Become a more systematic and thorough manager "Had I not seen it and read it, I would not have believed it was possible to reduce all those fine-sounding theories to such straightforward lists - you are a genius, even if you are doing me out of a job." Charles Handy

This book introduces a new paradigm called 'Optimization in Changeable Spaces' (OCS) as a useful tool for decision making and problem solving. It illustrates how OCS incorporates, searches, and constructively restructures the parameters, tangible and intangible, involved in the process of decision making. The book elaborates on OCS problems that can be modeled and solved effectively by using the concepts of competence set analysis, Habitual Domain (HD) and the mental operators called the 7-8-9 principles of deep knowledge of HD. In addition, new concepts of covering and discovering processes are proposed and formulated as mathematical tools to solve OCS problems. The book also includes reformulations of a number of illustrative real-life challenging problems that cannot be solved by traditional optimization techniques into OCS problems, and details how they can be addressed. Beyond that, it also includes perspectives related to innovation dynamics, management, artificial intelligence, artificial and e-economics, scientific discovery and knowledge extraction. This book will be of interest to managers of businesses and institutions, policy makers, and educators and students of decision making and behavior in DBA and/or MBA.

This book systematically examines and quantifies industrial problems by assessing the complexity and safety of large systems. It includes chapters on system performance management, software reliability assessment, testing, quality management, analysis using soft computing techniques, management analytics, and business analytics, with a clear focus on exploring real-world business issues. Through contributions from researchers working in the area of performance, management, and business analytics, it explores the development of new methods and approaches to improve business by gaining knowledge from bulk data. With system performance analytics, companies are now able to drive performance and provide actionable insights for each level and for every role using key indicators, generate mobile-enabled scorecards, time series-based analysis using charts, and dashboards. In the current dynamic environment, a viable tool known as multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is increasingly being adopted to deal with complex business decisions. MCDA is an important decision support tool for analyzing goals and providing optimal solutions and alternatives. It comprises several distinct techniques, which are implemented by specialized decision-making packages. This book addresses a number of important MCDA methods, such as DEMATEL, TOPSIS, AHP, MAUT, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy MCDM, which make it possible to derive maximum utility in the area of analytics. As such, it is a valuable resource for researchers and academicians, as well as practitioners and business experts.

The proliferation of computers in business requires increased managerial expertise in decision support systems and expert systems. Managers, executives, and scholars will find this in-depth examination of the latest tools and technologies available for decision support invaluable. The book provides a clear and complete discussion of the foundations and management applications of decision support, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and other management support systems. Practical examples are provided throughout, giving the business professional a useful tool for evaluating and utilizing the variety of decision support and information technologies available. In addition, Bidgoli explores the growing field of applicable artificial intelligence, including expert systems, fuzzy logic, and neural networks. This book enhances expertise in a succinct, practical, and readable way.

This book demonstrates the theoretical value and practical significance of systems science and its logic of thinking by presenting a rigorously developed foundation-a tool for intuitive reasoning, which is supported by both theory and empirical evidence, as well as practical applications in business decision making. Following a foundation of general systems theory, the book presents an applied method to intuitively learn system-sciences fundamentals. The third and final part examines applications of the yoyo model and the theoretical results developed earlier within the context of problems facing business decision makers by organically combining methods of traditional science, the first dimension of science, with those of systems science, the second dimension, as argued by George Klir in the 1990s. This text would benefit graduate students, researchers, or practitioners in the areas of mathematics, systems science or engineering, economics, and business decision science.

This book provides essential insights into a range of newly developed numerical optimization techniques with a view to solving real-world problems. Many of these problems can be modeled as nonlinear optimization problems, but due to their complex nature, it is not always possible to solve them using conventional optimization theory. Accordingly, the book discusses the design and applications of non-conventional numerical optimization techniques, including the design of benchmark functions and the implementation of these techniques to solve real-world optimization problems. The book's twenty chapters examine various interesting research topics in this area, including: Pi fraction-based optimization of the Pantoja-Bretones-Martin (PBM) antenna benchmarks; benchmark function generators for single-objective robust optimization algorithms; convergence of gravitational search algorithms on linear and quadratic functions; and an algorithm for the multi-variant evolutionary synthesis of nonlinear models with real-valued chromosomes. Delivering on its promise to explore real-world scenarios, the book also addresses the seismic analysis of a multi-story building with optimized damper properties; the application of constrained spider monkey optimization to solve portfolio optimization problems; the effect of upper body motion on a bipedal robot's stability; an ant colony algorithm for routing alternate-fuel vehicles in multi-depot vehicle routing problems; enhanced fractal dimension-based feature extraction for thermal face recognition; and an artificial bee colony-based hyper-heuristic for the single machine order acceptance and scheduling problem. The book will benefit not only researchers, but also organizations active in such varied fields as Aerospace, Automotive, Biotechnology, Consumer Packaged Goods, Electronics, Finance, Business & Banking, Oil, Gas & Geosciences, and Pharma, to name a few.

Introduction; B.R. Munier. 1. Fifty Years of Maurice Allais' Economic Writings: Seeds for Renewal in Contemporary Economic Thought; B.R. Munier. 2. Maurice Allais, Belatedly Recognized Genius; T. de Montbrial. 3. Self-Organizing Markets; J. Lesourne. 4. A Theory of Spatial General Equilibrium in a Fuzzy Economy; C. Ponsard. 5. Maurice Allais, Unrecognized Pioneer of Overlapping Generations Models; E. Malinvaud. 6. Some Possible Uses of Households Assets in the National Economy, with reference to American Households; A. Babeau. 7. Should we get Rid of Economic Calculus? M. Boiteux.

The comprehensive and crystal-clear companion to making the right acquisition decisions and executing them well: Acquisition is the most powerful corporate development tool available to companies and will therefore always be on the business agenda. Very practical and easy to follow: diagrams, checklists and case studies throughout. The authors have an accessible style and approach The Audience: High level entrepreneurs, senior executives, directors, and business strategists. Updates include: new and updated case studies, analysis of different types of company and how this could affect the transaction, a guide to working with external advisors.

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers' understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as complex adaptive systems, the impacts of psychological and emotional factors upon value co-creation exchanges, and ICT enablers of service network performance and service exchange fulfillment. Thanks to the chosen perspectives, all of which are based on different systems research streams, the book will support more consistent and robust decisions, leading to sustainable, wise, and viable systems dynamics. It will aid managers, practitioners, and consultants in their decision-making processes and will also be of interest for academics and scholars in management, systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing.

There are many people who are refugees of the corporate world.

This book examines the relationships among leadership, the quality of the management process and business results. Drawing from the pioneering contributions of Chester I. Barnard, this book defines the role and characteristics of an effective and efficient manager in the new knowledge economy. This book also examines the relevance of Barnard's work on modern studies in economics and business administration. Chester I. Barnard considered the company to be a complex socio-economic system, oriented towards general aims. A company's behavior is rational if its constituent elements and management models are planned, organized, guided and regulated in order to create and maintain a cooperative system that combines efficiency and effectiveness. In this book, the conceptual construction of Barnard's management theory is represented by a synthetic scheme in which the various components of the business process (including leadership) and their influences on the outcome variables of the company are linked as a system. This approach makes this book appealing to academics, scholars and professionals in business, management, administration and knowledge management.

Global Solutions for Teams is a strategy-packed resource essential for multinational organizations or any company that is considering going global. The book's cultural guidelines and case examples of leading multinational corporations demonstrate how cross-cultural teams can overcome a disjointed state of cultural collision...and progress to the more productive stages of coexistence and finally, collaboration. As workplace borders expand and the mobility of the workforce increases, new techniques are needed to manage transnational teams. Global Solutions for Teams shares these concepts, as well as the approaches that can position a company more competitively now - and well into the 21st century.

"Operational Risk Management" offers peace of mind to business and government leaders who want their organizations to be ready for any contingency, no matter how extreme. This invaluable book is a preparatory resource for when times are good, and an emergency reference when times are bad. "Operational Risk Management" is destined to become every risk manager's ultimate weapon to help his or her organization survive ? no matter what.