Human Systems Management

In preparation for his key-note speech to the Philippine Society for Quality annual conference in October of 1999, the author reviewed the messages of the quality masters detailed in his book, Profiles in Quality. Analysis of these messages revealed three major groupings – Leadership, Direction, and Action.

The Leadership element has five components – Roles and Responsibilities, Appreciation for a System, Knowledge of Variation, Theory of Knowledge, and Psychology. Four out of five of these components fell into place coinciding with the four elements of Dr W. Edwards Deming’s Profound Knowledge. The components of Direction are Aim, Planning, Implementation, and Review. The elements of Action fit a model developed by Dr Noriaki Kano, which he calls the House of TQM. These are General Education, Intrinsic Technology, Motivational Approach, Concepts, Techniques, Vehicles, Strategies, and Customer Satisfaction.

This paper presents a structured composite of theories and concepts of the Masters from which we can learn and apply in our personal development and in the improvement of our organizations.

The major purpose of this paper is to address some online procurement implementation issues and provide managerial implications on leveraging enterprise resource planning (ERP) investment by extending the functionality into the supply chain. In this paper we discuss issues related to the benefits gained and caveats of effective online procurement, implementation process, managerial implications, and the impact of online procurement on supply chain management. These issues are explored in the paper using a case study.

The success of electronic commerce for any individual company, especially if it is not a well-known name, is greatly dependent on the appropriate design of its Website. This study investigates the major determinants of an effective Website. A literature survey indicated that the major categories of determinants are: page loading speed, business content, navigation efficiency, security, and marketing/customer focus. The relative importance of each category was determined by counting the number of citations in the literature, and by conducting a survey for soliciting the opinions of customers and potential customers of e-commerce. The research reported is exploratory, aiming to identify the most important issues as perceived by different groups of users. The major findings indicated the expert and consumer differ significantly in what they consider to be the most important factors.

This work is the last part of a unitary framework of analysis, the first part of which was published in HSM, Special Issue, Vol. 18, No. 2. The principal aim of the analysis is the pattern of transformation of local production systems. They are discussed as a complex institutional form of the division of labour and knowledge between firms by means of institutions and meta-organisers as actors of a post-Fordist local economy. A specific production system is defined as a peculiar governance form of interrelations, mediated by cognitive resources such as internal/external competencies of a population of firms localised in a sharing context. In this way there emerges a process of internalisation of competencies through evolutionary networking in which efficiency is not simply an output but a fundamental input for both growth and innovation. Our aim is to describe the peculiarity of the institutional networking system in the Italian case of Northeast industrial districts, assuming that a specific industrial economy evolves on the basis of differentiated learning capacities according to a complex system of economic and social relations, encouraging the circulation of useful knowledge and information for the economic enlargement based on industrial leadership and firm networks: they form a complex and dynamic Multilevel Neural Network. Two main types of district emerge: the evolutionary district (e.g., Montebelluna, specialised in ski-boot production) and non evolutionary static and adaptive districts (e.g., Maniago, specialised in knife production), where we find limited leadership and limited division of labour between firms.

In recent years a number of innovative applications of modern support technology have been presented and published at a number of international conferences. (Such as the HICSS, INFORMS, IFORS, EURO, DSI, ICIS and ECIS conferences.) The challenge for future research is still to explore and understand both successes and failures with the innovative and more advanced intelligent systems constructs.

It is a truism in the field that the key problems never appear to be technology related, but they are “people problems”: (i) people have cognitive constraints in adopting intelligent systems, (ii) people do not really understand the support they get and disregard it in favor of past experience and visions, (iii) people cannot really handle large amounts of information and knowledge, (iv) people are frustrated by theories they do not really understand, and (v) people believe they get more support by talking to other people (even if their knowledge is limited).

We will explore the lessons learned from implementing hyperknowledge – an intelligent support platform for strategic management – and we will study how this platform may be enhanced with new results in intelligent systems and soft computing. (This paper was originally presented at the ISDSS’99 Conference in Melbourne, July 19–22, 1999.)