Systemic Flexibility and Business Agility

414 Pages·2015·8.81 MB·English

by  Sushil

Flexible Systems Management
Series Editor
Sushil
Department of Management Studies
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi,
New Delhi
India
Editorial Board
Gerhard Chroust, Institute for Telekooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz,
Austria
Julia Connell, Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.
Stuart Evans, Integrated Innovation Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Takao Fujiwara, Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Aichi, Japan
Mike C Jackson OBE, University of Hull, UK
Rashmi Jain, Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, USA
Ramaraj Palanisamy, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada
Edward A. Stohr, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, USA
The main objective of this series on Flexible Systems Management is to provide a
rich collection of research as well as practice based contributions, from different
contexts, that can serve as reference material in this upcoming area. Some of these
books will be published in association with ‘Global Institute of Flexible Systems
Management’.
It will help in cross-fertilizing ideas from different perspectives of flexibility
so as to consolidate and enrich the paradigm of flexible systems management.
The audience for the volumes under this series includes researchers, management
students/teachers, and practitioners interested in exploring various facets of
flexibility research and practice.
The series features five types of books:
• Post conference volumes containing peer reviewed high quality research papers
around a theme and clustered in sub-themes that can act as good reference
material.
• Contributed thematic volumes based on invited papers from leading profession-
als, from academia as well practicing world, containing state of the art on an
emerging theme.
• Research monographs based on research work making a comprehensive contri-
bution to the body of knowledge.
• Books based on novel frameworks and methodologies covering new develop-
ments that are well tested and ready for wider application in research as well as
practice.
• Business practices and case-based books documenting flexibility practices,
strategies and systems in real life organizations.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10780
Sushil • Gerhard Chroust
Editors
Systemic Flexibility
and Business Agility
1 3
Editors
Sushil Gerhard Chroust
Department of Management Studies Johannes Kepler University Linz
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Linz
New Delhi Austria
India
ISSN 2199-8493 ISSN 2199-8507 (electronic)
ISBN 978-81-322-2150-0 ISBN 978-81-322-2151-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-2151-7
Springer New Delhi Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957875
© Springer India 2015
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Preface
Flexibility and agility in business are emerging as key dimensions of business ex-
cellence that encompass the requirements of both choice and speed. Both flexibility
and agility have been used, in literature as well as practice, in multiple ways and
often interchangeably. The growing need of flexibility/agility in business can be
seen from reactive as well as proactive perspectives. A business enterprise is sup-
posed to have reactive flexibility/agility (as adaptiveness and responsiveness) to
cope with the changing and uncertain business environment. It may also endeavor
to intentionally create flexibility/agility as a strategic change by the way of leader-
ship change, reengineering, innovation in products and processes, use of informa-
tion and communication technology, learning orientation, and so on.
The proposed book is intended to provide a conceptual framework of “Systemic
Flexibility and Business Agility” supported by researches/case applications in vari-
ous types of flexibilities and agility in business.
This book presents selected, reviewed, and updated papers of GLOGIFT 12 con-
ference on the theme of systemic flexibility and business agility that was held at
University of Vienna, Austria during July 30—August 1, 2012. These are organized
in the form of an edited volume that can serve as a good reference material in the
area of creating and managing systemic flexibility and business agility.
The selected papers from a variety of issues concerning the theme of systemic
flexibility and business agility are organized into following five parts:
1. Systemic and strategic flexibility
2. Information and business agility
3. Flexibility, innovation and business excellence
4. Flexibility in value and supply chains
5. Financial flexibility and mergers and acquisitions
The first part of the book deals with six chapters on the sub-theme of systemic and
strategic flexibility. The first chapter gives an overview of systemic flexibility and
agility in business leading to the evolution of a flexibility maturity model. A related
concept of managing diversity is treated in Chap. 2 in the context of international in-
formation and communication technologies (ICT) project teams. One aspect of stra-
tegic flexibility of managing confluence of continuity and change is elaborated in
v
vi Preface
the context of telecom service providers by delineating elements of flowing stream
strategy crystal. Another chapter deals with the interaction of continuity and change
with e-government performance. Next two chapters exhibit the implementation of
flexible strategy game-card as a performance management framework; one through
a case study of a telecom service company and the other one illustrating the effec-
tive strategy execution.
Part II, on information and business agility, comprises five chapters. The first
chapter in this part takes a case study of Japanese electronics industry to illustrate
exploiting economies of scope on 70–30 principle that treats products and services
for separate segmented submarkets to be designed 70 % in common with remaining
30 % for customization. The next chapter links the agile management practice with
developing personal flexibility; according to which, flexible and agile management
methods require one to react to change at any time of a project’s lifecycle. E-learn-
ing and knowledge management are important contributors of flexibility that are
dealt through a case study of national level repository of knowledge content. The
subject matter of the next chapter, in this part, is related to e-governance perfor-
mance that aims to empirically relate flexibility of processes with performance of
e-governance systems. Finally, the stakeholder engagement methodology is applied
for the design and development of a workflow automation process for an account-
ing system in reinsurance domain.
Part III covers the issues interlinking flexibility, innovation, and business excel-
lence. It consists of six chapters; the first one deals with issues of localization, cul-
tural preferences, and global commerce. It discusses cultural differences between
nations as per Hofstede’s framework and relates it to seven hierarchical layers of
localization. The issue of organization vitality is focused in the next chapter; it elab-
orates the pillars of vitalization as learning, innovation, flexibility, and entrepre-
neurship illustrated by a caselet-based study. The next chapter deals with designing
flexible performance targets and presents a fast innovation model supported by the
case study of Toyota as a leader in product development and as a forceful strategic
innovator. Building flexibility into product development teams is talked by a new
factor named time-bound formulation in the next chapter through a study of 108
teams in public and private sector organizations. Flexibility constructs have not
been well represented in business excellence models, which is the subject matter of
the next chapter. It captures flexibility dimensions for all the nine criteria of EFQM
business excellence framework through semistructured expert interviews. The last
chapter in this part takes flexibility as a strategy for reducing cost of renovation in
building construction projects.
Flexibility in value and supply chains is the subject matter of Part IV, consist-
ing of four chapters. The first chapter, in this part, takes the case of a beverage
giant that implemented flexible systems for establishing visibility across the value
chain. Next three chapters cover various aspects of supply chain flexibility. One
of the chapters applies total interpretive structural modeling and fuzzy interpretive
structural modeling for structural flexibility in supply chains. Another chapter also
uses total interpretive structural modeling for evaluating flexibility index of a sup-
ply chain. The last chapter in this part considers interaction of flexibility and green
Preface vii
perspectives of supply chain. It uses analytic hierarchy process and interpretive
ranking process in this context.
Part V, which is the last one, comprises three chapters in the area of financial
flexibility and mergers and acquisitions. The first paper in this part seeks to explore
the influence of innovative mode of financing like combination of cash and stock
or earn-out offer used in the acquisitions. The next chapter gives multiple perspec-
tives of mergers and acquisitions performance. The last chapter provides a system
dynamics model of post merger integration and analyses the post merger integration
of Kelvinator and Whirlpool with its real life validation.
We thank all the authors and reviewers whose efforts have made it possible to
create this volume. Special thanks are due to Rejani Raghu who helped at various
stages in communicating with authors and reviewers, and also provided support in
word processing and formatting the manuscript.
We hope that this volume on “Systemic Flexibility and Business Agility” will
generate enough interest in the readers to take up research in this up coming area to
further evolve and enrich the paradigm of flexible systems management.
Sushil
Gerhard Chroust
Contents
Part I Systemic and Strategic Flexibility
1 Diverse Shades of Flexibility and Agility in Business ............................. 3
Sushil
2 New Research Perspectives on Managing Diversity in
International ICT Project Teams .............................................................. 21
Christina Böhm and Renate Motschnig-Pitrik
3 Elements of Flowing Stream Strategy Crystal for Telecom
Service Providers........................................................................................ 33
S. B. Khare
4 Interaction of Continuity and Change Forces and
E-Government Performance ..................................................................... 63
Saboohi Nasim
5 Development of Flexible Strategy Game-card: A Case Study ............... 83
Neetu Yadav and Sushil
6 Flexible Strategy Game-card Framework for Effective
Strategy Execution ..................................................................................... 97
Amit Srivastava and Sushil
Part II Information and Business Agility
7 Strategic Flexibility in Exploiting Economies of Scope on
70–30 Principle: A Case Study of Japanese Electronics Industry ......... 115
Ushio Sumita and Jun Yoshii
ix
x Contents
8 Developing Personal Flexibility as a Key to Agile
Management Practice .............................................................................. 131
Renate Motschnig-Pitrik
9 Flexibility in E-learning through Knowledge Management
Practices: A Case Study ........................................................................... 143
Kalyan Kumar Bhattacharjee, Ravi Shankar and M. P. Gupta
10 E xamining the Influence of Flexibility of Processes on
E-Governance Performance .................................................................... 165
P. K. Suri
11 W orkflow Automation Process for a Reinsurance Company
Using BPM Tool: A Stakeholder Engagement Perspective ................... 187
Anuradha Alladi and P. H. Anantha Desik
Part III Flexibility, Innovation and Business Excellence
12 L ocalization, Cultural Preferences and Global Commerce—
Software Like a Cooperative Partner .................................................... 205
Gerhard Chroust
13 C ritical Processes for Organization Vitality: A Conceptual Study ...... 223
Sumant Kumar Bishwas and Sushil
14 How Flexible is the Strategic Innovative Performance
Target Design without Sacrificing Lead Time? ..................................... 235
R. C. Pathak, Rajesh Pathak and Shreya Virani
15 T ime-Bound Formalization and its Role in Building Team
Flexibility in Product Development Organizations ............................... 249
K. Srikanth and K. B. Akhilesh
16 Next-Generation Business Excellence Model: Integrating
Flexibility Dimension ............................................................................... 257
Rakesh Kumar Gupta and Sarita Nagpal
17 Flexibility as a Strategy for Reducing Cost of Renovation in
Building Construction Projects............................................................... 271
Rashmi Shahu, Ashok K. Pundir and L. Ganapathy
Part IV Flexibility in Value and Supply Chains
18 Establishing Visibility Across the Value Chain of a
Beverage Giant by Implementing Flexible Systems ............................. 285
Kamal Karnatak and Arnab Mitra