Editorial

Citation

Moutinho, L. (2013), "Editorial", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2013.29708baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 8, Issue 2

Welcome to, once again, a very robust eight years of JM2, with growing interest, taking into account the amount of downloads. This issue reflects well the diversity of research topics that are submitted to the journal. JM2 informed readers can find a vast array of concept, technique and research contexts in this issue. The coverage is wide in terms of content and topics range from the development of business model applying a system dynamic approach, the assessment of a hierarchical process and the issue of information security management using a novel ISM MicMac approach to price and production post strategies.

The interpretation of a structured model for critical success factors (CSFs) in the area of R&D performance and efficiency analysis in PH organisations.

Although, everyone talks about business model, but 95 percent of people has neither a clear and complete idea nor a framework about their business model and as a result, they are not able to have appropriate and effective relationships inside or outside of their organizations.

New business model creations and innovations are actually necessary for surviving in an environment, that “game rules” are revolving continuously and it is considered as a requirement for achieving disruptive competitive advantages. In this case, developing a framework of investigating the way in which the new business is created would be a great challenge.

Innovation in business model is vital and also difficult; a lot of problems and limitations are due to the change of current business model. It is indispensable to have a dynamic managerial approach to design a business model. Therefore, in designing a business model, instead of a static approach, which is suitable for business model typology and performance, managerial business models alteration should be in question and dynamism has to be considered from the design phase. In accordance with environmental or internal requirements, business model change needs quantitative, flexible and dynamic approach. This approach facilitates observing the effects of decisions on model’s building blocks and their relations. The benefits would be operating altered business model, leading to added values.

Accordingly, the main purpose of this particular research by Nastaran Hajiheydari, it is to apply dynamics system approach in studying and simulating a business model to predict its changes and new scenarios’ implementation consequences.

Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been widely applied in decision making. However, the critiques of its technical validity have remained. Many of these criticisms center on a phenomenon where the ranking of the old alternatives changes after adding new alternatives to the option set.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become more popular and important in our daily lives. The world is fast moving towards a connected digital society and hence everyone needs to be secured in the cyber space. Information security stands on a tripod of confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and services. Without proper information security mechanism, computerization can never achieve its fullest potential as a serious business and governance tool. Identification of key success factors/enablers of information security and their interrelationship in an organization is useful for strategic decision making in this regard. Muktesh Chander provides a comprehensive framework for the various important factors of information security management at the organizational level leading to a culture of information security in the organization. The purpose is to identify various information security management parameters and develop a conceptual framework for it.

The paper by Yohanes Nugroho focuses on duopolistic competition under dynamic price and production postponement for two differentiable products that share common product platform at a certain degree of product commonality? Both price and production postponement modeling are benchmarked according to their profit in order to investigate the product substitutability effect to the profit and also their appropriateness to different competition situation. In addition, dynamic property is applied to show the demand changes effect of both strategic decisions (price and production) against demand uncertainty.

The results show that the pure price postponement is appropriate to be applied into highly customized products while pure production postponement to configurable products.

In the competitive race to develop and commercialize new products and services, leading-edge manufacturing organizations have discovered that research and development (R&D) operations can be optimized to yield a key lever for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. According to the previous studies, one may assume that there is not a single list of factors that are applicable in all countries. Other studies show that CSFs are the restricted number of areas that may assure successful competitive performance for the organization. Identification of CSFs of R&D is necessary for a manufacturing firm to achieve its mission. The interpretive structural model (ISM) is an interactive and interpretive method to prioritize and improve the understanding of the linkages among the factors. Sushant Tripanthy applies ISM to identify the CSFs for R&D in manufacturing organizations in India, to establish the relationship among identified CSFs, to propose a structural model of CSFs in R&D performance, and to classify the identified CSFs into various categories.

Taking into account the complexity of this organizational format, Jorge Marcelino’s paper intends to define as well as to compute managerial indicators for the main organizational programs with a view to:

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  measure any program performance;

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  assess the effectiveness of the whole organizational structure; and

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  investigate whether there are any scale inefficiencies in the eight programs selected as decision-making units (DMUs).

The computation of those indicators involved a particular class of linear programming models – the so-called DEA models – whereby two input variables and seven output variables were used to represent the eight DMUs. Several DEA models have been specified, including both input- and output-oriented versions that considered frontiers presenting either constant or variable returns to scale. Findings suggest that integrated action programs (PAIs) related to clinical research operated under increasing returns to scale between 2002 and 2006. To that extent both the choice of integrated action programs (PAIs) as an organizational format and the current growth strategy may be considered adequate. This approach is valuable to complement the cost minimization analysis of specific activities of multipurpose organizations and has general application to the overall assessment of performance, structures and strategies of these organizations.

We hope you enjoyed the breadth and depth of the modeling methods included in this issue of JM2. We do hope that we can continue to disseminate more challenging and useful modeling approaches so that the searches can benefit from their applications.

Thank you for your continued support and readership.

Luiz Moutinho, Kun-Huang Huarng, Joaquin Aldes-Manzano