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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions of 19 requirement engineering (RE) techniques in Kuwait in term of three criteria “awareness,” “use,” and “perceived value generated over past system development projects.” Also, this paper aims to examine possible relationships between these RE techniques and two information system development success factors.

This paper develops a questionnaire and tests with a sample of respondents from 175 organizations in Kuwait.

Results show that: Arab culture influence perception of RE techniques; most companies have good knowledge of different techniques; several different techniques for identifying and analyzing customer requirements are used; the most highly valued RE techniques are decision trees, goal oriented, prototyping, data flow diagram (DFD), and interviews; six techniques (tree analysis, role playing, unified modeling language, Kawakita Jiro method, flow charts, and Ishikawa) are found to have the least perceived value; and only two techniques (prototyping and decision tree) are highly correlated with the statement “Obtaining the right requirements is a critical success factor for system development,” while other three techniques (quality function deployment, DFD and role playing) are correlated with “We experienced problems during past system developments projects because of wrong requirements collection.”

The study sheds light on perceptions on RE techniques perception in Kuwait where less is known about the subject from Western researchers.

This paper suggests re‐examining university curriculums in order to prepare students for familiarity with techniques that have proven their effectiveness elsewhere and call for more collaboration between academia and practitioners in order to appropriate research outcomes. In addition, this paper is of benefit to foreign consulting companies willing to penetrate the Gulf Cooperative Council.

This is the first Arab study that sheds light on system development practices in the Arab world.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the successful strategy formulation process of a new purchasing department at an international engineering group.

The strategy formulation was co-created by the department manager and employees at a storytelling workshop, facilitated with interview technique from narrative therapy, and later authorized by the business area director. The organizational intervention preceded the scholarly inquiry.

Employees’ retrospective storytelling about working at the company enabled them to formulate a joint mission statement using words and expressions from their own stories. Prospective storytelling enabled them to formulate a joint medium- and long-term vision and a corresponding action plan. This paper proposes interview technique from narrative therapy as a new practice-oriented strategic management tool and calls for further experimentation in rethinking best practices in strategy development.

Introducing narrative therapy interview technique in an organizational context is valuable because it may facilitate affinity of employees to strategy through storytelling thus contributing to contextualized strategy formulation and paving the way for subsequent implementation. This “from practice to research” approach can serve as inspiration for action researchers interested in driving organizational change.

Compares the affinity credit card markets in the USA and the UK, focusing on the members of the partnership trio: charities, card issuers and cardholders. The affinity card market in both the USA and the UK is expanding rapidly. Explores the motivations for entering the partnerships and the satisfaction derived from the partnerships. Discusses the results in the light of an increasing deregulated marketing environment permitting foreign credit card issuers entry into the UK market.

Many future research proposals of Lean Manufacturing (LM) are presented in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to determine these future research proposals of LM which are country-related and classify them.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of peer-reviewed journal articles in LM was conducted. A total of 145 articles published in 34 journals during 2010–2020 were collected from four major management science publishers namely, Emerald Online, Elsevier/Science Direct, Springer Link and Taylor and Francis. The country-related future research proposals of LM identified in the literature were classified according to, firstly, the continent of the country of reference, and secondly, some form of natural affinity of these proposals creating meaningful themes. The quality tool “affinity diagram” was applied to classify the country-related future research proposals of LM.

The country-related future research proposals of LM, which are increasing in the literature over time, refer mostly to studies to be conducted in several continents/countries and to multinational studies. Conducting studies specifically in Asia, Europe, South and North America, Africa and Australia–New Zealand is also suggested. The plethora of the country-related future research proposals of LM were classified, based on the affinity of their content, into 18 meaningful themes. These themes were also classified based on their affinity into two broad categories, namely “themes concerning the LM approach itself” and “themes concerning factors outside the LM approach”.

The restricted number of the databases searched and the subjectivity of classifying the large number of the country-related future research proposals into themes are the main limitations of the present SLR. Based on these limitations, future literature review studies can be carried out.

Useful proposals are provided to researchers of several countries for conducting original and country-specific research studies which can enrich the knowledge of the implementation of LM under the specific circumstances of a country for the benefit of practitioners.

This study goes beyond previous literature review studies on LM by focusing exclusively on the LM future research agenda which is country related. The analytical presentation of the country-related future research proposals as well as the formulation of clusters of these proposals make the present SLR study substantially different from those carried out worldwide so far.

To utilize the idle computational resources in a network to collectively solve middle to large problems, this paper aims to propose an integrated distributed computing platform, Java distributed code generating and computing (JDGC).

The proposed JDGC is fully decentralized in that every participating host is identical in function. It allows standard, single machine‐oriented Java programs to be transparently executed in a distributed system. The code generator reduces the communication overhead between runtime objects based on a detailed analysis of the communication affinities between them.

The experimental results show that JDGC can efficiently reduce the execution time of applications by utilizing the networked computational resources.

JDGC releases the developers from any special programming considerations for distributed environment, and solves the portability problem of using system‐specific programming methods.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

Introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

As opposed to general literature reviews, by narrowing down the context only around the resources related to Six Sigma tools, this study aims to offer a strong discussion about Six Sigma toolbox which has a vital role in the success of Six Sigma.

Based on a comprehensive literature research, the most used tools; classification of tools; flow of tools with respect to define, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) steps; tools as critical success factors and reasons of ineffective use of tools are reviewed. To stay focused and not to diverge from the research aim, 60 articles which are suitable to the context and flow of the discussion are selected during the construction of the study.

The study provides a detailed and integrated review of Six Sigma articles about tools. The most used tools are listed from different perspectives and resources, and the role of these tools has been discussed. After a broad review, a more practical and combined classification of Six Sigma tools is proposed. Next, the issue of using which tools during which steps of DMAIC is systematically addressed. Finally, emergence of tools as a critical success factor and the gaps in the literature related to tools of Six Sigma are pointed out.

Addressing important statistics and the facts related to the tools of Six Sigma helps new practitioners in particular to build a strategic filter to select the most proper tools throughout their projects.

This study is unique in investigating only Six Sigma toolbox and providing a literature review on this subject.

This paper aims to explore the requirements of organizational knowledge management initiatives using requirements engineering techniques, identifying the optimal techniques configuration and serving as a management tool for knowledge engineers.

The method is selection attributes. Knowledge management enablers are characterized and mapped with the coverage capabilities of requirements engineering techniques, using the attributes of the elicited object and a box-plot analysis. The information is gathered from 280 references, 32 companies and 16 experts in requirements engineering.

Requirements of organizational knowledge management initiatives are got optimally by combining interviews, use cases, scenarios, laddering and focus group techniques. The requirements of structure and processes are more complex to identify, while culture requirements are the best covered.

Knowledge management enablers are analyzed according to the current studies and comprehension of engineering techniques.

Knowledge engineers need to consider the coverage capabilities of engineering techniques to design an optimal requirement identification and meet the objectives of organizational knowledge acquisition initiatives. Requirement engineers can improve the requirements identification by a staged selection process.

The requirements of knowledge management initiatives that impact the community can be identified and traced to ensure the knowledge objectives. Requirements related to culture and people, like shared values, beliefs, and behaviors, are also considered.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study about formal requirement identification of knowledge management initiatives in the organizational context, providing the optimal configuration. A novel staged process is proposed for requirements engineering techniques selection, analyzing the enablers at component level and identifying the attributes associated with the elicited object.

The purpose of this paper is to review and gather the latest critical success factors (CSF) of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployment and implementation into a comprehensive list of factors.

The approach taken by authors in this study was to analyze the latest literature review starting 2010 onwards and focus on CSFs of LSS (not dedicated as Lean or Six Sigma) by excluding other improvement methodologies or initiatives, e.g. Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, TRIZ etc.

Five significant CSFs were identified (initially 97 CSFs listed from 13 papers) out of nine groups/headers listed in clustering analysis using Affinity Diagram tool and new headers mapping.

Most of the organisations were aware of the success story on LSS, but did not scrutinize or consider its CSFs. By knowing the outcome of this paper, it can help open eyes regarding readiness before implementing LSS.

At the end of this paper, the authors tried to cluster the CSFs similarities that could intentionally provide the guidelines and references to industries/companies for successful deployment and implementation of LSS in future endeavours.

This paper aims to demonstrate that Facebook likes affect outcomes in nonprofit settings. Specifically, Facebook likes influence affinity to nonprofits, which, in turn, affects fundraising outcomes.

The authors report three studies that establish that relationship. To examine social contagion, Study 1 – an auction field study – relies on selling artwork created by underprivileged youth. To isolate signaling, Study 2 manipulates the number of total Facebook likes on a page. To isolate commitment escalation, Study 3 manipulates whether a participant clicks a Facebook like.

The results show that Facebook likes increase willingness to contribute in nonprofit settings and that the process goes through affinity, as well as through Facebook impressions and bidding intensity. The total number of Facebook likes has a direct signaling effect and an indirect social contagion effect.

The effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms is limited to nonprofit settings and only applies to short-term effects.

Facebook likes serve as both a quality signal and a commitment mechanism. The magnitude of commitment escalation is larger, and the relationship is moderated by familiarity with the organization. Managers should target Facebook likes at those less familiar with the organization and should prioritize getting a potential donor to leave a like as a step leading to donation, in essence mapping a donor journey from prospective to active, where Facebook likes play an essential role in the journey. In a charity auction setting, the donor journey involves an additional step of bidder intensity.

The approach the authors study is shown effective in nonprofit settings but does not appear to extend to corporate social responsibility more broadly.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first investigation to map Facebook likes to a seller’s journey through signals and commitment, as well as the only investigation to map Facebook likes to charity auctions and show the effectiveness of this in the field.