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Drawing on established alignment and architectural theory, this paper seeks to present the argument that an organisation's enterprise architecture can enable the alignment of business strategy and information systems and technology (IS/IT).

The paper presents a detailed case study of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), where a high degree of alignment and international recognition of excellence in business and enabling IS/IT performance are documented.

The ABS enterprise architecture was developed in 1999‐2001 and describes the organisation's physical business and IS/IT elements, and the connective relationships that inform the alignment condition. The ABS architecture is robustly holistic in form, and is characterised by a strong and equal focus on business operations, the deliberate inclusion of an IS/IT governance framework, the structuring and hosting of corporate information for business delivery, and the efficient reuse of IS/IT components.

The ABS case study also examined empirically the social aspects and formal mechanisms of organisational alignment, and shows how a formal enterprise architecture mechanism can integrate into a successful alignment process.

Contractor prequalification involves the establishment of a standard for measuring and assessing the capabilities of potential tenderers. The required standard is based on a set of prequalification criteria (PQC) that is intended to reflect the objectives of the client and the requirements of the project. However, many pre‐qualifiers compile a set of PQC according to their own idiosyncratic perceptions of the importance of individual PQC. As a result, sets of PQC, and hence prequalification standards, vary between prequalifiers. This paper reports on an investigation of the nature of the divergencies of the perceived importance of individual PQC by different groups of prequalifiers via a large‐scale empirical survey conducted in the UK. The results support the conclusion that there are significant systematic differences between groups of prequalifiers, with the individual PQC that contribute most to the differences being the method of procurement, size of project, standard of quality, financial stability, project complexity, claim and contractual dispute and length of time in business.

Following the Australian Government's Garnaut Climate Change Review (CCR), the implementation of a joint business and climate change agenda is weighing heavily on the minds of those executives whose firms fit within the Emissions‐Intensive Trade‐Exposed Industry (EITEI) sectors. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and explain the major concerns that confront EITEI firms as the government moves Australia towards a low carbon economy.

The paper adopts an economic regulation perspective that focuses on public and private interests, coupled with the leximancer software package, which was used to analyse submissions made by EITEI firms to the Garnaut CCR.

The authors observed that the impact of costs on business and trade performance, future emissions trading schemes, investment in low emissions technologies, world greenhouse gas production levels in emissions‐intensive industries, and conflicting government policies form the foundations of serious corporate‐level concerns and uncertainties.

The paper highlights that private interests, as expressed in the analysed submissions, intersect with the public interest and need to be addressed seriously.

Suggestions for a cooperative approach to addressing climate change that would involve businesses and governments are also put forward.

The paper utilises an economic regulation perspective to explain a practical issue and has implications for future climate change policy development.

The frequent occurrence of emergencies and disasters continues to threaten community safety and security. Emergency communications and warning systems (ECWS) allow people to make decisions and take actions before, during and after the emergency or disaster. The critical objective of this study is to determine the critical capacities of ECWS in the Australian context.

This study used stakeholder analysis in which written submissions from individuals, and public and private organizations collected by the Australian federal government were subjected to structured coding techniques in order to identify major ECWS capacity issues. The summary of findings were generating by axially collapsing and summarizing the coded statements.

Findings showed that a broad range of ECWS are deployed in the Australian context. These ECWS come with social and/or technical limitations that suggest the importance of adopting an integrated or systems based approach for their construction and deployment. Also, while the identification of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities reinforced the argument for an integrated systems approach for ECWS, this also demonstrated the pressing need to build resilience and redundancy into domestic infrastructure networks. In addition, new and innovative ECWS technologies and solutions will enable improved emergency or disaster management in the future.

This paper simultaneously considers important factors and issues impacting ECWS and provides an instructive discourse on the requirement for more combinative ECWS.

This paper seeks to provide a timely consideration of how regional governments in Asia and other national governments around the world collect, manage, and share critical geo‐technical information in what is becoming an increasingly global community.

The paper addresses the socio‐technical perspective of government information systems and management, and draws on the collection and analysis of several public reports, media articles, and expert opinions published in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami of 26 December 2004.

On the basis of the published material, the paper observes how critical early warning information was handled by government authorities in the hours before the tsunami wave strike, discusses the availability of technological solutions that can provide earthquake and tsunami warning information, and poses that government bureaucracies and human relations form the weakest link in the information chain.

The paper concludes with a potential research agenda for government warning information systems and management.

The type of early warning information system that might be created to avoid another loss of life, suggested improvements to inter‐government information sharing and communications, and the emerging requirement for earthquake and tsunami information dissemination and education in lesser developed countries are also discussed.

The research enabled the examination of weaknesses in critical information sharing between governments and members of the international community, and highlights the issue of strong human relationships as a key to preventing the loss of life and better managing disasters.

Managers in retailing and distribution have been bombarded in recent years with the results of the microelectronic revolution, in terms of the hardware, varying from electronic checkouts to robots in the warehouse, as well as more advanced software to operate the machinery. The underlying effect is an enormous expansion in the capacity of individuals and organisations to process information; and one which at the same time may fundamentally change the way in which companies operate, far more than has ever been the case in earlier periods of technological innovation. The point of this article is not to discuss the technology itself — but rather the opportunities and problems faced in adapting to the technology in distribution. In short, the focus here is on the management of the technology and the growing need for an information technology strategy.

This paper aimed to explore the submissions made to the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) policy paper by corporations and other stakeholders. It also sought to establish whether broader climate change issues were addressed in the context of the submissions.

The agenda‐setting framework was utilised to provide the theoretical perspective for the study. This research applied a combination of concept analysis and mapping, and content analysis, of the submissions using the Leximancer software tool.

The study found a divergence in the responses of corporations and other stakeholders, with the former focusing primarily on the NGER policy paper, while the latter presented significant concerns over carbon pollution and climate change, an issue that was not the primary concern of the policy paper. Moreover, corporations also acknowledged the close link between the NGER process and a future emissions trading scheme, and expressed concerns over the development of a mechanism that would put a price on carbon.

The paper contributes to the limited literature on carbon accounting and reporting in relation to both the local and international context. Moreover, an agenda‐setting perspective provided a suitable lens for understanding the NGER submissions process and its role within the broader climate change policy area in Australia.

Policies are influenced by key players and their familiarity with these policies could lead to successful implementation. The establishment of the NGER legislation was deemed successful, despite concerns raised in the submissions. This was because the policy used corporate reporting as a means of assessing accountability for carbon emissions. This finding has implications for other nations seeking to develop mandatory carbon reporting.

The paper has built further explanatory potential of the agenda‐setting framework, provides direct evidence in relation to stakeholder submissions to prospective environmental legislation, and adds to the use of combination methods that can be utilised for effectively analysing stakeholder submissions on major policy questions and issues.

A strong and fast‐cycle innovation system has been developed to counter the ongoing threat of computer viruses within computer systems employing vulnerable operating systems. Generally, however, the innovative applications that develop in response to each generation of computer virus can be seen as a reactive, rather than proactive, critical response. The paper seeks to present a critique of the innovation system that has emerged to combat computer viruses by comparing it with its natural system namesake, the human anti‐viral immune system. It is proposed that the relevance of this analogy extends beyond this case to innovation systems more generally.

This paper discusses the biological theory related to the human body's immune system and how immune systems might be mimicked in the development of security systems and anti‐virus software. The paper then outlines the biomimicry framework that can be used for scoping the development and features of the security systems and software, including the population of the framework segments. The implications of biomimetic approaches in the wider innovation management literature are discussed.

Some commercial security products that are undergoing evolutionary development and current research and development activities are used to augment the biomimetic development framework and explicate its use in practice. The paper has implications for the manner in which the objectives of innovation systems are defined. There is implicit criticism of linear models of innovation, that by their nature ignore the recursive and/or adaptive processes evident in natural systems.

This is the first paper, to the best of the authors' knowledge, that discusses the application of natural systems and biomimetics to broaden the scope of innovation process design, and link its findings back to the wider innovation literature.

The paper argues that indirect capabilities – the ability to access other organizations' capabilities – are an important and neglected part of firm strategy in procuring complex performance (PCP) settings, and that this is especially so if these settings are treated as genuinely complex, rather than merely complicated. Elements of indirect capabilities are identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This is a theoretical paper, drawing on complexity notions and Penrose's analysis of endogenous innovation to drive a disequilibrium-oriented discussion of the capabilities required by firms in a PCP setting.

Six inter-related elements of indirect capabilities are proposed and discussed: IT infrastructure, boundary management practices, contracting, interface artefacts, valuing others' capabilities and relating direct to indirect capabilities. These are important in PCP settings and in other operations and supply settings characterised by complexity.

This paper reconsiders the way complexity has been treated in the PCP literature and develops an extended discussion of the notion of indirect capabilities. It potentially provides the basis for an operations and supply strategy more attuned to the demands of shifting inter-organizational networks.