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This chapter focuses on automating and operationalizing the intelligence models and solutions developed through design and analysis. The authors draw from project management, planning, and implementation practices to identify the activities involved in this capability. Automating is defined more broadly than simply adding technology to a solution. Instead, it includes all aspects of operationalizing a solution for business use, including establishing a business model, building an operating model, operationalizing and deploying the solution in business operations, monitoring the solution, reviewing feedback and anomaly detection, and finally training for sustainability. This capability focuses on deriving the maximum business value from a solution and taking steps to ensure that there is an excellent long-term business return on investment. This chapter also includes practical business stories.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the pathway toward operationalizing resilience in management of transportation infrastructure.

The research approach includes a comprehensive survey of the State Transportation Agencies (STA) in the USA. The information collected from the survey is analyzed using statistical analysis to explore the determinants of operationalizing resilience in transportation infrastructure management.

The results reveal that the current practices of STA need improvement in terms of pre-disaster vulnerability and exposure analysis as well as pre-disaster retrofit and betterment efforts. A pathway toward this end is identified with the major components being: funding availability, integration of efforts across different units, use of risk and vulnerability assessment approaches, and use of resilience indices.

The pathway, along with the other findings, enhances the understanding of the status quo, drivers, and barriers toward operationalizing resilience in transportation infrastructure management. Such an understanding is critical for infrastructure agencies to better adapt and enhance the resilience of their assets in response to various stressors such as the impacts of climate change as well as natural disasters.

The study presented in this paper is the first of its kind to identify the pathway toward operationalizing resilience in transportation infrastructure management.

This paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing the broader question of how ethnicity presents in an accounting situation, it examines the mundane level responses to those accountability demands manifesting an operationalisation of the ethnicity of the people who make those responses.

The study followed ethnomethodology principles whereby one of the researchers acted both as an active member and as a researcher within a Salvation Army congregation in Manchester (UK), while the others acted as post-fieldwork reflectors.

The conceivers and guardians of an accountability system relating to the Zimbabwean-Mancunian Salvationist congregation see account giving practices as they appear (etic), not as they are thought and interiorised (emic). An etic–emic misunderstanding on both sides occurs in the situation of a practice variation in a formal accountability system. This is due to the collision of one ethnic group's emics with the emics of conceivers. Such day-to-day practices are thus shaped by ethnic orientations of the participants who operationalise the meeting of accountability demands. Hence, while ethnicity is operationalised in emic terms, accounting is seen as an etic construct. Possible variations between etic requirements and emic practices can realise this operationalisation.

The authors’ findings were based on one ethnic group's emic construction of accountability. Further research may extend this to multi-ethnic settings with multiple etic/emic combinations.

This study contributed to the debate on both epistemological and methodological issues in accountability. As it is ill-defined or neglected in the literature, the authors offer a working conceptualisation of ethnicity – an operating cultural unit being implicated in both accounting and accountability.

Intellectual capital (IC) management includes various activities that focus on identifying, measuring, controlling and developing the intangible resources of business. As a concept IC management is still theoretical – the managerial problem is that managers do not know the most appropriate approach for them to operationalise IC management. The purpose of this research is to understand the situation in which a suitable approach to IC management is chosen and factors affecting the choice.

Factors that may affect choosing the approach to IC management are suggested in light of the literature. In addition, three cases in which a suitable approach to IC management is chosen in practice are examined. The main research method used in the cases is action research.

The results may provide support when operationalisation of IC management is relevant. The framework presented can be used as a guideline when deciding how to operationalise IC management in one's own organisation. In addition, three examples are given of how IC management can be initiated and why certain choices have been made. Using the framework researchers can improve their models to take better of account various situations.

This paper provides new knowledge about the situation in which a suitable approach to IC management is selected and the factors affecting the choice. The results contribute to the existing discussion on IC management by diminishing the gap between theory and practice.

This study demonstrates how becoming a high-reliability institution in health care is a priority, given the high-risk environment in which an error can result in harm. Literature conceptually supports the need for highly reliable health care facilities but does not show a comprehensive approach to operationalizing the concept into the daily workforce to support patients. The Veterans Health Administration closes the gap by documenting a case study that not only demonstrates specific actions and functions that create a high-reliability organization (HRO) for safety and improvement but also created a learning organization by spreading the knowledge to other facilities.

The authors instituted a methodology consisting of assessments, training and educational simulations to measure, establish and operationalize activities that identified and prevented harmful events. Visual communication boards were created to facilitate team huddles and discuss improvement ideas. Improvements were then measured and analyzed for purposeful outcomes and return on investment (ROI).

HRO can be operationalized successfully in health care systems. Measurable outcomes verified that psychological safety was achieved through the identification and participation of 3,184 process improvement projects over a five-year period, which yielded a US$2.8m ROI. Documented processes and activities were used for educational teachings, which were disseminated to other Veteran Affairs Medical Center’s through the Truman HRO Academy.

This case study is limited to one hospital in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) network. As the VHA continues to deploy the methods outlined to other hospitals, the authors will perform incremental data collection and ongoing analysis for further validation of the HRO methods and operations. Hospitalists can adapt the methods in the case study for practical application in a health care setting outside of VHA. Although the model is rooted in health care, the methods may be adapted for use in other industries.

This case study overcomes the limitations within literature regarding operationalizing HRO by providing actual activities and demonstrations that can be implemented by other health care facilities.

The aim of this paper is to propose cognitive theory as a theoretical basis for operationalising an independent concept of mental health. The shift away from an illness view to a much more ‘salutogenic’ (health‐enhancing) view of mental health demands an understanding of mental health that is separate from an understanding of mental illness. Embodied within this, however, lie both pragmatic and theoretical barriers to operationalising mental health in practice. The paper extends the debate in this area. It considers the difficulties involved in understanding mental health from a conceptual, definitional and descriptive stance. A critical discussion of the need for a theory of mental health is presented. Basic psychological theories are reviewed in an attempt to explore their appropriateness to development of an integrated theory of mental health. The paper culminates in highlighting the link between the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’ and argues for the use of cognitive theory as a theoretical basis from which mental health can be operationalised.

The extant literature provides much-needed support to understand marketing accountability and how marketing actions are related to financial performance (FP). However, we have limited understanding of the relationships between marketing actions and firms' social performance (SP) and environmental performance (EP). Understanding these links is critical to enhancing sustainable FP, SP, and EP. Moreover, the literature provides limited understanding of the measures by which SP and EP may be operationalized, or the data necessary to reach a conclusion. This study bridges these gaps by extensively reviewing the extant literature to offer a set of measures and data sources to operationalize SP and EP, and empirically show their relationships with marketing actions. We find that greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, environmental disclosure score, waste reduction, energy consumption, and recycling are prominent measures of EP, and that social disclosure score, philanthropy or community spending, and diversity of gender and race are prominent measures of SP. The KLD, ASSET4, and Bloomberg are prominent sources of data that can be used to operationalize SP, to which CDP may be added for EP. We also show that marketing actions positively affect EP and SP. This study contributes to the extant literature on SP and EP by identifying measures and data sources and linking marketing actions to both performance types. It contributes to policy development by identifying the importance of EP and SP and how marketing actions can help achieve such performance.

Most feminists policies are aspirational. Deficiencies include vague terms of what constitutes ‘feminist’ within policy, ambiguous investment criteria, lack of consultation and the use of the binary definition of gender negating gender-diverse people (Tiessen, 2019). The purpose of this study is to identify parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policies and to advance recommendations to operationalize these policies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled fragilities in the socio-economic gains that women entrepreneurs have achieved. Gender-regression is, in part, the product of entrepreneurship policies that fail to recognize the nature and needs of women entrepreneurs. To inform recovery measures, this article considers two research questions: what are the parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policies? and how can parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy be operationalized in pandemic recovery measures? To inform the questions, the study draws on the academic literature and thematic analysis of three collective feminist action plans to operationalize ten parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policy.

Supplanting ‘feminist’ for women in the construction of entrepreneurship policies, without specifications of how parameters differ dilutes government's efforts to achieve gender quality and women's economic empowerment. To inform policy, recommendations of three feminist recovery policies clustered under seven themes: importance of addressing root causes of inequality; need to invest in social and economic outcomes; economic security; enhancing access to economic resources; investment in infrastructure; inclusive decision-making; and need for gender disaggregated data to inform policy. Differences in policy priorities between collective feminist recovery plans and the academic literature are reported.

The parameters of feminist entrepreneurial policy require further interpretation and adaptation in different policy, cultural and geo-political contexts. Scholarly attention might focus on advisory processes that inform feminist policies, such as measures to address gender-regressive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research is also needed to understand the impacts of feminist policies on the lived experiences of diverse women entrepreneurs. Limitations: The study design did not incorporate viewpoints of policymakers or capture bureaucratic boundary patrolling practices that stymie feminist policies. Thematic analysis was limited to three feminist recovery plans from two countries.

Recommendations to operationalize feminist entrepreneurship policies in the context of pandemic recovery are described.

Ten parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy are explored. The conceptual study also advances a framework of feminist entrepreneurship policy and considers boundary conditions for when and how the parameters are applicable.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and address the underlying causes of costly quality/ethical problems that have prevented companies to achieve and sustain excellence. More broadly, the study has leveraged data from multiple sources to determine root-cause issues and propose a new management model that enables leadership to prevent and effectively address quality/ethical problems by operationalizing excellence. For the purpose of this research, operationalization is defined in terms of developing a sustained culture of excellence and enabling a firm to systematically prevent, detect, and address costly problems in their daily operations.

The study has defined the concept of excellence in terms of measurable results based on ten critical success factors: products, financials, stakeholders, employees, leadership, societal, operational, innovation, alignment, and ethical excellence. To identify and address the underlying causes, this study has used a spiral research model to develop and improve an assessment process for the consistent examination of three types of firms: national quality award recipients, successful and responsible Fortune-500 companies, and landmark ethical violators. Findings from case studies were then substantiated using results from current research studies and conclusions from over 20 years of international field work/experience.

To operationalize excellence, this study found that organizations need to develop a foundation for two tightly coupled and inseparable variables: ethics, excellence. Case studies show when these two variables are inadequately planned, integrated, checked, and enforced across business operations, they cause serious and costly problems. This foundation enables a firm to maximize performance, the return on investment, and to sustain performance in each of these critical success factors (CSFs) using the following interconnected building blocks of excellence: grander purpose, measurable results, effective collaboration, leadership development, individual development, continuous alignment, continuous innovation, ethics management, and ethics foundation.

The application of the assessment instrument proved to be complex due to the difficulties of transforming conjecture into certainty using existing online corporate records (e.g. understanding true leadership intention). Findings of this study are applicable to any industry and type and size company. The building blocks of this new management model should not be developed and implemented in an isolated, standalone, or piecemeal manner; nor should they be forced onto an organization as a new program. For best results, each building block needs to be implemented as an interconnected component of a complete and total system of management and infused into the fabric of the culture as a normal part of the daily operations.

Total business excellence is a proposed new management model for operationalizing excellence. This new model serves three major purposes. First, it enables an enterprise to responsibly deliver a continuous flow of innovative and competitive products as defined and measured by ten CSFs. Second, it enables management to prevent costly quality/ethical problems by developing a unified and responsible strategy for planning, execution, and quality. Most importantly, it provides a missing platform of opportunity where individuals can incrementally grow and develop as they add meaningful personal, professional, and societal value.