This publication originated in the European Science Foundation (ESF) exploratory workshop on ''Innovative comparative methods for policy analysis. An interdisciplinary European endeavour for methodological advances and improved policy analysis/evaluation'' held in Erfurt from 25 to 28 September 2004 (ref. EW03-217). This volume brings together a selection of contributions to this workshop, whic…

The information technology (IT) revolution is surely coming in this century, just as did the agricultural and industrial revolutions that have already so enriched our lives. As the IT revolution progresses, it is expected that almost all social structures and economic activities will be changed substantially. In order for the IT revolution to penetrate our societies and enrich our lives, everyo…

Multimedia communications have emerged as a major research and development area. In particular, computers in multimedia open a wide range of possibilities by combining different types of digital media such as text, graphics, audio, and video. The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW), two decades ago, has fuelled the growth of multimedia computing. Because the number of multimedia users is incr…

The worldwide popularity of both personal computers and the Internet has been a mixed blessing. The immediate popularity of the IBM PC was not anticipated. The DOS operating system installed on the original personal computers back in 1982 was never intended for commercial use and therefore was not designed to be secure. In the interest of maintaining compatibility with the early versions of DOS…

We decided to write this book while traveling together on a business trip. Returning from a meeting with a supplier whom we wanted to place on kanban scheduling, we were discussing how resistant the supplier had been to the idea. Our discussion migrated to how most companies and individuals were resistant at first, but that they soon came on board once they understood the benefits of using kanb…

Let?s cut the b.s. and cut straight to the chase. Strategy is not rocket science. It?s about listening to customers, asking some pretty simple questions, making some choices, and getting people to support your decisions. Strategy is the ultimate responsibility of every business leader. Companies succeed when they get it right and fail when they get it wrong. The fact that more companies fail th…

In this book we look much more closely at the experiences organizations have had in using scorecards: the challenges they have encountered, and the key design issues in making scorecards actionable. In doing this, we build on a number of cases from business and government. During the past 10 years we have also learnt from the scorecard experiences of many others: clients, participants in confer…

With remarkable regularity a ?new idea? surfaces in the management community. Often it results from repackaging a long-lived management issue or truth. Conversely, the current vogue, Knowledge Management, is a genuinely new concept. In summary this involves the processes that ensure all the knowledge, explicit and implicit, that exists in the organisation is organised in a way that enables it t…

This book has its origins in a painstaking process of research into the practical difficulties that organizations experience in segmenting their markets, research which we initiated in 1992. We discovered that most of the academic work in this domain is prescriptive, with virtually no pragmatic guidelines provided to enable managers to make sense of the confusing array of data and information a…

This book is intended for use in undergraduate and graduate marketingmanagement courses.We have tried to prepare a text that covers all of the essential managerial elements of marketing with sufficient detail to provide a review for marketing, background for nonmarketing majors in a case-oriented teaching environment, and challenge to take students to the next level of understanding marketing. …