Abstract

The collapse of a number of high-profile firms (such as Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat) was shocking news that turned the world's focus upon corporate governance (defined as the total of operations and control of an organization). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 constituted a reaction against those events by stressing the significance of corporate controls and auditing. Section 406 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act requires disclosure whether or not an enterprise has adapted or not a code of ethics for its CEO and senior financial officers. Such a disclosure, however, may range from a strictly typical compliance to an enterprise-wide adoption of essential and practical measures that promote and establish a corporate governance mindset.

In this article, we explore the issue of measuring the actual level of enterprise compliance against established corporate governance directives and practices. We first define the realm of business codes, their relationship with financial reporting and their effect on the role of the auditor. Based on these findings, we define and describe a maturity model for measuring compliance to corporate governance. Its parameters are analyzed and relevant recommendations are put forward.

Abstract

Business intelligence is a deceptively straightforward construct that has many dissimilar definitions throughout the business arena. When managers and the leaders of organizations speak of this construct they may often agree upon models or theories of implementation without making the warranted efforts to operationally define the construct for them selves. This manuscript will attempt to offer some operational definitions of business intelligence as well as tender significant insight into the process of operationally defining the construct from an organizational leadership perspective. An inquiry into the human aspects of agency, learning and intelligence will hopefully create environments for organizational leaders to include the citizens of an organization in the process of operationally defining this construct for themselves.

Abstract

In advocating for a stakeholder engagement approach to BI system development and deployment, this article draws upon the author's twenty-plus years of experience in data and knowledge management system engineering (Kesner, 2003). For a relevant example, the author employs his most recent field work with the Haverhill School District, Massachusetts, U.S.A. While the reader may not consider a public school district as a representative setting for a BI implementation, the author would observe that the Haverhill BI project possesses all the trappings and issues confronted by a typical BI effort, including: serious resource constraints, time pressures to deliver a solution quickly and within budget, the absence of strong in-house data management and analysis expertise, and weak stakeholder understanding of and hence the commitment in engaging the solution delivery. The success of the undertaking in Haverhill illustrates that by focusing on bringing end users into the core BI development process and in vesting them with ongoing system maintenance and support responsibilities, an organization no matter how modest can achieve its BI objectives.

Abstract

The New Product Introduction (NPI) process has been thoroughly reviewed and its potential delays have been identified by the available relevant literature. Any of these delays can potentially extend the time to market, with known effects to a company's performance. Therefore, it is important for such delays to be eliminated or substantially reduced. However, it is not always easy to resolve NPI related issues, due to the complexity of activities and the involvement of several different functions throughout the process. Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is a problem solving method that is applied to address "soft" issues. However, this methodology can be utilised to assist in defining and potentially resolving NPI issues. In order to demonstrate this, the data transfer and manipulation activity of the NPI, that takes place between the engineering and manufacturing functions, was investigated. After the application of SSM, the problem area was better defined and a potential solution was identified through the use of the conceptual model. The SSM technique was successfully applied in this case, this indicates that it can be utilised to simplify other problem areas of the NPI process.

Abstract

We examined ethically-charged business and tax accounting decisions made by 598 Arab, Chinese, Latin American, Iranian, American, and Vietnamese students. Respondents indicated decisions on 11 situations, and separately provided data on their cultural values, education, work and managerial experience. Our purpose was to test hypotheses that individual-level cultural values, education and experience, and the interaction of values and education/ experience affected the decisions people made. In other words, shed light on the “why” behind differences in intentions. Business managers often face challenging situations that require ethical reasoning. Accountants preparing tax statements are frequently required to make decisions about ambiguous situations. In the U.S, tax preparers are expected to follow the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' standards of ethical tax practice. While the laws for tax preparation are of course country specific, common dilemmas are faced by tax accountants worldwide, such as dealing with estimates and correcting errors unlikely to be caught by authorities. Result indicate that six cultural values, Being orientation, Determinism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Collectivism, and Facework were significant predictors of business and tax accounting decisions in 11 out of 11 scenarios, when controlling for age and gender. In most cases, we failed to find that work experience, years of study, accountancy studies, or managerial experience were significant predictors. However, we did find that the interaction of education and experience with cultural values moderated the relationship between the six cultural values and business and tax accounting decisions.

Abstract

With the current globalization drive, most firms rely on Competitive Intelligence to help position them strategically through effective decision-making based on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing activities and competitors' vulnerability. It is of interest therefore to make decisions based on accurate inferences. Association rules have been widely used in data mining to find patterns in data that reveal combinations that occur at the same time which are called rules. The rules are sometimes too numerous to be used in decision making, hence, the interestingness of the rules are used to select the subset to act upon.

This paper aims at evaluating the interestingness of rules gotten from applying association rule mining algorithm to data received from questionnaires of mobiles phone users in Nigeria. A pattern is interesting if it is easily understood by humans, potentially useful and novel. The evaluation of the rule is done objectively using statistical independence and correlation analysis. This research has helped to reduce the uncertainty and inaccuracy of rules from which decisions are based towards the competitive advantage of an organization. Findings from the research revealed the areas of strength and weakness of mobile phone manufacturers and this understanding is used to provide competitive business decisions, which will in turn contribute to the profit of the organization.