Papers by Rui Dinis Sousa
E3S Web of Conferences, 2020
The creation of a well-defined strategy and tactics of logistics services for various groups of c... more The creation of a well-defined strategy and tactics of logistics services for various groups of customers with the definition of the range of services is extremely important for a service producer in terms of its competitiveness and market stability. The purpose of the study is to propose a method for classifying logistics services based on the use of ABC analysis, which allows Pareto to distribute services according to their degree of influence on the cost of production, which will enable the formation of an effective system of logistics services. A method for the classification of logistics services is proposed. The implementation of the proposed method made it possible to determine the types of services that should be differentiated.
… CISTI), 2010 5th Iberian Conference on, Jun 16, 2010
Aligning Business and Information Technologies strategies has been a subject studied for a long t... more Aligning Business and Information Technologies strategies has been a subject studied for a long time. Despite all the efforts, achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment remains a challenge requiring even more agility nowadays to keep up with the competition in a turbulent organizational environment. Past contributions are uncovered in this paper calling particular attention to the development of Enterprise Architecture as a way of addressing this challenge. However, this should be a process to be carried out in the ...
Americas Conference on Information Systems, 2014
Today's leading organizations are investing millions of dollars in Business Process Management (B... more Today's leading organizations are investing millions of dollars in Business Process Management (BPM) related services and software products. The BPM area is expected to be a $26B industry next year and grow by at least 12% for the foreseeable future. However, the bulk of BPM research and university-level course offerings are not in the USA. Why is there so little BPM education and research in the USA? Why are top recruiting firms for this area in the USA going to Europe or to Ops Management or Industrial Engineering? Are we laggards in the USA, or do we know something the rest of the world fails to see? These questions and the other questions and related topics will be addressed in this panel session.
Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, 2012
Business and Information Technology alignment remains one of the most important issues among IT m... more Business and Information Technology alignment remains one of the most important issues among IT managers. To assess it, many proposals have been put forward over the years. As one of the most cited in Google Scholar, the Luftman's survey instrument emerges as a promising one to assess business-IT alignment. This work presents a critical review of the Luftman's proposal for assessing business-IT alignment by comparing it with six other relevant proposals in the literature. Each one of the selected proposals was studied in terms of the coverage of the dimensions of the Luftman's instrument: communications, competency/value measurements, governance, partnership, technology scope and skills. Governance was the dimension better covered followed by the technology scope but the remaining dimensions were not so well covered with the skills dimension being the worst one. In fact, none of the selected proposals showed up as complete as the Luftman's proposal. Some research has already been carried out to validate and test the Luftman's instrument as a useful tool for practitioners and managers. The result, a more parsimonious instrument than the original one, seems a promising tool calling for further attention and use in research to get to an acceptable and recognized valid instrument to assess business-IT alignment.
The Influence of Logistics Innovations on Management of Freight-Transportation Processes
Polish Journal of Management Studies
Time is one of the main factors, and it affects the decision of costumers while choosing a partic... more Time is one of the main factors, and it affects the decision of costumers while choosing a particular transportation company. Every stage of logistics processes takes a particular period. That is why almost every firm thinks about the ways of decreasing the time wastes in order to maximize the profit of business. The objective of this research is to explore how different logistics innovations can affect freight transportation processes and save operational time. To achieve this goal and explore the topic more deeply, a list of articles published in worldwide databases related to this domain was analyzed and interpreted. The survey on freight transportation was used to get a better knowledge of today’s situation of freight systems. Based on the result of this article, it is suggested that new ideas for the management of companies in this sphere are suggested. The findings of this research can help Kazakhstan’s logistics companies to develop better strategies and to adopt innovative logistics technologies into freight transportation. They can make them become innovation-based logistics service providers.
Americas Conference on Information Systems, 2014
Organizational agility is one of the top management concerns as organizations face today increasi... more Organizational agility is one of the top management concerns as organizations face today increasingly changing environments. Among enterprise architecture (EA) benefits, organizational agility has been claimed as one of them, perceived as a direct or indirect benefit, for example, through business-IT alignment, another top management concern. However, even with reasonable explanations in the EA literature, there is still a lack of empirical evidence to support such claim. Our research looks for that evidence seeking to understand how the development and use of EA may contribute for organizational agility. Having one of the biggest municipalities in the country as the research setting, using a mixmethods approach, a case study was carried out to identify EA artefacts, understand EA at use and examine agility in a specific change situation. In this case, enterprise architecture was not just used but was developed and improved during the change situation to enable organizational agility.
This work has been supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Sco... more This work has been supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2013. The authors are also grateful to Informa D& B (Dun & Bradstreet) for its support to this research by providing the database with the sample of companies and their top level management contacts.
Baseline Mechanisms for IT Governance at Universities
The pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on Information Technology (IT) ... more The pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on Information Technology (IT) that requires IT Governance (ITG). ITG calls for the definition and implementation of formal mechanisms at the highest level in the organization taking into account structures, processes and relational mechanisms for the creation of business value from IT investments. However, determining the right ITG mechanisms remains a complex endeavour. Previous studies have identified ITG mechanisms in use in the financial and health care industries. While universities also increasingly depend on IT for their success, ITG implementation in universities has not received much attention. As universities have many unique characteristics, it is highly unlikely that ITG experiences from the financial and health care industries can be directly applied to universities. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to identify an ITG mechanisms’ baseline for universities. Six case studies comprising of in-dept...
Information technology (IT) has become essential in supporting the growth and sustainability of a... more Information technology (IT) has become essential in supporting the growth and sustainability of all types of organizations. Universities are one of those types that are more and more dependent on IT having a technological infrastructure made of heterogeneous technologies that turns IT Governance into a real challenge. The teaching-learning and research processes, nuclear for universities, require effective and efficient IT governance so universities remain competitive. IT governance calls for the definition and implementation of formal practices at the highest level in the organization involving structures, processes and relational mechanisms for the creation of business value from IT investments. However, it is quite notorious the difficulty in defining and implementing those practices from frameworks such as COBIT, ITIL, ISO/IEC 38500, among others. The level of adoption of such frameworks at universities is quite low, superficial or limited in scope. To address these issues, we p...
This research looks at the individual acceptance of an Enterprise System (ES) in terms of extende... more This research looks at the individual acceptance of an Enterprise System (ES) in terms of extended use. "Extended use" is intended to capture the situations when the users go beyond the basic use to discover through their own exploration new ways of utilizing the system. Building from the theoretical framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this research seeks to identify what factors under managerial influence are most likely to predict extended use. The model suggests that extended use will be predicted by perceptions of usefulness of extended use and ease of extended use. These will be predicted by four factors: user participation, knowledge transfer from consultants, training, and situated learning. A survey of key users will be conducted to test the model. From an academic perspective, this empirical study seeks to contribute to: a) an emergent research area where case studies are still predominant and empirical studies are scarce, and b) the understanding ...
Complex information technology often remains under-utilized following implementation. As a result... more Complex information technology often remains under-utilized following implementation. As a result, potentially powerful tools may deliver only limited benefits. These limited benefits may not compensate for what is usually a costly and difficult implementation process. One way for organizations to move from superficial to more comprehensive usage is to get users to go beyond the basic capabilities of the system and to uncover new ways of using it, either on their own or with the help of others, i.e., through exploratory use. This study focuses on ERP systems as an example of complex IT. Building on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), sets of salient behavioral, normative, and control beliefs are identified as determinants of the intention to explore. To engage in the exploratory use of complex technologies, users will likely need to overcome significant knowledge and motivational barriers. Thus, key knowledge and motivational factors are also included in the research model. Hypoth...
This work is supported by FEDER funding through the Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme... more This work is supported by FEDER funding through the Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme – COMPETE and national funding through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology under the project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674.
Enterprise Systems Extended Use
This research looks at the individual acceptance of an Enterprise System (ES) in terms of extende... more This research looks at the individual acceptance of an Enterprise System (ES) in terms of extended use. "Extended use" is intended to capture the situations when the users go beyond the basic use to discover through their own exploration new ways of utilizing the system. Building from the theoretical framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this research seeks to identify what factors under managerial influence are most likely to predict extended use. The model suggests that extended use will be predicted by perceptions of usefulness of extended use and ease of extended use. These will be predicted by four factors: user participation, knowledge transfer from consultants, training, and situated learning. A survey of key users will be conducted to test the model. From an academic perspective, this empirical study seeks to contribute to: a) an emergent research area where case studies are still predominant and empirical studies are scarce, and b) the understanding ...
E3S Web of Conferences, 2020
Digitalization in education sphere is the new paradigm of high technologies development. The arti... more Digitalization in education sphere is the new paradigm of high technologies development. The article proves that digital technologies are relevant and widely used in various areas of society: management, economic relations, science and education. However, digitalization of the educational process is of particular importance, because the several factors such an advance of the quality and relevant experience in this sphere. Today, important transformation processes are taking place in the field of education: electronic textbooks, Internet portals, databases of information needs are spreading, systems of online courses and distance learning are actively developing.
Universities are complex organizations dependent on information technology. Their technological i... more Universities are complex organizations dependent on information technology. Their technological infrastructure consists of a variety of applications, different platforms, academic systems, cloud applications and heterogeneous technologies. The goals and objectives of a university are different from traditional organizations. As organizations aim to generate economic value and reduce costs, the universities, the public ones, are particularly concerned with generating, sharing and transferring knowledge to the society that support them. In this way, IT support to core activities such as research and teaching require appropriate IT governance mechanisms making use of frameworks and maturity models. The literature presents a variety of frameworks to help organizations implement IT governance. However, these frameworks are complex, complicated and difficult to interpret and use. Organizations usually choose to develop their frameworks considering their features and business reality. This...
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2017
In a globalized world, where companies operate across different locations and work becomes increa... more In a globalized world, where companies operate across different locations and work becomes increasingly complex, collaboration in a diversity of ways is required among employees to perform tasks more effectively. Following a case study methodology that involved six interviews across three different country locations, this research addresses the phenomenon of Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) in a multinational corporation with a focus on the assessment of ESN success. The findings show that the company, while trying to assess the success of Yammer, the freemium social networking service at use, has mainly relied on analytics tools to measure usage through indicators such as the total number of users. However, the extent to which ESN is used does not provide a complete picture of ESN success. Business value from that ESN usage is another dimension to be considered to assess success. Therefore, the study of specific ESN usage scenarios that are perceived to have a trackable impact on business results can be used to assess ESN business value on top of ESN usage to fully understand ESN success.
Information Technology Issues in Portugal
World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in Business
Exploring the case of a local food bank to understand information technology use in government information networks
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
Problems and Perspectives in Management
Progress of agriculture is becoming increasingly reliant on the successful application of technol... more Progress of agriculture is becoming increasingly reliant on the successful application of technology. However, many developing countries depend on technology transfer from other countries to be utilized in large and complex projects in agriculture. This study intends to identify strategic directions for successful technology transfer in developing countries’ agriculture with Kazakhstan as a case study. A SWOT analysis was conducted using Internal Factor Evaluation, External Factor Evaluation, Strategic Position and Action Evaluation, and Quantitative Strategic Planning matrices as analytical methods, based on primary data from interviews and secondary data from reports. With a weight of 52%, opportunities prevail in external factors, with emerging good geographical position, land area latitude, and participation in economic integrations as the most significant ones. On the other hand, internal factors such as emerging low skills in agricultural innovation, insufficient resources in ...
Information Systems Function and Governance in Portuguese Organizations
2021 16th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)
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Papers by Rui Dinis Sousa