Using Africa as a context for research, new conceptual framing is proposed to make sense of the challenges of designing effective organizations to pursue socio-economic development.

This book examines influential ideas within Management Information Systems (MIS). Leading international contributors summarize key topics and explore a variety of issues currently being discussed in the field. They re-visit influential ideas such as socio-technical theory, systems thinking, and structuration theory and demonstrate their relevance to newer ideas such as re-engineering, hybrid management, knowledge workers, and outsourcing. In locating MIS within an interdisciplinary context, particularly in the light of rapid technological changes, this book will form the link between past and future approaches to MIS.

There are many books on duality. All of them fall into the following hackneyed categories: putting various spins on the classical dualities of good and evil, right and wrong, light and dark, mind and body, male and female, etc.: dualities as limitations and how to overcome them, or how to not limit oneself to one side; duality as illusion and how to free oneself from it; duality between women and men and how to reconcile it; etc. poetic and odd dualities such as the duality of the third dimension; haphazard dualities such as duality of risk and pain, moon and sun, wall and ceiling or any two other haphazardly chosen objects; treatises on the dual nature of something, e.g. the dual nature of matter, or the dual nature of mind, or the dual nature of soul, or the dual nature of space, etc. and, finally, scientific textbooks and monographs on duality principles in mathematics and physics. This book breaks a new ground and presents dualities discovered in the course of the research on how people think, solve problems and invent. The research began within the framework of TRIZ (the Russian acronym for the Theory of Inventor's Problems Solving) but went beyond it. It all started with the discovery of duality patterns in the TRIZ methods of invention. Attempts to formalize them led to the discovery of mathematical operators with properties that no other mathematical operator has. This led to the hypothesis that until now mathematics was the science about equal dualities. Accordingly, a program was launched to transform mathematics so that the axioms and theorems would assert the equivalence of dualities. Then dual transitions were discovered in the mechanisms of thinking and evolution. All this was put to use in devising new methods and algorithms of invention. The duality revolution has begun and continue to spread across domains revolutionizing them. This is what this book is about.

An authoritative collection of leading critical and contemporary writings published in the field of technology and organizations. The set spans a 50-year time period taking the reader from the first and most influential papers from the early 1950s through to some recent publications which address contemporary and emerging debates in the field at the dawn of the 21st century. Each of the 4 volumes has a particular focus upon this area of research and scholarship: the early debates; theories, paradigms and concepts; critical empirical studies; and emerging themes and future debates. The editors provide an introduction to, and overview of, the themes, debates, perspectives, theories and paradigms which characterize this area of organization studies, and set out a "route map" to help guide the reader through the four volumes.

Globalization of business, internationalization of trade, and increasing prevalence of multi-cultural interdisciplinary teams are beginning to redefine the nature of office work. Different-time/different-place/different-culture teams will become the norm. Same-time/same-place/same-culture teams will become the exception. The International Office of the Future (IOF) will be a dramatically different environment than that which exists in the majority of today's organizations. Prospects for the IOF give rise to numerous questions, which are addressed in this book. What are the salient issues? What design options or solution strategies exist to address these issues? How might these design options be best implemented? What are their implications? In addition, a number of specific topics will be discussed including: multi-cultural team productivity, IT platform requirements, and global telecommunications.

Winner of a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award Information Technology is supposed to enable business performance and innovation, improve service levels, manage change, and maintain quality and stability, all while steadily reducing operating costs. Yet when an enterprise begins a Lean transformation, too often the IT department is either left out or viewed as an obstacle. What is to be done? Winner of a 2011 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award, this book shares practical tips, examples, and case studies to help you establish a culture of continuous improvement to deliver IT operational excellence and business value to your organization. Praise for: ...will have a permanent place in my bookshelf. —Gene Kim, Chief Technology Officer, Tripwire, Inc. ... provides an unprecedented look at the role that Lean IT will play in making this revolutionary shift and the critical steps for sustained success. —Steve Castellanos, Lean Enterprise Director, Nike, Inc. Twenty years from now the firms which dominate their industries will have fully embraced Lean strategies throughout their IT organizations. —Scott W. Ambler, Chief Methodologist for Agile and Lean, IBM Rational ... a great survival manual for those needing nimble and adaptive systems. —Dr. David Labby, MD, PhD, Medical Director and Director of Clinical Support and Innovation, CareOregon ... makes a major contribution in an often-ignored but much-needed area. —John Bicheno, Program Director MS in Lean Operations, Cardiff University ... a comprehensive view into the world of Lean IT, a must read! —Dave Wilson, Quality Management, Oregon Health & Science University