A move towards a process based view has been noted as the way forward to achieve the desired performance improvements in the construction industry. It has further been recognised that, it is important for the organisations to possess appropriate process capability maturity to embark on successful process improvement initiatives to achieve desired performance improvements. With the success of the software industry's Capability Maturity Model (CMM), other industries have attempted to map the principles of CMM as a basis for process improvement initiatives within their respective settings. Construction is not an exception; the same has been attempted within the construction industry through a research collaboration between academia and industry, under the name of SPICE (Structured Process Improvements in Construction Enterprises). Being a stepwise improvement strategy, the CMM consists of five maturity levels, where the first three levels have been identified as low maturity levels, while levels four and five have been named as high maturity levels. While the low maturity levels lay the foundation for organisations to attain continuous improvements successfully, the practices of the high maturity levels deploy the process improvements required to achieve substantial performance boosts. Despite the fact that achieving high maturity levels is of utmost importance to achieve continuous improvements, up till now, only the low maturity level practices of CMM have been mapped within the context of construction organisations, leaving its true potential unexplored as a construction process improvement initiative. In the light of the above, this research aimed at mapping the practices of CMM high maturity levels to construction organisations to achieve high process capability maturity within construction organisations. This research has adopted the grounded theory and case studies as the primary research methods. It used the hermeneutic spiral approach to operationalise the research. Accordingly, the empirical investigation of this research consisted of two phases. The first phase is a series of expert interviews followed by two case studies conducted during the second phase of the study. Data analysis in this research was based on the coding, content analysis and cognitive mapping techniques. To assist with the data analysis and presentation

The contemporary socio-economic and technological climate promotes structural change in organisations. The impact has been further heightened by the recent global financial crisis. In these circumstances organisations in all sectors develop change strategies to enable them to adapt and continue to be effective. In response, Business Process Management (BPM) can be used as an ongoing organisational commitment and its effectiveness is through the strategic management of processes. Many public sector organisations also face a fundamental cultural shift as the basis of public funding changes. As an example, the importance of higher education institutions to the economy is increasingly recognised. Transformation of higher education institutions increases the importance of facilities and demands a more strategic approach to their management. For facilities management to take a leading role in transforming organisations, processes need to be mapped to understand their status ('as-is'), to identify opportunities for their development and set out plans for improvement ('to-be'). This research thesis focuses on the role and development of facilities management in the United Kingdom, considered as business processes, and as a response to changing conditions in higher education. Evidence from literature reveals the need for the development a generic process protocol for facilities management. This research contributes to the early stages in the development of a generic process protocol for facilities management and tests its feasibility in a UK higher education institution. The research provided the author with the opportunity to contribute to the development of a new CEN European standard in facilities management processes and involvement in the Realising Our Vision (ROV) project at the University of Salford. Qualitative research was conducted within a nested research philosophy with a single case study, designed to gain in-depth information and to create a framework that describes and maps facilities management processes. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, documents' review, direct observation and archival records and this data was analysed using content analysis, cognitive mapping and process mapping. The research found that poorly developed FM processes limit the contribution of the FM Process Protocol in supporting the University's strategic objectives. The study identified organisational and cultural barriers in the development of a FM Process Protocol and suggested that a better understanding of the organisation is vital to the incorporation of a FM strategy into strategic management. The study confirmed the feasibility of developing a process protocol for facilities management and the protocol was consistent with guidance on the development and improvement of FM processes that was produced in the draft European standard. This study also offered a methodological contribution that could be applied to a similar study for different types of universities and different countries. The work identified the input necessary for the development of a FM Process Protocol to create a robust tool and to deliver consistency in its application, across sectors and in different contexts.

Spatial data are items of information related to a location on earth. The early forms of spatial data included maps, survey plans, coastal charts and geodetic triangulation. With the advancement of technology, this spatial data have increased its importance. Decision makers from many disciplines tend to rely on up-to-date relevant, wider and accessible spatial data as an essential input in supporting their operational and strategic decisions. The demand to access multi-organisations spatial data continue to increase and this has pushed organisation to share their spatial data as rarely all these data sets reside within one organisation. However, there are persistent challenges that limit the utilization of available spatial data across organizations. The existence of these challenges is a global phenomenon and Brunei, a small country in south East Asia is no exception. The main purpose of this research is to identify factors that impede spatial data sharing within government departments in Brunei and use the findings to develop a framework for sharing spatial data within the government departments. The proposed framework took the innovative approach of combining both technical and non- technical factors, which have not been currently addressed. This research adopted multiple holistic case studies in 3 selected government departments in Brunei. A comprehensive literature review of relevant topics helped in designing a preliminary guideline for research in spatial data sharing. This guideline is used as a basis for data collection and at the same time refined by the case studies. Both content analysis and cognitive mapping techniques were applied to help in customizing the framework for sharing spatial data in Brunei, the ultimate product of this research. The framework comprises of two different components, which include the contextual component and the collaborative process component. Under the collaborative process component, there were 5 key elements that are crucial in spatial data sharing. This includes leadership, formal agreement, IT structure, monitoring and review and security. The framework was not empirically validated due to the immaturity of spatial data sharing in Brunei, unable the framework to be validated empirically. At such, opinions from the experts on the appropriateness of the framework were elicited as an initial validation. Efforts were also made by assessing the impact of each key element to the past data sharing projects in Brunei. The research concluded that the proposed framework offers a viable and effective formal mechanism for data sharing and coordination of spatial activities within government departments in Brunei. It is envisaged that with minor amendments to the policy aspects, the framework is expandable for application to private sectors.

The thesis evaluates the impact of just-in-time (JIT) strategies on retailers and cut make and trim (CMT) manufacturers within the apparel supply chain. A simulation approach is adopted based on a case study within the apparel sector, involving a major high street retailer and a manufacturing supply chain. A range of procurement strategies are subsequently modelled (including manufacturing resource planning [MRPII], safety stock [SS]. ship to forecast [STF] and JIT) within manufacturers of differing scale, and varying levels of dependence on primary customers (major high street retail chains) and impact on the variation of demand against forecast are evaluated against a wide range of parameters; these include: net margin, delivery, manufacturing profit and impact on a manufacturing company's ability to satisfy its secondary customers (smaller retail outlets with less buying power). Analytical methods are used to evaluate performance measures within three perspectives: Primary and Secondary customers, and Suppliers (manufacturers). A further perspective is evaluated combining all three views. Findings indicate that JIT retail strategies, notably where power of the retailer is high and the power of the manufacturer is low (compared to the raw material supplier), necessitate inventory holding and biased work scheduling at a supply level, leading to reduced manufacturing margin and loss of secondary customers; the latter imposes hidden costs in attracting new custom, which is not evaluated in this thesis. The thesis concludes by comparing the variation of parameters across each of the four perspectives, and proposes recommendations for conventional JIT policy, based upon optimising benefits for all parties within the supply chain.

This research aims to contribute to the area of new alignment in Facilities Management (FM). By taking urban FM as the focus of the research, this research highlights how FM is looking at a new way to deliver services to the community, which involves the management of public facilities, infrastructure and its associated services. This new alignment in FM gives new ideas to many researchers by using the urban FM concept to explore many possibilities and putting it in a proper place to improve the current services related to FM. The concept of urban FM moves away from the classical view of the 'traditional service provider' approach that involves the private sector such as in privatisation, outsourcing, or even joint venture approaches. This study tries to look beyond that by looking at the possibilities for having a flexible platform that could involve public agencies or the private sector, or both together, as a new way of delivering services to the public and the community. Therefore, it is important to understand the concept of urban FM and its underlying philosophy in order to realise the inter-relationships with the social enterprise principle, which could possibly offer a new approach to improve the current service delivery. In particular, this thesis outlines the enablers for a new service delivery model which meets the needs of social enterprise applications in an urban FM setting, for the purpose of managing community facilities operations. The research has thoroughly investigated the activities related to urban FM around the world including the UK, and the same goes for the social enterprise practices. It was done by looking at different perspectives to reveal the enablers of the service delivery model so that it can be used extensively. Having this in place helped the researcher to develop a strong base in identifying the initial enablers before particularly seeking the enablers for a Malaysian setting. Looking at the main themes; urban FM and social enterprise with the aim of building a theory, a thorough review of the literature provided a strong basis before looking into current practices. Case studies were conducted at several local councils in Malaysia to gain a better understanding of the contextual factors in seeking the applications of the new service delivery model. Although it was a new approach to apply this model for Malaysian applications, having expert views on this to validate the findings helped to explain the findings in an appropriate way. The contribution to knowledge in the field may be viewed in terms of a critical examination about the urban FM concept and its relationship with social enterprise principles, as well as demonstrating its potential success within an urban FM setting. This study also adds to the current empirical evidence being studied, particularly for the Malaysian context. Derived from that, this uncovered a flexible model for delivering services in managing community facilities operations. This suggested a 'Ridley-Duff model, Type B' of a social enterprise organisational form as a suitable company or agency, with combining the government and business aspect which suits an urban FM setting in this context of study. Moreover, realising the benefits from the 'flexible model' provides added value to the contribution to the knowledge in this area, which also can be taken for further research in other FM areas.

Information technology (IT) is in many cases business critical for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). IT outsourcing is an already common practice for SMEs and their IT outsourcing projects are often similar in size and demands with those of large corporations. This thesis aims to provide an answer to the following research question: "What are capabilities that facilitate the governance of IT outsourcing and lead to the successful management of external IT resources in SMEs?" The findings may be used to draw one or more hypotheses or propositions about IT outsourcing capabilities of SMEs. The study follows a positivistic qualitative approach and applies inductive analytical strategies and procedures to address the research question. The author presents multiple-case study research on SMEs in Austria and Germany and, based on a conceptual model from the literature, identifies capabilities that facilitate the governance of IT outsourcing in SMEs. This study explores these capabilities based on five IT governance domains (i.e. strategic alignment, value delivery, risk management, resource management, and performance measurement), which are commonly known in the professional IT management and cover most processes and aspects of the IT operations of a company. The outcome of this research is a model of ten capabilities that are expected to facilitate the governance of IT outsourcing in SMEs: (1) Relationship building, (2) business-IT linkage, (3) communication (4), knowledge management, (5) contract facilitation and monitoring, (6) informed buying, (7) process management, (8) quality management, (9) project management, and (10) IT goals planning and measurement. The conclusions provide suggestions for executive managers of SMEs on how to grow and develop IT outsourcing capabilities. Following these suggestions can substantially influence the IT outsourcing experience of SMEs and improve the benefits achieved through IT outsourcing.

This study adopted a qualitative approach to address a range of questions intended to clarify and explain the ways in which performance management and measurement (PMM) has been used as part of the Kingdom of Thailand's public service reform. The study examines the origins of Thailand's public sector development within the context of wider debates about New Public Management, bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy, and the emergence of HRM. By adopting a qualitative approach, based on interviews with over 60 managers and employees, it provides a rare insight into the ways in which PMM is experienced by those who are required to implement it and who are subject to it. These insights are especially interesting as they also provide one of the few qualitative studies into Thai organisational practices. In order to evaluate how far the responses to PMM are specific to the public sector, a comparison is made with a private bank in order to control for some of the influence of national culture. The findings suggest that, despite a rhetoric of 'performance', the public sector organisations are finding it difficult to make PMM operate effectively. In particular, it is shown that there is a persistent bureaucratic culture that inclines employees to frame PMM in terms of compliance to hierarchical authority rather than identify with it as a means of improving real performance. This is seen to be associated with challenges to psychological contracts and the established patterns of trust, discretion and power. In contrast, the private sector organisation had managed to establish 'performance' as a substantive feature of its management processes, especially HRM, and had adopted forms of management that appeared closer, in some respects, to ideas of post-bureaucracy.

Although investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are continuously increasing, the relationship between ICT and productivity has been very elusive. Indeed, despite the plethora of studies, research findings have always led to contradictory and/or questionable results. This has resulted in the development of a debate around the concept of the so called ICT productivity paradox. Recently, the issue regarding the productivity impact of ICT has been intensified due to the increasing role and penetration of ICT in the economy and their potential to create an equal competing field for all operators. However, it is widely recognised that there is a need to enhance our understanding of how ICT enhances productivity as well as to develop new techniques and methods for measuring, assessing and managing ICT for delivering organisational value. It is the aim of this study to investigate the impact of ICT on productivity by proposing and applying a robust methodology that is argued to overcome the limitations and problems of previous studies. By providing empirical evidence of the critical ICT issues that add organisational value, the research findings have also contributed in the development of a framework for managing ICT, which in turn raises more questions for further research and investigation. The hotel industry is not an exception in such developments. ICT investments are increasing, however research on their impact on hotel productivity is lacking. To that end, the empirical framework of the study is placed within the context of the hotel sector. In particular, a mail survey targeting hotel managers of three star hotels was conducted for gathering data regarding productivity and ICT metrics. The latter were developed after conducting a thorough and systematic review of the literature regarding three core fields: a) productivity; 2) ICT; and 3) Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The latter is a multivariate statistical technique that was employed for carrying out enhanced statistical analysis of the productivity metrics, which were in turn investigated in their relationship with three ICT metrics. These were; a) type and amount of ICT applications; b) integration of ICT systems; and c) sophistication of use of ICT applications. Overall, 93 usable questionnaires were obtained, which provided the following main findings. Although, a great variety of ICT has been adapted in three star hotel properties, operators are very limited in the way they exploit ICT tools and capabilities for enhancing their productivity. Specifically, very few hotel properties are deploying the networking/integration capabilities of ICT and so limit themselves to automating isolated work tasks and processes. Moreover, a great majority of respondents were found to be at the first stages of ICT implementation meaning that they mainly use ICT for automating their processing and not for exploiting the informational and transformational capabilities of ICT. On the contrary, findings provided evidence that productivity benefits are mainly attributed to ICT integration and sophistication of use rather than simple ICT availability. In this vein, in order to materialise ICT productivity benefits, an integrated approach for managing ICT should be adopted and implemented. Specifically, hotels need to manage and co-ordinate four components namely business processes, information, information systems and information infrastructure.

The effectiveness of outsourcing in the Ford interior department is analyses by having a closer look at all outsourced groups, especially a look at three different engineering service groups and four job experience groups. The focus is on outsourcing car development from start to end. Two mini case studies have shown a need for effectiveness improvement. From the literature the outsourcing definition, reason for outsourcing, advantages and disadvantages are identified. The literature is checked how the effectiveness and performance can be measured. Outsourcing and effectiveness are the fields of interest for the survey from which the research questions have been generated. The Ford interior population was target for this survey, while access issue resulted in asking all outsourcing groups inside the Ford interior department, 518 persons have been asked without the Ford employees, 68 did answer. Supported with two mini case studies the evaluation has been showing that the main fields of ineffectiveness are target setting, design efficiency, salary, complain handling, trust and relationship. This survey was cross sectional. To get continues improvement inside the Ford interior department, it is needed to implement a performance measurement or quality control system. The automotive industry has already implemented ISO/TS 16949 (2009), but Ford and the other outsourcing provider seem to have a gap in controlling it through the project phases, resulting in finding effectiveness gaps. The survey result will underline the need for a performance and quality control system, which is effective and improving effectiveness, if continuously used in all project phases. The wider implications for management are that the outlined questions could be usable in any other outsourcing organization, maybe even in any organisation to evaluate the areas of ineffectiveness and to start with this framework the necessary uplift of effectiveness and performance.

Design decision making increasingly involves the participation of multiple agents which bring into the design process multiple, and often conflicting, needs, knowledge, and goals. To the human agents (experts from the same or different domains, clients, users, stakeholders) one should add artificial agents (computational models and tools more generally) that play an important part in the process. Design research has considered the issue of distributed decision making mainly through the concepts of cooperation and collaboration. The present thesis argues that coordination is a more apposite concept for capturing the social distributed character of design. The concept of coordination places emphasis on issues of interdependency, complexity and distribution and enables us to understand design at a systemic/organisational level, without making assumptions about agents' commitment to a common goal, or their disposition towards cooperation or conflict. Additionally, coordination is used to capture the generative, creative aspects of distributed design decision making. The study explores and establishes the meaning of coordination through experimentation with computational models and simulations. The very process of building these models is a vehicle for exploring key hypotheses and assumptions, and developing a coherent theoretical construction. Overall, the thesis identifies the key dimensions of coordination that are typical to the domain of design, and employs them to develop a framework (a theory) for understanding multi-agent design as a generative social process. The dimensions identified are learning, decentralised control and co-evolution. A model of coordination developed using the paradigm of distributed learning control is used as a way to establish the precise meaning of these dimensions. Based on insights from the experimentation, the concept of coordination is further refined in order to propose an organisational (complexity-informed) perspective of multi-agent design. According to this perspective, the relationship between agents, their goals, and the design variables they manipulate, is at the same time a product of the design process, but also a constraint over individual agents. Coordination is then defined as a dynamic process towards a scheme of organisation that entails the emergence of collective design solutions.