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M.Comm. / In the current economy, leveraging information technology (“IT”) is of vital importance to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. To accomplish this, companies must ensure the alignment of IT with business strategy. The fundamental goal of alignment should be for IT capabilities to support, enable, and, where appropriate, lead business strategy. Such alignment will maximize the effective use and value of IT in a strategic context. The alignment of IT and business strategy is not easily achieved and has always presented IT and business executives with numerous problems. One of many challenges facing small businesses is that IT strategy appears to take a parallel course to business strategy, maintaining a common direction with business strategy but at a distance. The objective of this research is to identify the impact of this separation of strategy, and understand how to enable enhanced alignment of IT and business strategy. The research scope focuses on the alignment of IT and business strategy in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The Strategic Alignment Model will be used to analyse IT and business strategy alignment. The value that IT contributes to the organisation will be analysed in terms of three dimensions: systems, users and the wider business. The research will seek to establish whether a relationship exists between strategic alignment and the value of IT to the organisation. Data has been collected through structured interviews conducted with management executives from various SMEs. A concise introduction with each participant ensured a common understanding of key terms and concepts. Questionnaires were also mailed to willing participants where personal interviews were not possible. The findings of this study are expected to assist the alignment of IT and business strategy in SMEs in South Africa resulting in greater realisation of IT value and benefits.

As a result of the perfect storm of 2008-2009 (an intensely competitive environment and extremely harsh economic conditions), hotel properties around the world are more dependent upon revenue management strategies today. Furthermore, hotel revenue management has become a core strategic element for both domestic and international major brand name hotels within today's worldwide lodging industry. Accordingly, this study examined any potential linkage between revenue management resources, management approach, working knowledge of the external environment, and overall revenue management performance of international hotel properties. In this context, revenue management resources speak to management information systems, technology, and human capital. Furthermore, management's approach to how the external environment is taken into consideration is also addressed. Consequently, this study identifies which specific outside variables management considers relevant to the revenue management decision-making process. As such, this study contributes to the discipline of revenue management by addressing the following: (a) How are revenue management decisions for hotel properties influenced by external factors if at all? (b) How significant are internal resources, such as human capital and technology, to the success of hotel revenue management programs and systems as well as overall firm performance in a cross-border, premier international tourist destination? The results of this study help to augment and expand revenue management theory as well as provide hotel managers with a deeper understanding as to how revenue management decisions are influenced by external environmental factors as well as the importance of internal resources on hotel revenue management performance.

The target of the thesis will be to propose a business strategy for a company operating in the field of digital design with emphasis on the use of ICT support for the proposed strategy. The thesis is divided into three basic parts. The first one is the theoretical part which will outline the theoretical basis characterizing the strategy and its implementation in connection with ICT. The second part will be an analysis of the internal and external environment of the company in order to obtain the basis for decision-making in the design part of the thesis. The third, design part will be devoted to the definition of business strategy and implementation of ICT to support it.

Organisations are facing increased competition in contemporary business environments. At the same time, cloud computing is a catalyst for new software applications and services available to organisations. Therefore, cloud computing is a viable option to provide innovation within the organisation. Therefore, organisations need to recognise the potential transformation of its business model, to take advantage of cloud computing. This research sets out to describe and explain the relationship between the various business strategy factors and CC. Organisations have to guard against using cloud-computing capabilities only to provide organisational efficiencies, as the efficiencies gained do not always translate into business value. Adopting cloud computing can cause disruptions in the organisation. Therefore, the organisation needs a strategy and understand the relationship between the business strategy and the cloud computing options available. The present study performs multi-method qualitative research, within the South African context. By taking a constructivist view, the researcher believes the knowledge will emerge from the interaction the people have with their environment. The research purpose states the research as descriptive and explanatory. Data collection for the present study performs face-to-face interviews. A general interview-guided approach ensures the research covers same areas of interest in all the interviews. For the data analysis, the researcher uses an inductive thematic analysis method. Software-as-a-Service influences the customer behaviour and forces organisations to re-evaluate their use of cloud computing. However, new cloud computing capabilities brought into the organisation need to provide a value proposition with an expected time-to-market. Also, large organisations require a technology architecture review to assess the impact on their infrastructure. The multi-faceted cost structure coupled with legacy systems and legacy investment products can prevent the adoption of cloud computing. Another factor is the vendor relationship and their influence regarding the solutions into which an organisation invests. The present study concludes how cloud computing offers no competitive differentiation for South African investment services organisations. For these organisations, their existing business models remains profitable. Business strategy, therefore, has no compelling reason to consider cloud computing. Furthermore, information technology is a utility service. For these organisations, the information technology and business strategy align through the service-level method. This alignment method forces the information technology department to focus on maintaining a stable and reliable infrastructure. Cloud computing is only considered when contributing to the service-level. A misalignment then follows, and individual business units adopt cloud computing to fulfil their business need. As a result, the business unit is ready to adopt cloud computing while the information technology department is a hindrance towards adopting cloud computing. Software-as-a-Service solutions are the most used cloud computing option, based on its ability to offer an accelerated time-to-market for proof-of-concept products and services. However, most final business solutions move onto the internal infrastructure of the organisation. Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service are used to a lesser degree by organisations in this study.

The lack of practical methodologies to guide and integrate the strategic and operational organizational efforts toward a systematic e-business strategy is hindering the effective use of the e-business model. This paper offers a Baldrige-based rapid assessment implementation methodology (RAIM) approach toward integrating the different facets of e-business.

The strategic orientation of Portuguese firms in the porcelain industry is examined empirically. In the process, the effective use of traditional generic strategies as opposed to emerging strategies is compared. Special attention is devoted to the utility of classical Porter's generic strategies in comparison to time-based differentiation strategy. The study concludes that different variations of the classical differentiation strategy, which includes time-based differentiation, appear to be more effective than cost leadership or mixed generic strategies.

The economy of Taiwan relies heavily upon the electronic manufacturing industry; hence choosing appropriate generic business strategies which are consistent with the environment based on suitable resources can allow small and medium size firms to sustain their competitive advantages and earn a higher return for the electronic manufacturing industry in Taiwan. This study intensities the effect of the precedent factors and generic business strategies chosen on the performance of small and medium size firms in the Taiwanese electronic manufacturing industry. It explores simultaneously the impact of the resources and the environment on business strategy which affects a firm's performance will provide valuable insight into the formulation of competitive strategies by structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. Finally, the use of SAS 9.0 with Amos 5.0 perform first order confirmatory factor analysis for the reliability of questionnaire and explores the relationship among variables in the proposed model based upon path analysis and multiple regression statistical methods and to recommends a new model depending on survey data gathered from firms in Taiwanese electronic manufacturing industry.

The challenges of developing the information systems (IS) that support modern enterprises are becoming less about engineering and more about people. Many of the technical issues of the past, such as hardware size and power, connectivity, and robust software, are engineering problems that have largely been solved. In the next stage of computing, the human factor will be far more important than it has been in the past: the colors of an interface or the shape of an icon are the engineering problems of the past, and the availability and usefulness of such basic solutions is rapidly coming to a close. A new paradigm is needed that provides a roadmap of higher level conceptions and values, one about humane computing. A part of this older, mechanistic approach are quantitative, economic values whose impact on IS are readily visible and acknowledged within software engineering. However, qualitative values, and in particular consumer preferences, have been researched to a lesser degree, and there has been very little direct application.  To create the next-generation information systems, requirements engineers and systems developers need new methods to capture the real preferences of consumers, conceptualize these abstract concepts, and then relate such preferences to concrete requirements for information systems. To address this problem, this thesis establishes a conceptual link between the preferences of consumers and system requirements by accommodating the variations between them and expressing them via a conceptual model. Modeling such preferences and values so that they can be used as requirements for IS development is the primary contribution of this work. This is accomplished via a design science research paradigm to support the creation of the works’ primary artifact—the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM is intended to improve the alignment between business and information systems by capturing and concretizing the real preferences of consumers and then expressing such preferences via the requirements engineering process, with the eventual output being information systems. CPMM’s development relies on theoretical research contributions within three areas in information systems—Business Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Requirements Engineering—whose relationships to consumer values have been under-researched and under-applied. The case studies included in this thesis each demonstrate the significance of consumer preferences to each of these three areas.  In the first, a set of logical mappings between CPMM and a common approach to business strategy (strategy maps/balanced scorecards) is produced. In the second, CPMM provides the conceptual undergirding to process a massive amount of unstructured consumer-generated text to generate system requirements for the airline industry. In the concluding case, an investigation of foreign and domestic students at Swedish universities is structured through CPMM, one that first discovers the requirements for a consumer preference-based online education and then produces feature models for such a software product line-based system. The significance of CPMM as a lens for discovering new concepts and highlighting important information within consumer preference data is clearly seen, and the usefulness of the meta-model is demonstrated by its broad and beneficial applicability within information systems practice and research.

O mercado de baixa renda tem se tornado cada vez mais relevantes para todos os setores empresariais. Estima-se que em 2010 as classes C e D serão responsáveis por mais da metade do consumo do mercado interno brasileiro. Empresas de transporte aéreo brasileiras de passageiros, que historicamente se caracterizaram por prestar serviço voltado para as classes de maior renda, passaram a desenvolver estratégias para atrair o público de baixa renda para viajar de avião, partindo de estratégias concebidas em outras indústrias e adaptando às particularidades do setor aéreo. O presente trabalho identificou as estratégias de empresas aéreas brasileiras para atender o mercado de baixa renda. Devido ao fato do mercado de baixa renda para o transporte aéreo ser ainda embrionário, as estratégias se concentra ainda no composto mercadológico, como produto, preço, canal de distribuição, comunicação e serviço. Práticas adotadas pelo varejo para atrair e reter o consumidor de baixa renda, como a loja de vizinhança, porta a porta, meios de financiamento alternativos ao cartão de crédito tem sido testadas e adotadas pelas empresas aéreas analisadas, complementando as práticas usuais do mercado. Essa pesquisa avaliou ainda os principais fatores indutores e restritivos à inserção da baixa renda no setor de transporte aéreo. A maior preocupação das empresas aéreas analisadas nesse estudo é com a infra-estrutura aeroportuária, que pode se tornar limitador da expansão do setor aéreo no Brasil. Já as operadoras de turismo são percebidas pelas empresas aéreas como agente indutor à inserção da população de baixa renda, em especial pela venda de pacotes de turismo. Finalmente, essa pesquisa avaliou, ainda que de maneira sucinta as estratégias de negócio adotadas pelas empresas aéreas, e identificou um modelo de baixo custo brasileira. Trata-se de um modelo híbrido entre as estratégias de diferenciação e baixo custo. As empresas analisadas procuram simultaneamente oferecer serviços para clientes corporativos e estimular novos mercados, sobretudo o mercado de baixa renda. De acordo com Porter (1985), esse tipo de estratégia poderia ser classificado como meio-termo, visto que a empresa não adota nenhuma das estratégias genéricas. Porém, o histórico dessas empresas permite avaliar que essas empresas iniciaram sua operação com modelo mais próximo à estratégia de baixo custo, e tiveram que evoluir ou reformular completamente esse modelo de acordo com as características do mercado brasileiro. / The Bottom of Pyramid has become increasingly relevant market to all business sectors. It is estimated that in 2010 social classes C and D will account for over half the consumption of the Brazilian domestic market. Brazilian airlines, who have historically been characterized by providing service for the high income classes, began to develop strategies to attract lowincome public to travel by plane, using strategies developed in other industries and adapting to the particularities of the airline industry. This research has identified strategies for Brazilian airlines to reach the Bottom of Pyramid market. As this segment is still limit, strategies still focus on the marketing mix, such as product, price, distribution channel, communication and service. Practices adopted by retailers to attract and retain low-income consumers, as the neighborhood store, door to door, alternative financing to credit card have been tested and adopted by the airlines studied, complementing the usual practices of the market. This research also evaluated the main factors that affect the introduction of Bottom of Pyramid in the airline industry. The major concern of airlines examined in this study is with the airport infrastructure, which can limit the expansion of the airline industry in Brazil. Tour operators are already perceived by the airlines as a promoter for this process. Finally, this research evaluated the business strategies adopted by airlines, and identified a Brazilian low-cost model. The model is a hybrid between the strategies of differentiation and low cost. The analyzed airlines are seeking to offer services to both corporate customers and stimulate new markets, particularly the Bottom of Pyramid. According to Porter (1985), this strategy could be classified as stuck in the middle, because the company does not adopt any of the generic strategies. However, the history of these companies can assess that these companies started their operation with model closer to the strategy of low cost, and they had to evolve or completely redesign this model according to the characteristics of the Brazilian market