<p>Software evolution is a crucial activity for software organizations. A specifc type of software evolution is the integration of previously isolated systems. The need for integration is often a consequence of different organizational changes, including merging of previously separate organizations. One goal of software integration is to increase the value to users of several systems by combining their functionality, another is to reduce functionality overlap. If the systems are completely owned and controlled in-house, there is an additional advantage in rationalizing the use of internal resources by decreasing the amount of software with essentially the same purpose. Despite in-house integration being common, this topic has received little attention from researchers. This thesis contributes to an increasing understanding of the problems associated with in-house integration and provides guidelines to the more efficient utilization of the existing systems and the personnel.</p><p>In the thesis, we combine two perspectives: software architecture and processes. The perspective of software architecture is used to show how compatibility analysis and development of integration alternatives can be performed rapidly at a high level of abstraction. The software process perspective has led to the identification of important characteristics and practices of the integration process. The guidelines provided in the thesis will help those performing future in-house integration to make well-founded decisions timely and efficiently.</p><p>The contributions are based on several integration projects in industry, which have been studied systematically in order to collect, evaluate and generalize their experiences.</p>

<p>Predmet istraživanja predstavlja definisanje i analizu ključnih indikatora performanse prilikom donošenja strateških odluka u industrijskim preduzećima. Ispituje se uticaj ključnih indikatora performanse na organizovanje efektivne i efikasne proizvodnje uz minimalne troškove, kao i uticaj lojalnosti zaposlenih na performansu u uslužnim preduzećima. Pored naučnog doprinosa u oblasti menadžmenta, istraživanje ima i praktičnu primenu.</p> / <p>The research subject is defining and analyzing key performance indicators for making strategic decisions in industrial companies. Examines the impact of key performance indicators for organizing effective and efficient production with minimum costs, and the impact of employees&#39; loyalty to the performance of the service companies. In addition to scientific contributions in the field of management, the research also has practical application.</p>

The top leader of an organization influences the organizational culture, and the organizational culture influences the leader. Strategic thinking on the part of the leader is a result of organizational culture and/or will impact organizational culture. This qualitative study is a comparative multiple-case study that examines the relationship between leaders and organizational culture and what the leader’s strategic decision-making and organizational changes indicate about the relationship between leadership and organizational culture. The organizational context of private schools is used to better understand the dynamics between leadership and organizational culture. This study uses an interview protocol with CEOs of private schools, a macroculture in the United States, to solicit the leaders’ perspectives on their school’s organizational culture and their perspectives on the specific strategic decisions made by those leaders in the context of that organizational culture. This study focuses on six different schools in Virginia, all approved through accrediting procedures by the Virginia Council for Private Education -- a shared organizational context. Individual focal points for data collection and analysis include individual school websites, published school documents, and required accreditation documents as well as structured interviews with the CEOs of each school. This study examines the cycle of influence that the leader has on the organization through strategic thinking and the influence that the organizational culture has on the leader. Three findings expressed how the leader influences the organizational culture. There were also three findings on how the organizational culture influences the leaders. Two additional findings are on what change indicates about the relationship between the leader and the organizational culture. These findings reveal that a focus on relationships in the school, a willingness to target specific growth for the individual school, and goals that were expressed spiritually as well as academically are key to the leaders. The study also found that the school cultures identified strongly and positively with that of being a family, spiritual focus operationally distinguishes the school cultures, and spiritual identity is also expressed as the relationship the school has to church. Two findings were identified relating to strategic decisions and change; these findings were that evidence of change should be visible and explicit within the organization and organizational change relates directly to focus for growth from the leader. These findings from this study support the conclusions that 1) Christian school leaders have a direct influence on the values and direction of the school’s organizational culture; 2) the Christian school’s organizational identity has a direct influence on the focus of the leader, and 3) changes targeted in Christian schools reflect the focus of the leader on growth. Findings from this research suggest that organizational culture is highly contextualized and as a result strategic thinking and decision-making on the part of the leader are also highly contextualized. Contextualization increases as the leader seeks to grow the organization or to change the organization. Understanding contextualization that exists, and how organizational culture changes as strategic decisions are made by the leader, has implications for further research in effective leadership, effective change, strategic thinking, and growing effective organizational cultures including private and public institutions of higher education and public and private corporate institution.

Software evolution is a crucial activity for software organizations. A specifc type of software evolution is the integration of previously isolated systems. The need for integration is often a consequence of different organizational changes, including merging of previously separate organizations. One goal of software integration is to increase the value to users of several systems by combining their functionality, another is to reduce functionality overlap. If the systems are completely owned and controlled in-house, there is an additional advantage in rationalizing the use of internal resources by decreasing the amount of software with essentially the same purpose. Despite in-house integration being common, this topic has received little attention from researchers. This thesis contributes to an increasing understanding of the problems associated with in-house integration and provides guidelines to the more efficient utilization of the existing systems and the personnel. In the thesis, we combine two perspectives: software architecture and processes. The perspective of software architecture is used to show how compatibility analysis and development of integration alternatives can be performed rapidly at a high level of abstraction. The software process perspective has led to the identification of important characteristics and practices of the integration process. The guidelines provided in the thesis will help those performing future in-house integration to make well-founded decisions timely and efficiently. The contributions are based on several integration projects in industry, which have been studied systematically in order to collect, evaluate and generalize their experiences.

Many features of the making of major managerial decisions have been covered by research - complexity, politicality, innovations, and so forth. Yet one - to which all others may be subject - remains almost untouched by research. It is the effects of societal culture on the way managers from different nations make, and implement, such decisions. This study compares the effects of a New World Latin dominated culture with those of an Old World Anglo-Saxon dominated culture, namely in Brazil and England respectively. It arises from the proposition that decision making, as well as other managerial practices, must be shaped by the cultures of the societies of which senior executives are part, in ways of which they themselves may be unaware. Methodologically, in response to the criticisms of earlier research which often attributed managerial and organizational differences to culture without direct evidence for that, this study began by composing portrayals of both cultures. The purpose of the portraits was to enable predictions of culturally affected elements in decision making, prior to empirical investigation. Data was collected by interview on twenty Brazilian and twenty English decisions in sixteen Brazilian and seventeen English organizations, ranging through a variety of manufacturing and service industries as well as universities. The examination of the results confirmed most of the predicted cultural characteristics. Differences although small on each variable were remarkably consistent across all variables. Brazilian strategic decision making was found to be dominated by a clique around the chief executive, who make fast decisions in a process strongly based on the social relationships between the participants. This style of decision making leads, in Brazil, to very informal processes, with little or no delays and, relatively speaking, less search for information. English decisions were found to be more consultative with more interests being involved in different stages of the process. Decisions in this country were characterized by caution and conservatism with some tendency to postpone decisions. Methodologically, the value of the prior conceptualization and description of societal culture is demonstrated since this gives meaning to the extensive differences found in all aspects of decision making. Theoretically, an attempt is made to elucidate the interconnectedness of societal culture and managerial behaviour.

Strategic decisions evaluation model is based on complex strategic decisions evaluation and scenarios methods’ synthesis. Using methods synthesis the evaluation becomes exhaustive, complex and is executed regarding environment changeability of business subject. The results of the study, conclusions and suggestions are useful for solving strategic problems of enterprises, for choosing the most suitable strategic decisions in enterprises paying attention to results of complex evaluation and environment conditions of business subject.

This collected volume gives a concise account of the most rel-evant scientific results of the COST Action IS1104 "The EU in the new complex geography of economic systems: models, tools and policy evaluation", a four-year project supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). It is divided into three parts reflecting the different perspectives under which complex spatial economic systems have been studied: (i) the Macro perspective looks at the interactions among international or regional trading partners; (ii) the Meso perspective considers the functioning of (financial, labour) markets as social network structures; and, finally, (iii) the Micro perspective focuses on the strategic choices of single firms and households. This Volume points also at open issues to be addressed in future research.

This collected volume gives a concise account of the most relevant scientific results of the COST Action IS1104 "The EU in the new complex geography of economic systems: models, tools and policy Evaluation", a four-year project supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). It is divided into three parts reflecting the different perspectives under which complex spatial economic systems have been studied: (i) the Macro perspective looks at the interactions among international or regional trading partners; (ii) the Meso perspective considers the functioning of (financial, labour) markets as social network structures; and, finally, (iii) the Micro perspective focuses on the strategic choices of single firms and households. This Volume points also at open issues to be addressed in future research.

This collected volume gives a concise account of the most relevant scientific results of the COST Action IS1104 "The EU in the new complex geography of economic systems: models, tools and policy evaluation", a four-year project supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). It is divided into three parts reflecting the different perspectives under which complex spatial economic systems have been studied: (i) the Macro perspective looks at the interactions among international or regional trading partners; (ii) the Meso perspective considers the functioning of (financial, labour) markets as social network structures; and, finally, (iii) the Micro perspective focuses on the strategic choices of single firms and households. This Volume points also at open issues to be addressed in future research.

Titel: Strategiska beslut bakom reshoring- en studie om hur strategi påverkar reshoringbeslut Författare: Simon Nilsson, Christian Persson och Gustav Andersson Handledare: Natalia Semenova Examinator: Pia Nylinder   Bakgrund och problem Svenska företag har flyttat sin produktion till låglöneländer under många år. Under de senaste åren har det däremot blivit vanligare att företag flyttar tillbaka sin produktion till Sverige igen. Problem som kan uppstå utomlands kan vara kvalitetsproblem, minskad kontroll och flexibilitet vilket bara är ett par exempel om varför företag flyttar hem. Vid strategiska beslut måste företagets strategi tas i beaktande, vilket är ett mindre utforskat område inom ämnet reshoring.  Syfte Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur strategiska beslut ser ut bakom reshoring i svenska tillverkande företag. Uppsatsen ämnar att med djupare förståelse beskriva varför produktion har flyttats hem, bakomliggande faktorer bakom besluten samt hur väl de strategiska besluten är förankrade i bolagens strategier. Metod Denna kandidatuppsats utgår ifrån en kvalitativ ansats med flerfallsstudier. Data kommer att samlas in med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer samt att företagen har valts ut med ett målstyrt urval. Slutsats Företagens strategiska beslut ser i viss grad lika ut bakom reshoring men det finns även skillnader. Vissa aspekter menar företagen är viktigare än andra vid hemflytt av produktion till Sverige. Företagets strategi är starkt kopplad till de bakomliggande strategiska beslut som ligger bakom reshoring. / Title: Strategic decisions underlying reshoring- a study about how strategy affects reshoring decisions Authors: Simon Nilsson, Christian Persson and Gustav Andersson Supervisor: Natalia Semenova Examiner: Pia Nylinder Background and problem  Swedish companies have moved production to low-wage countries for many years. During the last years it has been common that companies move their production back to Sweden again. Problems can occur abroad and a few examples are quality-issues, lack of control and flexibility which are just some reasons of why companies move back home. At strategic decisions, the companies strategies have to be taken into account, which is a less investigated area within the reshoringsubject. Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate how does the strategic decisions behind reshoring in Swedish manufacturing companies look like. The thesis is intended, with a deeper understanding, to describe why production moves back, explain the underlying decisions and how the strategic decisions are established in the companies strategies.   Method This bachelor thesis emanates from a qualitative approach with a multiple-case study. The data will be collected from semi-structured interviews and also where the companies have been selected by targeted selection.   Conclusion The companies strategic decisions are, to a certain extent, similar regarding reshoring although there are some differences. Some aspects according to the companies are more important than others in the move of production to Sweden. The companies strategies are strongly connected with the underlying strategic decisions that are at hand to reshoring.