Today's firms exist and run business in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment in terms of industry, market, technology, economic conditions, and culture. To be competitive, at least to survive, firms must cope with and manage uncertainty effectively. In other words, firms should be equipped with powerful weapons to capture competitive advantage over their competitors. There are several ways for a firm to capture competitive edge over its competitors such as cost leadership, quality of the products and services, manpower, higher productivity, and technology. Among these, technology, especially information technology, could be the most effective weapon for competitive advantages since it is possible to monitor competitors' movement as well as to provide appropriate information with both planning and control phases through an information system. In this paper, a competitive weapon in action, a Process Control System which is developed by and installed at a U.S petroleum company would the described.

This paper investigates the performance improvement opportunities through a resiliency mechanism in the distributed primary/backup database system. Recognizing that a distributed transaction executes at several servers during its lifetime, we propose a resiliency mechanism which allows continuous transaction processing in distributed database server systems in the presence of a server failure. In order to perform continuous transaction processing despite failures, every state change of a transaction processing can be saved in the backup server. Obviously, this pessimistic synchronization may give more burdens than benefits to the system. Thus, the tracking needs not be done synchronously with the transaction progress. Instead, the state of all transaction processing in a system is saved periodically. This activity is referred to as a savepoint. Then, the question is how often the savepoint has to be done. We derive the optimal savepoint to identify the optimization parameters for the resilient transaction processing system.

Most of the research on a group decision support system [GDSS] has focused on directly examining its effect on the decision outcomes. Under this research framework, however, the role of group interaction process is largely ignored. This study focuses on the effect of the group interaction process on decision-making performance when a GDSS is used as the only medium for group interaction. Specifically, this study sought to determine whether significant relationships exist between the quality of the decision and the decision functions, contingent phases, and different decision paths. Natural interaction processes of decision -making groups was simulated in an experimental setting in which volunteer subjects from several business classes were assigned to dispersed three-person groups undertook the experimental task via a decision network. A baseline GDSS was developed for this setting. The results of this study confirmed earlier studies in a non - GDSS setting to suggest significant effects of decision functions and contingent phases on the quality of decision but no significant relationship between decision path and the quality of group decision.

Expert Systems (ES) have been successfully applied to bank loan decisions. However, with regard to bank loan decisions, most loan officers approach the acquisition of an ES with apprehension, which implies that organizational resources devoted to the development and implementation of ES may have been wasted or misused. Because the primary cause of the users resistance to use ES are more significantly related to the behavioral elements rather than technical elements, applying appropriate behavioral theory to the well representative sample group of the whole bank loan officers in the United States with a very accurate measurement tool can provide some clues for developing successful ES for bank loan officers. In this study : 1) Vroom's (1964) expectancy theory was selected to explain bank loan managers' motivation to use an ES ; and 2) the ANN model's prediction power to estimate bank loan officers' motivation levels of using an ES was examined.

Since the bank managers were accustomed to be under the goverment policy and control so far, all what they had to do were just to follow the government policy and wait for customers. These usual practices resultedin neglection of concerns for innovation and competitive power. However, it currently happens the change of business environment such as the liberalization of interest rates and the open finance market policy. Thus, it is necessary for the bank managers to have a concern on that situation for the improvement of profitability through productivity and cost-down. The bank managers are trying to set out an innovation strategy to cope with this situation. An innovation strategy should be based on its own characteristics of banking business. The banking business is different from those of other business because it deals with intangible services rather than material goods and thus, the bank managers have to be more sensitive to the customers. There also exists an inefficiency of internal process due to too many repetition of 'check and balance'. Thus, We set out the five principles and six selected tasks in order to settle down an inefficiency and to redesign a bank operation process.

Data distribution is one of the most important steps in distributed database design. This paper proposes a methodology for distributing database by using a relational schema as an input. A design support system called DBDD (Database Distribution Design) is implemented within the framework of this methodology. The methodology consists of three phases such as (i) schema analysis, (ii) fragmentation, and (iii) allocation. In the schema analysis phase, all the table names are acquired from a global relational schema. In the fragmentation phase, fragments are generated according to transaction retrieval patterns. Furthermore, DBDD enhances the design quality by allocating fragments in a progressive manner. A real-life case is illustrated to demonstrate the practical usefulness of the DBDD.

Faced with the challenge of reducing costs and improving competitive position, firms have recognized outsourcing as an important information systems (IS) strategic option. It has not been understood clearly what determines IS outsourcing. Based on the IS literature and transaction cost economics, cost efficiency related factors were identified, and a questionnaire survey was conducted. The results based on 181 responses from the bank executives in U.S. revealed that vendor production cost advantage and transaction risk are significant predictors of degree of outsourcing and outsourcing preference for data processing services. Insufficiency of IS funds and information technology uncertainty were found to be not only positively associated with vendor production cost advantage, but also directly associated with outsourcing preference and degree of outsourcing. Firm size is, however, not significantly related to vendor production cost advantge and IS outsourcing.

The paper proposes an approach, called OPNets, for modeling and validating manufacturing systems that is based on object-oriented high-level Petri nets. In OPNets, modeling components of Petri net are constructed into hierarchical objects that communicate with each other by passing messages. To enhance the reusability and maintainability, OPNets organizes a system into hierarchical objects that inherit attributes and behavioral properties from the object of super class and object-interaction relations are separated from the internal structure of object. The modeling scheme of OPNets tries to resolve the complexity problems of Petri net. To illustrate the modeling schemes of OPNets, a storage/retrieval example has been proposed.

The problems like exceeding estimated cost, late due-date, expensive maintenance, insuffiency of experts and low productivity are becoming emphasized related with the software development. In order to overcome these problems and to develop the highly qualified software within the limited resources, a project management tool is used. The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model of the project management system which can plan, analyze and control the software development projects effectively. The model is constructed with plan and track management system, cost management system and operation management system for the efficient project management. It is named by LSD-PMS : Large-scale Software Development Project Management System. We reviewed 5 cases of project management. LSD-PMS is evaluated and reviewed by the project managers in the field. It is proved that LSD-PMS is a tool which can help project managers develop software successfully given budget and time schedule. In the future, this system should be further developed as an integrated model with system implementation tools such as CASE products.