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The wine industry is typical of many other horticultural industries in that it faces tremendous uncertainty, due to long lag phases between the initial planting, harvesting, bottling and sales, and seasonal variation between years. As a consequence, marketers face constant challenges when matching supply with demand. While much literature exists on forecasting, forecasting within the wine industry has not yet been documented. An exploratory study of 11 New Zealand wineries, using in‐depth semi‐structured personal interviews, was carried out to develop an understanding of the forecasting and planning processes followed by the wineries. Results were varied, at times confirming existing literature on forecasting and at times contradicting it. The results of this study suggest that wineries use more sophisticated short and long term forecasting methods. In addition, viticulturists become more involved in the forecasting process.

This study explores the influence of Taiwan’s high‐tech manufacturers’ innovative strategy and innovation motivation concerning the implementation of innovative activities, as well as the influence of innovative activities implementation on business performance. The two intermediate variables, industry group and enterprise scale are also considered. Through a review of the relevant literature, a theoretical model of the influence relationship is developed, while an empirical analysis is simultaneously conducted on Taiwan’s high‐tech manufacturers. The research result shows that the internal driving force of innovative activities has a significant impact on the level of implementing technological innovative activities and cultural innovative activities. The external driving force of innovative activities has a significant impact on the level of implementing market innovative activities and management innovative activities. Companies adopting self‐developed technology and purchased as well as self‐developed technology strategies, perform better than those adopting purchased new technology or those with neither purchased nor self‐developed technology strategies, at implementing technological innovative activities and cultural innovative activities. The level of implementing innovative activities has a significant influence on business performance (cost reduction and product/service differentiation). For the intermediate variables of “industry group” and “enterprise scale”, it is proven in this study that they have no significant influence on the level of innovative activity implementation or business performance.

Introduction Properly performed management accounting variance analyses frequently generate insight by management that helps to identify factors contributing to a poorer (or better) than expected performance, and to pinpoint persons or circumstances responsible for a variance. On the other hand, incorrect or inadequate evaluations are often dysfunctional to management. The wrong problem areas may be exposed by an incorrect evaluation, valuable time and expensive effort may be wasted in analysing the wrong problems, and improper actions might be enacted that would tend to hasten an already deteriorating situation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the confusion among project management practitioners about the role of steering committees.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with highly experienced participants selected from a range of industries and disciplines in Queensland, Australia.

Six separate confusions on the role of steering committees were identified within that practitioner community. However, despite participants expressing various opposing views, they had actually come to the same working arrangements for their committees; all that was missing was a common conceptualisation of these working arrangements and consistent terminology.

The paper provides clear evidence to the academic literature that confusion over the role of steering committees actually exists within the practitioner community and identifies six separate ways in which this occurs. It also identifies a problematic error in the widely used PRINCE2 governance model. Clarity in committee governance arrangements will facilitate future research endeavours through the removal of confusion surrounding committee labelling and accountability.

A committee decision tree model that guards against all six confusions is proposed for practitioner use, providing a means of avoiding unnecessary internal conflict within organisational governance arrangements. It can be used to check terms of reference of existing or proposed committees, facilitating organisational efficiency and effectiveness. The suggested renaming of project control groups to project coordination groups, and discontinuance of the practice of labelling committees that cannot authorise their decisions as either steering committees or boards, further supports this.

Reconciliation of terminology with actual practice and the consequent clarity of governance arrangements can facilitate building social and physical systems and infrastructure, benefitting organisations, whether public, charitable or private.

Clarity regarding committee accountability can avoid confusion, misunderstanding and their consequent waste of time, resources and money.

Recently, many enterprises are using a variety of methods and techniques to examine and improve their current maturity level of information technology (IT). Although IT evaluation studies based on IT maturity stages have been conducted widely, the stages theory has not been confirmed through statistical testing. IT evaluation activities can present managerial implications to an enterprise by determining where it stands within the stages theory. The purpose of this paper is to test empirically and repeatedly the once‐defined maturity model in order to make its validity more powerful.

To define IT maturity stages and benchmarks with statistical testing, evaluation fields and factors of the L&K Model are referred to. Data were gathered by a questionnaire survey and interviews, in which 312 enterprises in South Korea participated. Consequently, IT maturity stages are defined and significant benchmarks of each stage are validated through ANOVA and post hoc comparison methods.

The results of the study indicate the meanings and benchmarks of newly defined five stages of IT maturity: initiation, recognition, diffusion, control, and integration.

The aim of this study is not only to apply an advanced methodology to study empirically how IT maturity level of an enterprise is improved, but also to suggest practical guidelines for actions to improve it.

The five stages model is totally enhanced and reformulated from the previous stages theories. First, well‐combined and comprehensive evaluation factors are used to critically appraise the evolutionistic characteristic of IT in enterprises. Second, the definition and benchmarks of the five stages model are confirmed through statistical testing with sufficient sample size (n=312).

This research examines the extent to which the number of sales forecasting methods used by a company affects forecast accuracy and the extent to which organisation affects the number of sales forecast methods chosen. The objective is to better understand marketing management practices in this respect. Contextually, the study is part of the shift in sales forecasting research away from studies of accuracy per se to studies of organisation and implementation issues. It is widely recognised that objective techniques improve forecast accuracy, especially in the long run; yet, there is considerable evidence that such techniques are not widely used. The question of why there is such a discrepancy between practice and conventional wisdom, accounts, in large part, for this interest in organisation and implementation and the development of forecast models that incorporate implementation strategies.

In the era of the digital economy, organizations are under much pressure to justify their information technology (IT) spending on digital transformation. Some organizations have thus implemented IT chargeback, an IT governance (ITG) mechanism, to clarify and allocate IT costs among various business units. While practitioners have stressed the importance of IT chargeback, there has been little theoretical effort that investigates its strategic effects and boundary conditions.

Synthesizing the ITG literature and the resource-based view (RBV), the authors develop a research model to examine if IT chargeback affects IT–business strategic alignment and, in turn, organizational performance and how human IT resources strengthen the impacts of IT chargeback. The authors designed a survey to collect data from 103 firms and tested the model using partial least squares (PLS).

The authors found that IT chargeback promoted strategic alignment and then organizational performance only for firms with business-competent chief information officers (CIOs), rather than IT-competent business executives.

This study enriches the ITG literature by exploring the strategic value of an IT cost governance mechanism (i.e. IT chargeback). This study further proposes and validates a measure of IT chargeback. Drawing on the RBV, this study quantitatively investigates the strategic impacts and boundary contingencies of IT chargeback. This study also advances the CIO literature by identifying the strategic leading role, instead of the traditional supporting role, of CIOs in modern organizations.