Search results

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of practice in information systems (IS) project management (PM) by analyzing the use of tools and techniques by IS project managers.

The authors carried out an international questionnaire-based survey with experienced IS project managers.

Results reveal that, notwithstanding the similarities between the tools and techniques used in IS projects and projects from other areas, there are also significant differences concerning those more frequently used. The top five tools and techniques most used are “kick-off meeting,” “progress meetings,” “progress reports,” “requirements analysis” and “activity list.” However, the low use of some tools and techniques, from management areas such as risk and quality management, or related to the project monitoring and control, should raise concern.

Through the results of this research, researchers, organizations and practitioners can identify ways of developing and enhancing PM by examining the tools and techniques identified as the most used and those that are not being used as frequently as expected.

It provides a useful benchmarking basis for evaluating the most applicable tools and techniques, designing training and teaching programs and identifying academic research opportunities in IS PM.

This paper aims to analyze the characteristics of Brazilian micro and small businesses (MSBs) and the main lessons derived from the largest small business innovation support program in the country, the Local Innovation Agents – Agentes Locais de Inovação (ALI) Program.

In total, 34 papers were selected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases (28), as well as from the Revista de Administração e Inovação – RAI (6), a seminal Brazilian innovation journal. The papers were analyzed in terms of the regional context, methodological approach and main findings. Regional complementary analyzes of some program figures were also performed by Spearman correlation and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests.

The review revealed a low innovation level among Brazilian MSBs and that the platform (incremental product) and brand (marketing) innovation dimensions were the most developed across different regions and industries. Reviewed papers also showed that all MSBs were able to improve innovation over the program independent of previous management and innovation levels, besides positive relationships between management and innovation. The complementary analysis provided a regional panorama of the program figures and corroborated MSBs innovation improvement.

This review analyzed relevant papers and figures related to the program, summarized main lessons and provided future research venues.

Different innovation strategies reviewed may be implemented by MSBs owners. Policymakers may also benefit from the program experience.

Despite the high number of publications and the relevance of the largest Brazilian innovation support program, there were still no literature reviews comprehending the diverse lessons derived from the ALI Program, as well as a regional panorama of the program figures.

This paper aims to analyze how the internationalization process of Brazilian microbreweries takes place, especially in factors of propensity to internationalization, competition and survival in the national and international market.

The authors adopted qualitative approach research, using a multiple case study strategy, analyzing seven Brazilian craft breweries. The authors developed this study through documentary research, semi-structured interviews and nonparticipant observation.

The research findings made it possible to characterize the internationalization process motivated by the background and international experience of entrepreneurs that adopted different strategies for expansion in the international market. The authors noticed that the networks developed in production partnerships, festivals and international missions represent an increase in the ease of internationalization and helps to reduce the risk perception.

The contributions refer to the conjecture that the born global's evolution related to the high competitiveness of the market is influenced by the international background of the founders and by the influence of the international network, overcoming institutional and market challenges in emerging countries, assuming risks associated with rapid and early entry into the international arena.

The paper is potentially useful for managerial practice and policymakers by providing insights into the characteristics of entrepreneurs and companies considering their propensity to internationalize, presenting how entrepreneurs and managers can seek resources and develop their skills and capacities to manage such companies and processes of internationalization.

The research is presented as a complementary study to the limited number of studies examining born globals from emerging markets, also challenging the arguments of the dominant theory regarding gradual and nonlinear internationalization.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and analyze the use of local surrogate models to improve differential evolution’s (DE) overall performance in computationally expensive problems.

DE is a popular metaheuristic to solve optimization problems with several variants available in the literature. Here, the offspring are generated by means of different variants, and only the best one, according to the surrogate model, is evaluated by the simulator. The problem of weight minimization of truss structures is used to assess DE’s performance when different metamodels are used. The surrogate-assisted DE techniques proposed here are also compared to common DE variants. Six different structural optimization problems are studied involving continuous as well as discrete sizing design variables.

The use of a local, similarity-based, surrogate model improves the relative performance of DE for most test-problems, specially when using r-nearest neighbors with r = 0.001 and a DE parameter F = 0.7.

The proposed methods have no limitations and can be applied to solve constrained optimization problems in general, and structural ones in particular.

The proposed techniques can be used to solve real-world problems in engineering. Also, the performance of the proposals is examined using structural engineering problems.

The main contributions of this work are to introduce and to evaluate additional local surrogate models; to evaluate the effect of the value of DE’s parameter F (which scales the differences between components of candidate solutions) upon each surrogate model; and to perform a more complete set of experiments covering continuous as well as discrete design variables.

The purpose of this paper is to diagnose the barriers of dairy production system of Santa Catarina from the perspective of the business ecosystem concept.

The study consists of a bibliographic systematic review of the dairy production from the perspective of the business ecosystem. To analyze the resulting portfolio, the authors used the content analysis proposed by Bardin (2011), which served as the basis for analysis and discussion of the barriers of dairy production.

The authors identified a total of 19 barriers related with dairy production activity in Santa Catarina, they are properly presented and discussed. In addition, some ways to mitigate these barriers.

This study may not have enabled a complete coverage of all existing peer-reviewed articles in the field of dairy production. Yet, it seems reasonable to assume that the review process covered a large proportion of studies available.

It is the first study that identifies barriers to the development of dairy production in Santa Catarina using as an analytical lens the business ecosystem. And once identified these barriers, it is possible to devise strategies to eliminate or mitigate these barriers.

This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990 through the life stories of 10 intellectual-journalists, individuals whose journalistic activities have crossed over into other intellectual fields.

This study applies a symbolic interactionist framework to understand how these actors managed their reputations and careers within the intellectual world. The narratives were taken from qualitative semi-structured interviews, and supported by additional research such as interviews, biographies, and articles which have been published about their lives.

The life stories were compared to the extensive structural changes affecting the world of journalism and the world of intellectuals in Brazil. This comparison revealed gaps between these two spheres of practice, within which the ambivalent form of journalists’ identities have been constructed.

This chapter offers two contributions to the study of Brazilian journalists. From a theoretical and methodological viewpoint, it advances beyond other studies that focus more on the prevailing representations of journalists’ professional identities and their role in society. From an empirical standpoint, it describes the complex negotiations between the worlds of journalism, culture and politics. This chapter also reexamines the current dominant explanation for the changes in Brazilian journalism. It shows that building careers and new levels of interpersonal cooperation for intellectuals and journalists has been a slow process. Ultimately, this development has left some behind, especially those actors stretched between multiple professional identities such as those who self-identify as intellectual-journalists.

In the current business context, there is a current need to adopt contemporary practices of process management as a competitive advantage to leverage organizational results. This study aims to explore such relationships, considering the performance results in the organizational resilience (OR) dimension.

The authors collected 82 valid responses from a survey targeted at professionals occupying positions or functions in the operations area. For data analysis, the authors used the technique of structural equation modeling (SEM) using the partial least squares (PLS) algorithm.

The results show that maturity in the management of business processes positively influences the behavior of OR, with the highest level of maturity primarily being responsible for this impact. This result reveals that resilience naturally depends on mature and well-established processes in the organizational structure. The proposed model explained 78.5% of OR.

Companies that maintain mature management of their business processes will be better able to positively influence OR since process management can make organizations less fragile supply chains and more adaptable to changes.

The findings helped clarify the extent to which process management influences the results of OR. Although the literature indicates that maturity in business processes is formed by five first-order constructs, only the “innovated” dimension proved to be significant in the present study.

This study aims to identify sustainability indicators in the energy sector through a literature review and validate them from the perspective and context of professionals working in the sector in an emerging economy country, Brazil, considering the relationship of these indicators with the achievement of the targets set by the United Nations sustainable development goals (UN SDGs).

To accomplish this, a literature review on sustainability indicators specific to the energy sector was conducted. Subsequently, a research instrument (questionnaire) based on the identified indicators was developed and a survey was administered to professionals in the field. The collected data were analyzed using the Lawshe method.

The results revealed 20 indicators, distributed across environmental, economic and social dimensions. Among these, nine indicators were validated, including global impacts, local impacts, renewable energy production as a percentage of total production, greenhouse gas emissions, access to electricity, investment in the energy sector, installed capacity in the electricity sector, energy prices in the end-use sector and energy distribution and conversion efficiency.

Consequently, it was possible to determine which SDGs are directly impacted and provide a foundation for future actions that can contribute to the sustainable advancement of the energy sector in emerging countries.

Solid wastes are today one of the worst problems in the word, mainly because of the increase in volume and the high capacity of environmental contamination. The aim of this work is to analyze the possibility of use sawing granite wastes as alternative ceramic raw materials for the production of bricks and roof tiles. Samples were collected from wastes of several granites companies from the northeast region of Brazil. They were submitted to particle size and mineralogical characterization. Some ceramic compositions were prepared with granite waste and submitted to technological tests. The results indicated that the wastes have particle size distribution and mineralogical composition similar to conventional non‐plastic ceramic raw materials. These wastes can be used in substitution of conventional raw materials in ceramic formulations in proportions up to 50 per cent. This can be important to save traditional raw materials from the region and decreasing the aggression to the environment.