The drastic and continuous national deregulation policies result in the fact that private companies become more and more aggressively compete with each other in the global business environment. Then they are trying to find their core competence, stronger than others, to make intensive investment of their resources in a certain specific area so that they attract customers by offering original products and services. We investigate skills of systems engineers who support a new type of strategic management, so called the Corecompetence Management, through information technology.

Effects of top management characteristics on corporate performance have been discussed from various viewpoints. Demography factors are frequently used indices of the management characteristics and used extensively in empirical studies. However, the results have been inconsistent. This study compares the preceding studies with regard to their methods, and indicates four major differences that bring about different results. In addition, causes of inconsistency are examined using data of Japanese companies. The results confirm that the differences in methods have indeed caused the inconsistent conclusions of earlier studies.

Many pharmaceutical companies have installed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the past several years as their full-scale global competition is getting severe. SAP’s R/3, which is one of the most popular ERP packages worldwide, has been dominantly implemented in pharmaceutical industry. This dominant ERP implementation is due to the inherent feature based on the similarity of their primary business functions such as accounting, manufacturing, distribution and sales, which are similar operational and managerial processes and must be executed under the regulations for ensuring the safety of medical drugs. Such a similarity enables many pharmaceutical companies to develop similar ERP systems collaboratively and reduce the total ERP implementation cost. The purpose of this research is to investigate the state-of-the art of the ERP implementation in pharmaceutical companies through the empirical study and explore some basic features of implementing ERP systems. The results show that three typical features of enterprise information system strategies in pharmaceutical industry are identified and “Collaboration” in developing their ERP systems is the most critical strategy.

Network support for meetings is becoming an increasingly common way to assist the group decision-making process. The methods employed in the research on the group decision-making are mainly experimental and the theoretical methodologies are little for studying this field. In this paper, we proposed a modified spiral convergence model and a reputation theory and applied them to the group decision-making in Electronic Meeting System (EMS). Especially, we focused our attention on modeling EMS from the viewpoint of multi-agent system, and we analyzed the mechanism of opinion shift by the reputation of external environment and interaction between agents. By numerical analysis, we compared the efficiency of each EMS in according to the duration until consensus under different values of reputation parameter.

It is important for corporate alliances not only to make up for lack of resource but also to share knowledge among their members effectively. Based on previous studies by Nonaka (1990) and Matsuda (1990), we use the concept of “inter-organizational intelligence,” to analyze the knowledge sharing mechanism in an alliance community. Through case studies and the results of questionnaires, this paper shows that inter-organizational intelligence is different from organizational intelligences in terms of creating business planning skill, which is connected to the success of alliances, and that inter-organizational intelligence is formed through two steps.