The purpose of this paper is to propose an analytical framework for examining the change of the competitive advantage of business characterized by progressed industrial modularization. The research is undertaken through a case study of the Internet service provider business (ISP). The business seems to be one of the industries in which industrial modularization is typically progressing. The industrial modularization in the business in Japan is caused by standardization of telecommunications protocol and encouragement of partial entry using the NTT infrastructures.

In the paper, first, the analysis of historical changes of competitive situation in the ISP industry shows the validity of the framework. Secondly, the practical validity of the framework is demonstrated by proposing the prediction procedure of competitive situation in the future ISP industry. This research is also checking the validity of the hypothesis, “the competitive advantage of business characterized by progressed industrial modularization is fundamentally determined by what kind of industrial modules to hold,” according to the case study as a result.

The number of automatic/automated teller machines (ATMs) installed each year is increasing steadily since the ATM is very important for a financial institution to improve customer service. However, a large amount of expense is required for installation and maintenance of ATM. For this reason, a financial institution has to determine the appropriate number of installations of ATM for achieving the desired effect, that is, the achievement of superior customer satisfaction by maintaining the number of installations at a lower level. This paper proposes a method of determining the number of ATMs using an agent model that can deal with customer’s characteristics such as timing of use of ATM, a range of searching for convenient location and a feeling of resistance to queuing. The proposed method uses two values, which are the numbers of uses and opportunity losses of using ATM in order to determine the optimum number of ATMs. Through the experiments, we apply the method to the case of two areas in Kanazawa city and consider the effectiveness of this method.

Hatch, the mutual reference system is a kind of decision support system which targets ill defined problem of multi-goal combination problem under the situation where the knowledge is not well maintained. It supports both of problem comprehension and problem solving.

Through experimentation where MBA holders made decision of management strategy for actual venture business incubation, it is shown that the system makes decision maker’s knowledge more consistent and makes tacit knowledge explicit. In this way, the experimentation provides an example of the effectiveness of the mutual reference method.

This paper proposes information management with ASIV, an investigative approach to conditions of information use, incorporating an object-oriented structure of checking items. ASIV realizes a simple, abroad and a steady viewpoint for environment of information use and the related knowledge and skills for doing a task with it, and the viewpoint of ASIV is characterized by an object-oriented structure of checking items centered on information, and objects of information use (with the name “Information Vehicles”) such as Job Groups, Information Systems (Client and Server) have a common framework of their environment. Advanced investigation using the structure to plans and their implementations for improvement in environment of information use, leads to consistency among them and an efficient and effective information management in organizations.

This study proposes an approach to support the decision-making of an owner of a medium-sized supermarket chain working to improve his own shops (the “task of improving shops”) by discriminating shops. From a Research on the construction of a trial prototype has yielded the following results. (1) Perceptual maps representing the relative positions of the owner’s shops and competitor shops can help the owner understand these relative positions and identify points to be improved. (2) A graph comparing customer satisfaction at the owner’s shop with that at competitor shops can help the owner identify weak points of his shop and direct his attention to the strong points of the competitor shops. Moreover, a graph depicting an age-wise comparison of customer satisfaction can help the owner identify age groups that have been neglected at his shop. (3) The information provided by the prototype system is useful for the owner in his decision-making to improve his shops. On this basis, we conclude that our approach to support shop improvement is effective.

This paper deals with an attempt of solving a large scale complex problem by the Organizational cybernetics theory. For an example, as set allocation problem is adopted, which is originally large and complex. The Organizational cybernetics theory decomposes it into simple and small information units, and then gives them a rational and effective coordination regarding the problem as an organization. This model uses scenario method; an environment of the organization is described by the scenario aggregation consisting of necessary and sufficient number of scenarios having occurring probabilities. Decomposed problems’ optimizations converge to the overall problem’s optimization by the organizational coordination. The goal of the model is an investment recommendation which optimizes investor’s utility at the end of the planning term. The goals of small and simple units are gained easily, but they can not reach the overall optimization without the coordination. In organizational solving, the most important point is that the model is established to be coordinated effectively and efficiently.