To sustain competitive superiority, end-products manufacturers need to embark on device businesses, instead of merely assembling outsourced devices. We attempt to explore ways to embark on device businesses through comparative case study on the Japanese rechargeable battery industry and replication studies on the Japanese display industry.

Prior works suggest that newcomers should develop technologies in discontinuous trajectory to overtake existing firms. This means end-products manufacturers are required to develop technologies of the kind to overtake existing device-specialized manufacturers. These technologies, however, are fraught with uncertainty. They therefore have difficulty in reaching a decision about investment in development. We show that a synergy between endproduct business and device business amplifies the expected value of development, and this effect may leads to a justification for investing in technologies of uncertainty. Furthermore, we propose external and internal conditions which produce the effect.

A project is managed by the leadership of a project manager. In this paper, we have analyzed the impact of delay of instruction messages from the project manager. By agent based simulation models referred to Axelrod’s tag model, we can suggest that 1) when the instruction cycle from the project manager becomes longer, the smaller the size of project is, the lower the productivity becomes remarkably, and that 2) even if the project manager sends instruction messages delayed, when it is periodically and all delayed messages are included in the instructions, then the productivity will not be lower through the project period. From these suggestions, we show the review criteria for checking risky projects.

COBIT4.0 (ISACA, 2005) showed that roles of IT process owners should provide Plan and Organize, Acquire and Implement, Deliver and Support and Monitor and Evaluate. Since there is a problem how to design organizational structure which takes charge of these processes, we analyze a relation between user departments and an IT department. First, we show that factors to assign roles between an IT department and user departments are stickiness of business knowledge and stability of IT environment, and that relation between these factors and the organizational structure. Next, when there are two or more departments with sticky business knowledge, we analyze effective organizational structures by using the team theoretical model. We show the condition that a user department’s vertical integration model, an IT department model and a toolkit model become effective respectively from the viewpoint of the abilities. As a result, if IT abilities of user departments are high, a toolkit model that an IT department takes charge of companies common systems, and user departments take charge of business application is effective. But if the abilities are low, an IT department model is effective.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the causes of information system’s failure, and to suggest a basic approach to solutions. Causes analysis focuses on conflicts among four types of stakeholders: 1) top executives who make a decision about system implementation, 2) information system users, 3) internal information system department that is in charge of system implementation, and 4) vendors to which actual system development is outsourced. Conflicts among these stakeholders result from disparities between the goals of each stakeholder or from disparities between each stakeholder understandings of the facts. In this paper, six analytical models that focus on causes of failure related to conflicts among stakeholders are proposed, and a case study is conducted to determine the applicability of these analytical models. And finally, preventative solution guidelines based on the perspective of the information system department are proposed for each model.