Corporate world sees the library and information services as a significant part of a wider knowledge management activity. Increasing importance is being shown by the corporate world to ensure that they capture, share and exploit knowledge and information rights across organizations. Investments are being made to build online digital libraries to store both internal and external information, and facilitating the end users to access the same with appropriate search and research tools. The digital databases created by the organization are used to provide business intelligence services for the end users, like news monitoring services, profiles of the customers, competitors, etc. Knowledge management has been about breaking down barriers within the organization, and e-business has been about breaking down barriers between the organization and its customers. Building digital library is an institution-wide approach to break down these barriers. Puja Walia Mann and Nidhi in the paper, "Corporate Library: A Digital Aspect", have highlighted the technological aspects of the corporate digital libraries. They have also discussed the benefits rendered by the digital libraries as a medium to assist organizations to improve efficiencies and the associated challenges involved in creating them.

Optimization techniques have been successfully applied to a variety of applications involving multiple objective functions in engineering and management science for quite some time. The goal programming technique which belongs to the discipline of operations research has become one of the widely used approaches to solve large-scale multi-criteria decision-making problems, ever since the technique was first used by Charnes and Cooper during the 1960s. Shantanu Shankar Bagchi in the paper, "Goal Programming and Its Applications in Management Science", has highlighted the features of goal programming technique and its applications in different management fields, such as accounting, marketing, finance and operations management. The application of these techniques while optimizing the resource allocations in multiple product and multiple objective scenarios, cost estimation involving different kinds of estimation of errors, etc., are illustrated. This paper has reviewed the application of this technique in several other areas, like financial and operations management.

Six-sigma was originated and designed initially to improve manufacturing processes and to eliminate defects in them. Subsequently, the same practices were applied to other types of business processes to achieve efficiencies through quantitative measurement and analysis of characteristics of the processes.

The philosophy surrounding these practices emphasizes that a business can be successful only when continuous efforts are made to achieve stable, measurable and predictable processes. Sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management. Jighyasu Gaur in the paper, "The State of Six-Sigma in Service Processes: A Literature Review", has presented a detailed review of the six-sigma practices in service processes industries and the key benefits derived by the firms which adopted six-sigma practices to improve process efficiencies. The study reveals that while six-sigma is a well proven quality improvement technique for manufacturing industries, the potential benefits that can be derived by adopting these practices are yet to be realized in the service industries.

The widespread implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provides ample opportunity to access transactional databases for the integration of supply chain activities. Over a period of time, organizations have developed optimization models to manage transportation and distribution activities. These models need to be integrated with enterprise resource planning systems to handle inbound and outbound logistics functions. The paper by M Raja, "A Model-Based Decision Support to Manage Outbound Logistics", has brought out a case how an optimization model was developed and implemented a decision support system to handle outbound logistics by a large cement manufacturing organization with multiple plants and distribution channels. The developed model is subsequently integrated with the enterprise resource planning software. While the dataflow from transaction system to the optimization model was developed smoothly and transparently, the approach adopted to integrate the transaction processing application with the decision support system was aimed at strengthening the existing scalable information technology infrastructure.

The paper, "Management of Technology in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Case Study of Select Companies in Iran", by M Mahboudi and B R Ananthan has investigated a possible positive relationship between organizational structure, participative management, training and planning, support and participation of top management, investment and the effectiveness of the Management of Technology (MOT). Hypotheses were formulated and tested with the data collected using a questionnaire. The analysis revealed sufficient evidences to establish a correlation between these variables and MOT effectiveness. In addition, the findings reveal that factors of support and participation of top management, training and planning investment, participative management and organizational structure have the major roles in the effectiveness of MOT.

-- M Raja
Consulting Editor