Editorial

Editorial

There are two events about which we report in this issue. First, as was the case last year, this special issue of Measuring Business Excellence consists of a selection of papers presented at the International Research Conference of the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organisational Excellence (MAAOE). Second, we announce the transition of editorship to begin with issue three of this volume.

Held in Ayr, Scotland, MAAOE's Third International Research Conference brought together researchers and practitioners representing numerous countries from around the globe to explore conceptual, empirical and practical matters of organisational excellence. While many of the papers addressed business excellence, others addressed excellence in the educational, not-for-profit, publishing, and governmental sectors.

MAAOE was formed in November 1998 with a vision of creating, disseminating and applying knowledge relevant to the advancement of organisational excellence. MAAOE sees next-generation quality management as being multinational, multidisciplinary and performance focused. MAAOE's participant profile is consistent with that view, numbering approximately 400 individuals from a broad array of disciplinary backgrounds that hail from more than 20 nations on five continents. The MAAOE vision is supported by three strategic intents, each with several supporting goals and objectives. These strategic intents are the creation, dissemination and application of new knowledge to advance organisational excellence. Organisational excellence is regarded as the overall way of working that balances stakeholder concerns and increases the probability of long-term organisational success through operational, customer-related, financial, and marketplace performance excellence.

In this issue we present seven papers that we believe will have special interest to our readership. They address organisational excellence in a variety of countries including Australia, Austria, Denmark, France, Great Britain, and Sweden. The contributors are Annie Bartoli, Philippe Hermel, and Juan Ramis-Pujol (France); Manfred Bornemann and Martin Sammer (Austria); Pieris Chourides, David Longbottom, and William Murphy (Great Britain); Jacob Eskildsen, Anders H. Westlund, and Kai Kristensen (Denmark); Anders P. Fundin and Bo L.S. Bergman (Sweden); Allan Meers and Danny Samson (Australia); and Milé Terziovski (Australia).

The case study by Bartoli, Hermel and Juan Ramis-Pujol presents partial results from an eight-year long broad action-research program in a large pharmaceutical multinational company. They report on one of the main transformation axes of the study, multiple process reengineering.

Bornemann and Sammer present a systematic and comprehensive assessment tool to prioritize organisational development activities in the knowledge management setting. This tool derives from a system theory containing four dimensions: a strategy focused target level, a knowledge level covering all knowledge workers of an organisation, an action level focusing on operations and processes, and a data level containing an explicit stock of digital resources.

The empirical study by Chourides, Longbottom, and Murphy presents results from a knowledge management (KM) survey. The results show that, while KM is a very popular management topic, few organisations are implementing serious programmes. They also report on six case organisations that have been approaching and deploying KM.

Eskildsen, Westlund, and Kristensen describe the need for standardization of measuring intangible assets in the firm. They explore two methodologies, the European Performance Satisfaction Index and The European Employee Index. Using empirical data, they present the benefits of applying each of these methodologies finding that employee and customer satisfaction measures predict financial performance.

Fundin and Bergman explore the customer feedback process in three Swedish manufacturing firms. All three firms possess professional database structures for codifying customer claims. However, only one firm uses a product improvement process based on their customer information, while at the other two firms the improvement process is diffuse.

Meers and Samson present arguments that the contextual alignment of a Business Excellence initiative with the organisation's competitive business strategy and (2) the level of congruence between the initiative and the organisation's operating environment and culture influences the success and sustainability of the initiative. They support this argument with results from three case studies of Australasian organisations.

In a study of small to medium enterprises (SMEs), Terziovski studies the relationship between networking practices and business excellence. He concludes that groupings of network practices are required to explain Business Excellence and that the most significant networking practices to group are searching and incorporating diverse points of view; challenging the status quo; learning from failures; communicating with people outside the company, including experts; and allocation of resources to support communication linkages.

With mixed feelings, we announce that we are stepping down from the editorship of Measuring Business Excellence. At the first MAAOE conference in 1999, Emerald Director John Peters asked us to become editors as the company was assuming publishing rights to MBE. We were at once humbled and honored by this request to relaunch the journal and set it on a path of improvement. Over the three years that have transpired, we have endeavored to bring MBE to high appeal to academics and thinking practitioners alike. We hope that in some significant way we have brought value to you as the reader. We also thank your for your readership and we thank the many contributors who have submitted articles, worked diligently to respond to referee reports, and develop product of their research efforts that would appeal to MBE's readers. We now bid you adieu and move on to many other pressing commitments that, as with you, fill our plates.

With that, we are very pleased to announce to you the new editor of Measuring Business Excellence, Dr Mike Bourne. Mike is Director of the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield School of Management. The Centre for Business Performance is Europe's largest academic group focusing solely on performance measurement and management, running a best practice roundtable, hosting the performance measurement association and the bi-annual international conferences. Mike's research has been concerned with the implementation of balanced scorecards and he has spent the last nine years working with companies, supporting their senior management teams through the process of designing, implementing and using their balanced performance measurement systems. Before his academic career, Mike spent 15 years in business, spanning the valve, paper and board, building materials, machine tool and airline catering industries. He has held roles in production management, IT, acquisitions, commercial management, HR and general management including directorships of subsidiary companies. Mike is a chartered engineer and a chartered management accountant. He has over 80 publications in the area of performance measurement and management and is co-author of the books The Balanced Scorecard in a Week and Getting the Measure of Your Business as well as the editor of the Gee Handbook of Performance Measurement. He has worked with and consulted to a number of organisations including Accenture, BAE Systems, Caterair, James Walker, London and Scandinavian, McCormick Europe, Shell, Thomas Group Inc., Unilever and Wolseley.

Doug Hensler and Rick Edgeman