Accounting for Motives

1
Accounting for Motives

• Stakeholder Comprehension in Business / Academic
  Collaborative Projects

2
Activities at the academe/ business interface

• Vocational degrees - meeting the contemporary
  needs of the business sector, school leaver
  lifelong learner.
• Academic rigour underpinning of transferable
  skills
• Industrial liaison validation of transferable
  skills in existing and proposed programmes
• Course delivery enrichment through visiting
  speakers online delivery
• Attracting commercial funding support for
• Long term RAE development
• Short term knowledge transfer/ R D projects
• Applied PhD research - theory application
  evaluation -achieving commercial viability

3
The economic aspirations at the academe/business
interface

• Welfare maximisation
• Publicly funded
• Public access/ownership
• Targets accessibility issues
• Stakeholder added-value

• Profit maximisation
• Shareholder/Privately funded
• IPR ownership
• Exploits niche/market opportunities
• Shareholder added-value

4
Operational stakeholder motivation
misconceptions

• Preconceived ideas on both sides about people
  working in either sector
• Fear of exploitation
• Stimulation from commercial enhancement through
  applied theory

• Fear of the unknown - stick to what we know
• Apprehension about changing something that
  already works
• Apprehension about trusting others outside the
  business who may not appreciate the finer points

5
Applied PhD Research

• Case Study Airport Surface Access Management
• The Collaborative Trial
• Support vs Risks
• Stakeholder Motivation Comprehension
• Patience, focus understanding

6
The collaborative e-business trial

• Objective - to increase vehicle occupancy levels
• Method - to switch car users at the point of sale
  into MPVs door-to-door at reduced price
• The airport operator - needs to improve surface
  access management capacity to get permission to
  fly more services
• The airline operator - wants more flight slots,
  needs to exploit every possible revenue earning
  opportunity, whilst maintaining service delivery,
  passenger satisfaction market growth
• The passengers - need to be sure that they can
  get to the airport in time to check in
  comfortably
• Airport staff air crew need 24 hr reliable
  access parking

7
Practical e-business issues

• Linking to the airline booking system with the
  right message to effect switching motivation -
  without interfering with 5.5million existing
  transactions to negative effect.
• Linking to the travel agency booking interface
  for the MoD as the trial travel agency
  representative, with a similar switching message
• Creating an independent booking platform with
  server support to cope with high-volume airport
  passengers
• Providing reliable automated interface booking
  with high quality MPV providers - system must
  translate into service quality on the ground that
  meets passenger expectations
• Monitoring measuring passenger responses to the
  switching offer - how many cars have been
  eliminated ?
• Gathering trip data converting it into
  GIS-based forecasting mechanism for future
  surface access management improvements

8
Surrounding motivational issues

• The airline wanted 30k up front to take part -
  based on costs of modifying existing software,
  plus fears about lost parking car hire revenue
  share
• The airport operator had to intervene alay
  fears
• The franchised airport taxi provider has fears
  about losing control over taxi revenues
  customers to another provider - and refuses to
  allow access to their database
• The trial must not be so successful as to wipe
  out parking revenues to the airport
• Airport Parent company wants to exploit any
  potential the trial demonstrates at all other
  locations - who owns what then ???

9
Recruiting students - case study 2

• Whos job is it anyway ??
• People buy people first - the open day
  experience
• Reputation by word of mouth or first hand
  experience
• Changing function of the University website
• To Inform, what else ?
• Opportunities for multi-media adaptation
• To enrich the information
• Meeting the staff - the virtual person
• Seeing the facilities - the virtual tour

10
Stakeholder motivations

• Why students come to us (or not) - wheres the
  evidence?
• External relations service had never considered
  the internal relations service provided by
  course delivery staff - feeling threatened by
  their interference.
• Computing subject group teaching learning staff
  wanted input into external website format
• Web-master felt insecure about teaching
  learning principles interfering with
  state-of-the-art web techniques

11
Organisational culture issues

• Role cultures are essential for reliable service
  delivery
• Role cultures rely on tomorrow being the same as
  yesterday (Charles Handy)
• Task culture teams rely on cross-functional
  boundary communications to solve problems - both
  internal external (both case studies)
• The academe/business interface can be
  characterised by
• The theory/practice debate
• The experiential prejudices of the players
• The welfare/profit maximisation economic
  perspectives
• The role/task organisational culture conflict