System Sciences

While commoditization is creating opportunities for customers of information technology services, it is creating new challenges for the service providers. Pricing strategies are one of the most important challenges and decisions for today's IT service providers. Pricing strategies for IT services have traditionally focused on covering costs, achieving desired margins and meeting the competition. These pricing schemes range from simple approaches, easily copied by competitors, to complex models with high ...

With increasing reliance on outsourcing, cross-cultural teams, distributed knowledge workers, and other international collaborations distance learning (DL) has become a key agent of strategic competitive advantage and organisational renewal. This study stresses the importance of culture to DL success. To effectively use DL, we must understand the role culture plays in conceptualizing, inventing, and adapting this technology. We focused on Hofstede's individualism-collectivism dimension and asked whether it impacts perceived satisfaction and learning climate, known measures of DL effectiveness. We find that collectivistic groups enjoy more than individualistic groups the learning climate of a DL environment yet are not as Satisfied as individualistic groups with the overall results. We contend that this is because the open-endedness of asynchronous communication gives collectivistic groups simultaneously a sense of connectedness to their peers and a sense of disconnectedness from the instructor. Organizations will increase the benefits of DL by providing choices that embrace cultural differences.