Strategy and Business Systems

Department of Strategy and Business Systems Research

The department’s research strength lies in its scope and depth, covering a range of innovative research topics and a variety of knowledge transfer activities. The department’s research activities and achievements are principally in:

  • Strategic management, organisational relationships and trust.
  • Quality management, and organisational excellence
  • Crisis and risk management, corporate security
  • Entrepreneurship and enterprise
  • Operations management, multiple criteria decision analysis, statistics, and data mining
  • Business information systems (CRM, GDSS, EIS, e-Commerce), system thinking
  • Strategic information management, knowledge management

Knowledge Transfer activities and success of the department are primarily conducted through the Centre for Enterprise Research and Innovation (CERI). CERI’s KT activities are interdisciplinary, founded in partnerships with private and public sector organisations. It undertakes the analysis and improvement of strategic quality management, decision-analysis, and risk, innovation and technological change management.

Understanding Responsible Capitalism and Sustainability (URCS) is a broad-based research group which seeks to contribute to a wider understanding of the challenges of responsible capitalism and 'all things sustainable'.

The department’s research capacity and expertise in the aforementioned areas enables it to supervise KT projects, research projects leading to Ph.D. Students who are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. study should contact either Professor Ashraf Labib or Professor Edward Borodzicz.
More information about the details of the degrees available and how to apply.

The Business School is involved in an EU Programme called ILearn2Main, which offers e-learning training material to industrialists.

Area of expertise and research interest

Professor Edward P. Borodzicz

Crisis and risk management, human behaviour in crisis, Business Continuity Training, Corporate Security, Compliance, Terrorism and CBRN, Corporate Resilience, Management of Risk and Governance in Universities, Transport Risks, ethnographic research and simulations and games for crisis training.

Mr. Nick Capon

Mechanisms to encourage the transfer of knowledge between industry and Universities, building a network of local companies and University researchers. Diagnostic benchmarking to improve the survival rates of start up companies and inventors, decision making toolkits, mapping software for logistics and developing lean service methodologies.

Dr. Tammi Sinha

Operations management, specialising in business processes and lean operations.  She has worked with a variety of industries ranging from aerospace to furniture and pharmaceuticals and takes an action research approach to working with companies.

Dr. Andreas Hoecht

Trust and control within organisations and in inter- organisational relationships. He has publications in "Control in collaborative research and technology development", and "Managing trust and  risk in technology collaborations" (Hoecht 2004, 2002).

Professor Ashraf Labib

Operations and Decision analysis. In particular he focuses on applications of artificial intelligence such as fuzzy logic, multiple criteria decision analysis, and data mining.

Dr. Martin Read

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) and Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). His research work involves the application of GDSS with SMEs to help measure and manage organizational climate in an entrepreneurial environment.

Mr. Martyn Roberts

Model of e-commerce concerning on-line shopping and delivery, IT governance

Ms. Christine Welch

Knowledge management, organisational change, IS application for law firms.

Dr. Michael Wood

Statistics, research methods, decision analysis and quality management.

Dr. Mark Xu

eBusiness strategy and implementation; Executive Information Systems with a focus on strategic information scanning, information support and executive’s information behaviour. E-shopping models. ICT application in SMEs.

Dr Alessio Ishizaka

Decision Making with data: Data Mining, Expert Systems, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).  Decision Making without data: MultiCriteria Decision Making (AHP, ELECTRE, MACBETH), Delphi Technique, Conjoint Analysis.

Dr Zoe Dann

Technological entrpreneurship, complexity theory and knowledge management and their application to innovation and entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship pedagogy, SME development.

Mr Jim Rowe

Commercial engineering, strategic management, leadership, culture and change, management cybernetics. management education,  knowledge project management and the shipping forecast.