This paper evaluates the outsourcing procedures & apos; conformity of E-banking services in some Iranian private banks according to the OMBOK structure. The insight on the outsourcing as a supportive source for the strategies of an organization is increasing and outsourcing is not being looked at as an element for reducing the organization & apos; s costs anymore. Therefore, there is an increasing trend in banking sector towards employing the outsourcing, as an effective response to the environment and attracting customers. This paper attempt to find out how outsourcing procedures of e-baking services in private banks is corresponded with the framework of this standard. The study considers five primary dimensions consisting of infrastructure, operation management, business, customer relations and technology among private banks across the country based on OMBOK model. The study selects 90 experts out of 100 people in the field of E-banking as sample study and distributes some questionnaires among them and the questionnaire is analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis test. According to the achieved results, out of the five domains of OMBOK structure including infrastructure, business, technology, customer relations and operation management, the outsourcing procedures of the e-banking services in Iran & apos; s private banks does not correspond in two domains of infrastructure and business, but corresponded in other domains.

The rapid growth of the web and the lack of structure or an integrated schema create various issues to access the information for users. All users’ access on web information are saved in the related server log files. The circumstance of using these files is implemented as a resource for finding some patterns of user & apos; s behavior. Web mining is a subset of data mining and it means the mining of the related data from WWW, which is categorized into three parts including web content mining, web structure mining and web usage mining, based on the part of data, which is mined. It seems necessary to have a technique, which is capable of learning the users’ interests and based on the interests, which could filter the unrelated interests automatically or it could offer the related information to the user in reasonable amount of time. The web usage mining makes a profile from users to recognize them and it has direct relationship to web personalizing. The primary objective of personalizing systems is to prepare the thing, which is required by users, without asking them explicitly. In the other way, formal models prepare the possibility of system’s behavior modeling. The Petri and queue nets as some samples of these models can analyze the user & apos; s behavior in web. The primary objective of this paper is to present a colored Petri net to model the user & apos; s interactions for offering a list of pages recommendation to them in web. Estimating the user & apos; s behavior is implemented in some cases like offering the proper pages to continue the browse in web, ecommerce and targeted advertising. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed method is able to improve the accuracy criterion 8.3% rather static method.

The purpose of the present study is to prioritized different methods for making necessary change on the administrative system of the central state Welfare Organization in Iran. The proposed model of this paper uses descriptive and measuring approach based on 11 questionnaires, which include criteria and necessary options to change the administrative system. The proposed model selects the sample size from different management levels, human capital development assistance, top, middle, and operational mangers of central state Welfare organization. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique is used to perform pairwise comparisons and Expert Choice is implemented to analyze the information. The results indicate that structure and process correction are the primary requirements for systematic changing. Weight of mentioned index is 0. 203 and the Compatibility Rating of changing criterion is equal to 0.06.

This paper evaluates the effect of profit quality structures on capital cost and the primary objective is to disclose the effect to investors. The research methodology is practical based on its goal and its research design is Expose-Facto. The study selects 36 Iranian firms as statistical sample over the period 2006-2010 from some Iranian firms and the study selects post performances from their financial reports. The statistical parameters, statistical plots, multiple-variables linear-regression and correlation analysis are implemented for data analysis. The results show that the estimated model could explain 22 percentages of variable changes. This means that there is a weak linear relationship between cost of capital and profit persistence, profit predictability and other variables. Based on the regression estimation we concluded that there was a direct relationship between earnings persistence and cost of capital and there was a reverse relationship between earnings predictability and cost of capital.

Experiences of developed countries and various studies in the context of economic growth of developing countries have shown that economic growth is not only explained by physical capital and labor force but also, and more importantly, by human capital. The later variable should be entered, as a major determinant, in the endogenous growth model. With the concern of important role of human capital in this research, the primary objective of this paper is to explore the effect of gender discrimination of human capital on economic growth and factor productivity in Iran and the selected OECD countries. More specifically, to indicate the economic capability of educated females, we use data of the considered countries over the period 1974-2008, to estimate the relevant models of growth and productivity. The implication is to compare the empirical results obtained for Iran and the selected developed countries.

Culture is the soul of an organization, which can cause advance or retrogress of the organization. This paper investigates the role of organizational culture on improvement and effectiveness of organizations. We identify and recognize the role of important components of organizational culture in effectiveness of professional ethics within organizations. The results show that there was a meaningful relationship between organizational interest and commitment, enhancement of stability and compatibility, teamwork moral, giving identity to the staff and the quality of professional ethics. The results obtained from the data analysis also indicate that organizational culture deeply affects the employees & apos; behavior of an organization.

Productivity improvement plays essential role on cost reduction and production planning in many organizations. There are literally various methods for measuring productivity and improving systems’ capabilities such as total quality management, 5S, etc. In this paper, we perform an empirical investigation to find out whether implementing 5S could reduce interruptions in production systems in one of pipe and profile manufacturing units located in province of Semnan, Iran. The proposed study compares the mean and standard deviations of waste materials before and after the implementation of 5-S in three different lines and statistical tests indicate that 5-S have made the necessary change on production planning and it could reduce waste materials, significantly.

One of the important issues in port services is to evaluate the performance of the services. Without evaluating port services and their related components, these services cannot be considered desirable and its quality cannot be enhanced. However, the evaluation and the quality assurance of port services should be accomplished based on a scientific framework and a coherent framework to have desirable results. The importance-performance analysis model is an appropriate framework where each component is evaluated in terms of two dimensions of importance and performance. This study performs performance-importance analysis of ports’ services quality form perspective of containerized liner shipping in the Imam Khomeini port. In this exploratory study, 150 shipping lines experts are chosen, randomly in 2012. The study identifies 28 components of quality in port services and shipping lines’ experts are requested to evaluate these components in terms of two dimensions of importance and performance. Results reveal that there is a gap between the importance and performance of all port services components except three components of 6, 19 and 24. In addition, the results indicate that Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) model is capable of evaluating and assuring quality in port services and can precisely identify the strengths and weaknesses of the seaport system and provide guidance for strategy formulation for quality improvement.

This paper considers different approaches for establishment of change management in governmental agencies. The proposed model of this paper uses Kotter’s 8-step method in an empirical investigation for a gas distribution firm located in province of Esfahan, Iran. The results of this study reveal that the organization was successful to create sense of urgency, form a powerful coalition, create a vision for change, communicate the vision, create short-term wins and build on the change. However, the organization was not successful on removing obstacles and changes in corporate culture. In addition, the sixth step, create short -term wins, receives the highest rate of success while removing the obstacles maintains the minimum rate of success. Finally, the survey demonstrates that gender and educational background do not have any impact on change management but age, job experience as well as job position influences change management, significantly.


DOI: 10.5267/j.msl.2013.05.007
Keywords:

This performs an empirical investigation to evaluate the relationship between cultural values and earnings quality in some Iranian banks over the period 2005-2011. The individualism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance and masculinity dimensions are regarded as criteria for cultural values. The study also considers change in return on assets and loan loss provisions as the main criteria for earnings quality of banks. For measuring the cultural values, the questionnaire of Hofstede [Hofstede, G. (1994). The business of international business is culture. International business review, 3(1), 1-14.]. The study also uses two measures to calculate earnings quality: 1-just-meet-or-beat the prior year’s earnings and 2- Income smoothing through loan loss provisions based on compound linear regression. Research results showed that there was a weak relationship between cultural values and earnings management.