Introduction

The chapters in Volumes 22A and 22B, Advances in Business Marketing & Purchasing, focus on four topics: how firms in the service industries manage information and knowledge; how the creation and deployment of business intelligence operations serves to sustain a firm’s competitive advantage; how firms in manufacturing-wholesaler-retailing supply chains go about improving their firm and interfirm competitiveness; and systems dynamics modeling of integrated supply chain operations for sustainable manufacturing. The chapters are both expansive and deep in coverage of their respective topics.

Azizah Ahmad is the author of the chapter titled “Business Intelligence for Sustainable Competitive Advantage” in this volume. Ahmad shows how firms go about creating operational business intelligence units and how the work of BI impacts the sustainability of firms’ competitive advantages. Ahmad fills a big gap in the literature on successfully implementing BI; his chapter is a very useful empirical examination of how BI deployment nurtures sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research focuses on how the beliefs and actions by telecommunications decision-makers and executives impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations.