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Organizational problems that demand decision-making require planning about their own decision-making process: the meta-decisions. We propose that the decisions about the process itself can be organized around three key activities: (1) diagnosis of meta-decision context and evaluation of meta-decision problem, (2) selection / planning of the meta-decision strategies and (3) meta-decision strategies implementation. This paper aims to focus on the content of the first two key activities. We develop guidelines for these two activities intended for generic decision making process and we illustrate these guidelines with examples and graphs. It is hoped that by following them a decision maker can optimize the process of decision making and thus achieve higher-quality decisions with less time and less resources invested. Future studies will need to be developed in order to empirically analyze the meta-decisions taken during a decision-making process and improve the theoretical framework here proposed.

The decision-making process involves making decisions about the decision process itself. Understanding better about "how to decide" decision makers can improve the quality of their decisions and using less time and resources. A multiple case study was developed to identify factors that may lead a decision-making process to be planned or unplanned. In the three cases studied we observed the planning of the decision-making process, however, with distinct degrees of effort and the time frame of the problem's occurrence and the decision-making. We identified five main factors that influence the planning of the decision-making process: i) the nature of the problem-whether the problem is new or recurrent to the firm, ii) awareness regarding the problem, the objectives and alternatives, iii) decision maker's experience, iv) organizational culture regarding risk taking in decision making, v) decision maker's autonomy level and holistic view of the firm and the conjuncture embedded. By studying the decision planning process of these three cases we believe we could draw attention to a perspective of the decision process seldom studied and open the possibility of new studies involving the decisions about the decision process-the meta-decisions.

RESUMOA competitividade é o desafio atual da indústria brasileira. Identificar os fatores que determinam a competitividade de uma indústria e as estratégias que devem ser perseguidas é um dos objetivos básicos dos administradores industriais. O presente estudo constitui uma contribuição para a compreensão dos fatores competitivos de quatro indústrias pertencentes a uma cadeia produtiva do setor de embalagens para alimentos. Os resultados obtidos indicaram que os fatores competitivos mudaram ao longo da cadeia e que alguns ajustes são necessários para que as empresas pesquisadas se mantenham competitivas.ABSTRACT Competitivity is one of the Brazilian industrial challenges at the end of this century. The identification of the factors that contribute to keep an industry competitive is one of the basic objectives managers should aim at. This study was carried out with four enterprises from the food packaging industry and intended to understand some of the key competitive factors of these enterprises. The research showed that these factors differ along the chain, and some adjustments are necessary in order to keep these enterprises competitive.PALAVRAS-CHAVE Competitividade, cadeia produtiva, estratégias competitivas, indústria de embalagens.

This paper reports the history of the development of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) dedicated to managing the technical activities of the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute, a governmental research and technology institute in Brazil. After the implementation of the new planning process, the development of a new management information system named SIGEPI was immediately initiated. The implementation of this system followed a strategy of integrating databases already available and developing new ones in order to facilitate the data collecting process and to improve the quality and the reliability of these data. This paper describes the evolution of SIGEPI, its main features and it also reports the difficulties faced for almost ten years of developments. The success factors of the case were classified into three groups: strategic, technical and behavioral ones. The impact of these factors and recommendation for future similar developments are presented.

The Stokes Diagram model was developed to replace the linear mode view of a progression of science by a two dimensional plane in which the vertical dimension represents the search of understanding and the horizontal dimension represents the use. Although this diagram is easy to understand, no cases of organizations or government programs were identified in literature which developed a method to put this proposal in practice. Thus, based on the development of a conceptual and operating model, both dimensions were measured and validated through structural equation modeling, using information from 28 dissertations developed in a Postgraduate program. The results suggest that the proposed method is viable and give some examples of its use to analyze and manage R&D activities.

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