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Project Portfolio Management (PPM) deals with the coordination and control of multiple projects that pursue the same strategic goals and compete for the same resources, whereby managers prioritize among projects to achieve strategic benefits. PPM deals with simultaneously managing multiple projects and includes defining values, specifying priorities, solving conflicts between projects as well as defining organizational structure and the rules of its functions (Spradlin & Kutoloski, 1999). To provide maximum value to the organization, the portfolio must contain a balance of project types and risk levels as well as limit the number of projects to ensure that all projects can be resourced effectively (Killen, Hunt, & Kleinschmidt, 2008). According to numerous studies, project portfolio management is currently applied in the practice of nearly all modern enterprises (Miguel, 2006).

The challenging work environment of the 21st century has resulted in a great deal of global, societal and organizational change (Fry, 2003). We are experiencing a global crisis of confidence that has spread among many people and organizations (Parameshwar, 2005). Corporate fraud (Schroth & Elliot, 2002), negativity stemming from the downsizing of companies, anxieties resulting from emerging technologies (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003), and the financial crisis have affected the way employers see their organizations and leaders. Congruent with that reality, organizations have started to give more importance to positivity and developing strong characteristics of employees, rather than focusing on negativity and weaknesses (Avey, Luthans, & Jensen, 2009). Similarly, academics and organizational behaviour experts started to focus on positivity and positive sides of organizational life. This change in mentality brought about the need for a more holistic leadership style that can integrate minds and souls of people: namely, spiritual leadership.

There is convincing evidence to suggest that understanding the fundamental needs of human beings is essential if we are to develop strategies to transition society towards more sustainable forms of development (Hall, 2006). Besides, human needs satisfaction is likely to “make fewer demands on our environmental resources, but much greater demands on our moral resources” (Brown, 1982). As such, it is a moral obligation for governments, societies, industries, and individuals, to help fulfill human needs by enhancing health, safety, economy, and society, while preserving the environmental assets such as biodiversity and natural resources; i.e. to realize sustainable development.

Nowadays, organizations may deal with a variety of issues challenging the decision making such as overflow of data, lack of information, lack of knowledge and insufficiency of reports (Lin, Tsai, Shiang, Kuo, & Tsai, 2009). Over the years, management information systems including DSS, ES, EIS, and so on have been widely supported companies with their decisions; however, a key missing capability to manage decisions for emergencies, monitoring competition, collect data from different points of views, and carrying out constant analyses of numerous data and consider different variants of organization performance, is the major cause of failure to adequately meet the needs of enterprise decision-makers (Olszak & Ziemba, 2007). Given the widespread changes and the dynamics of today’s environment, organizations need to use new information systems that can analyse the various causal relationships both within and outside the organization. Hence they move towards using business intelligence (Gangadharan & Swami, 2004; Duan & Da Xu, 2012).

Several factors may be earmarked as vital to smooth and successful working of a developed economy; and one of these factors is the financial system, which provides valuable services to the economy and its stability is always deemed imperative to the stability of the entire economy (e.g. Beck et al., 2014, p. 1-2). This laudatory statement is by no manner diminished by the fact that there is – at it happens – a scattered mosaic of opposing opinions to what extent a sound financial system is actually important to economic growth (Levine, 1997; Thiel, 2001). The key function of the financial system in an economy is “to channel savings to investment” (Thiel, 2001, p. 7), or – putting it differently – to connect agents with surplus funds to those who are in deficit, which are merely two different ways to describe the essence of financial intermediation. The definition is suggestive that financial intermediation should be assessed by comparing how surplus funds are matched against deficit needs.