The 8th International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations

The concept of servitization ‘adding value by adding services to products’ was first introduced by Vandermerwe and Rada in 1988, which in later became a popular topic for researchers in the academia, business and government. Today, it is widely recognized as an increasingly relevant business strategy for manufacturing firms to improve their competitive advantage in the market. In many cases, the necessity or application of servitization concept explained by researchers from organization perspective, especially for developed economy, but they were less attentive to discuss the issue from customer viewpoint in developing economy. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the needs of servitization from customer perspectives, particularly the IT industry of emerging market ‘Bangladesh’. The data was collected by the interviews of suppliers and customers in the IT industry of Bangladesh. The survey results showed that the current suppliers cannot satisfy the customer needs at this moment, because customers are not happy anymore with the IT goods only; they also require solutions, knowledge and reliability as well.

Service sector is growing up during the trend of service in economic activities. There have been many researches in order to increase service value. However, there is no mathematical model to identify and measure the service value for maximizing it effectively. This paper proposes a concept of service field for creating service value. Then the concept is applied to service matching in service mediators and information value creation in information business. This mathematical model seems to be effective for analyzing service value theoretically.

Innovation is vital if companies are to survive. This is particularly so when it comes to energy innovation. Companies and government as well as universities are actively seeking to develop and adopt of renewable energy technologies. Effective innovation requires collaboration between different types of companies (big companies, small and medium-sized companies, start-ups, customers, suppliers, consultants, manufacturers, service providers etc.) and other organizations (universities, research institutes, think tanks, public sector etc.) as well as consumers. To provide collaboration among the different stakeholders, the Future Center project is created to promote energy technology innovation in Vaasa. Future Center can be described a collaboration-based, future-oriented, creative and sustainable innovation environment for the companies and other organizations in Vaasa region’s energy technology cluster. This paper describes the development of the future center through the co creation of value and the lessons learned. It especially focuses on explaining the challenges and opportunities using knowledge management, value creation theories.

There are many content websites rely on both the paid subscriptions and advertisement revenue model. Although they are making more profits now, to sustain in their business they need to co-create the value along with their users rather than focusing only on the content quality and the usability of the websites. The existing studies and techniques on user engagement provides platform to understand the users behaviour on the website. But, to drive the user engagement it’s still a real struggle. Many companies have started to focus on gamifications of their websites in order to drive in more user engagement. The innovative solutions provided by Badgeville for gamifications of websites are proving to be a real game changer in terms of driving user engagement. Most of the leading UK newspaper companies, who have pioneered in revolutionizing the paid content subscription model is also lacking behind in terms of user engagement. Although their website users share the popular articles in social platform the sharing metrics are not very high. The article commenting system doesn’t drive high number of comments in comparison to news feeds on social networking platform like Facebook etc. The purpose of this study is aimed at creating a co-creation value platform based on user’s behaviour to increase the user engagement on the news websites.

“Restaurant information services”, which provide information about restaurants, have recently caught the attention of the public. In this study, we examined competitive factors, which are the criteria by which consumers choose one service over another and influence competition, of these services. Especially, we focused on the importance of evaluation information. To this end, we investigated the case study of Japanese restaurant information services from the perspective of costs for information behaviors. Based on the analysis of this study, we presented four hypotheses and scenarios about the future of restaurant information services in Japan.

Is it possible that “Cloud” is sometimes possibly being misused when “Centralised” would be a more accurate term in specific instances? This paper examines a case study of an implementation of an ITIL based Service Management System which is delivered under a Software as a Service (SaaS) model and views the implementation in terms of its alignment to the currently accepted “Cloud” (or conversely “Centralised”) model. This paper then goes on to propose what factors might be examined in the future to push the current system implementation further into the Cloud model and how the issue of Customer Cocreation of Value interacts with this background setting for the current system implementation as it stands at the point in time of the writing of this paper.

In order to address the practical requirements in SOA design and implementation, this paper proposes an ontology-based approach for SOA design pattern advisement. The state-of-the-art SOA design patterns are formalized with ontology in order to be selected by the algorithm, according to user requirements. With refined results of the algorithm, the final advisement is presented to the users. Experiments show that our approach achieves the minimal set of appropriate patterns and meets the demand of an advisement system in the field of SOA design.

Innovation is crucial for organizations in order to remain competitive. However, not all innovations are successful. For innovation to be successful, it is important to co-create value with a customer. This paper investigates the impacts and consequences of innovation activities in three pharmaceutical companies. The study shows that two out of the three companies failed in their innovation because of the lack of co-creation of value. A model based on the co-creation of value from knowledge management was proposed.

The current research conducts an empirical study for the 3G mobile phone users within the context of Taiwan to examine the factors that affect users adopting MRTLBAS. The empirical research model is developed based on technology acceptance model and innovation diffusion theory. According to 336 valid samples, the research results indicate that (1) perceived compatibility shows a significant impact on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived playfulness; (2) impact of trialability on behavioral intention shows insignificantly while other variables show significantly. This implies that 3G users perceive that trying MRTLBAS will not be likely an important factor that attracts their use intention; instead they care more about the usefulness, ease of use, and even enjoyment; (3) perceived playfulness both significantly affects perceived ease of use and behavioral attitude, implying that improving the playfulness of MRTLBAS will be likely to positively improve uses’ attitude and the ease of use. Implications and suggestions for the MRTLBAS are also addressed.

The goal of this study was twofold: to examine how undergraduate students’ perceive themselves as innovative thinkers and to examine the way they express innovative ideas when asked to illustrate the ideal learning environment. The research was conducted among undergraduate students in two higher education institutes (N = 202). The ‘mixed methods research’ model was employed in the analysis and interpretation of data that was collected by two research tools: the Innovative Thinking survey and the Reflective Drawings analysis. Findings indicated that most students perceived their innovative thinking as average. Two groups of students expressed the highest inclination to be innovative: young students and experts in ICTs, suggesting that innovative thinkers are most likely to become experts in the use of advanced technologies. The analysis of students’ drawings of the ‘ideal learning environment’, indicated that only few illustrated innovative scenarios. Findings showed that although most of the students made a shift from desktops to mobile computers, their drawings did not reflect the added value of ubiquity learning. This finding indicates that most of the students still adhere to traditional learning environments, and are not able to imagine learning in any other way.

A new knowledge-creation model, called sensor-data-driven knowledge creation (SDD-KC), which utilizes sensor data for discovering tacit knowledge, is proposed and tested. The proposed model utilizes wearable sensors to digitize tacit activities such as location, motion, and social interaction of people. To derive practical knowledge, the obtained data is statistically analyzed and associated with performance outcome. An empirical test at a retail store demonstrated that the SDD-KC model was able to derive a rule that leads to customers’ behavioral change, which contributed to a sales increase. In contrast, the traditional knowledge-creation model, applied in the same setting, failed to identify effective ideas. The proposed SDD-KC model was thus shown to be effective for knowledge creation by overcoming cognitive limitations of people.

Most organizations, such as University Libraries focus on enhancing their capability of knowledge processes to create new knowledge. The aim of this paper is to revealed empirically levels and types of KM practices applied at Malaysian university libraries. Based on 300 questionnaires through online, a survey was administered to a Lead User group of libraries (PhD candidates) in Malaysia. This is to elicit opinion of the prime users on the linkage between Knowledge Management Practice (KMP) and Library Users’ Satisfaction (LUS). SPSS software and AMOS 18 were utilized to analyze research data. Furthermore, a meaningful linkage was observed between Knowledge Management Practice (KMP) and Library Users’ Satisfaction (LUS) based on the empirical findings. Major contribution of the paper is to provide groundwork empirical evidence about the linkage between Knowledge Management Practice (KMP) and Library Users’ Satisfaction (LUS) at Malaysian university libraries.

Knowledge productions within the academe have been strongly focused on publication in journals included in the Thomson’s ISI Web of Science (WOS) database. Within the WOS database, mechanical science and engineering researches ranks among the top five of the most highly presented topics in Taiwan. Since 1997 mechanical science research contributions have been steadily growing. To date there are a total of 9,576 mechanical science articles included in the WOS database with a contributing author coming from Taiwan. Many bibliometric theorists have proposed that within a specific field of study, 80 % of the articles are contributed by 20 % of the field’s source journals. In light of this issue, the current study seeks to understand what type of publication distribution exists in the pool of mechanical science researches in Taiwan. The understanding of publication trends is able to bring about valuable insights regarding significant contributions of key journals and the corresponding articles within them. Key finding shows that mechanical science researches follows the majority trend of older articles having the most number of citations, while, newer articles having a significant higher number of authors and references. Lastly, distribution analysis shows that the mechanical science researches in Taiwan behave in a likely pattern somewhat similar to the Revised Welch Vitality Curve. Additional, insights and trends are also provided to have a more complete picture of the mechanical science and engineering research field in Taiwan.

There is not many studies regarding the use of Knowledge Management (KM) practices in Chile, and not a study that compares this usage with other countries. This research is aimed to find out the level of use of selected KM practices in Chile, the importance that has in the companies and if it is a formal part of the company strategy (level of institutionalization).The Center for Educational Research and Innovation of the OECD performed during the years 1999–2003 a series of studies based on a survey developed by a joint working group from Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden and representatives of research organizations in Australia, Denmark, Germany and Ireland. This study uses the methodology developed by these research centers to analyze motives and effects of using knowledge management practices in the Chilean industry, in the light of the recent addition of Chile as a full member of the OECD in 2010 and compare the levels of adoption with Germany and Canada. To achieve the stated objective a survey to 147 Chilean executives from various industries was conducted. The results indicate that the Chilean industry has an average of 8.6 practices in use of a total of 17 selected practices for this research, being the use of the Internet to capture external knowledge the most used and common practice. Both in this study as those in other countries, the results indicate a positive correlation between firm size and average utilization of practices. Along the same lines the KM correlates positively with innovation, where countries with greater use of KM, have in turn increased rates of innovation measure by the global innovation index. Both the use and efficiency reasons attributed to the KM by the Chileans are below the results obtained in studies by the OECD in Germany and Canada, denoting a low industrial use of KM practices in the country and correlated with a low innovation index.

Traditionally, electronic portfolio tools focused mainly on the presentation of information, with an archive of digital data that are derived from the associated purpose of the presentation. Today, new electronic portfolio tools include digital environments for assembling and managing documents and all forms of media in a digital archive, and/or software applications for assembling and sorting portions of that archive for a particular purpose. This shares many features with knowledge management tools. Central to both tools is the knowledge creation stage. Based on our experiences of using electronic portfolio, this paper explores the potential use of electronic portfolio as a knowledge management (KM) tool for knowledge workers in organizations. Salient features of characteristics of KM tools are studied and these are matched against various electronic portfolio features. The paper then shows how the electronic portfolio can be used as a means to tackle the challenges faced at the individual context of the knowledge creation phase.

This paper introduces a conceptual model called Cascading Modes of Communication (CMC), which is designed by integrating social media and traditional seminars for concurrent formation of community and knowledge. It is inspired by Open Source processes and follows a SECI knowledge creation model. A case study was described to demonstrate how CMC works in professional seminars and a research proposed to validate the design.

Instead of focusing on one-size-fits-all policies for knowledge management (KM), this research attempts to establish a taxonomy of workers based on their KM readiness expressed through their attitudes and participation in KM activities. A questionnaire survey conducted with Japanese engineers reveals four distinct groups—advocates, skeptics, busy, and hopeful—derived from their perceived importance of and time spent on KM actions, with significantly differentiated perceived enablers and barriers of KM. The data, containing answers to both open-ended and ordinal scale questions, was analyzed with both text-mining and statistical analyses. Broadly, KM advocates and busy people recognize the importance of intention and autonomy while skeptics give very little credit to any established KM enabler. Advocates, busy people and skeptics recognize information and people as important barriers to knowledge acquisition, storage and system as impediments to knowledge storage, understanding as an obstacle to knowledge diffusion, and application as a hurdle for knowledge application. Advocates, representing the most actively-involved faction in KM, consistently acknowledge intention and autonomy as enablers, while they cite people as barriers of KM. The results of this study suggest that to improve KM, organizations should first segment their workers based on their attitudes and participation in KM activities, and then implement different strategies aimed at different subgroups of employees based on their level of preparation or readiness for KM.

As the amount of electronic medical record (EMR) denoting its big data characteristic are being collected by several healthcare institutions increases, privacy concerns also increases. Patients need to disclose their private information in order to be diagnosed and given appropriate treatments. There are several mechanisms used today to protect patients’ personal information but there are few studies conducted from patients’ perspective. This paper highlights the literature review on privacy preferences in healthcare environment. It then, further identifies the factors that influence privacy preferences based on secondary data obtained from journals, conference papers and books. The findings of this on-going study proceed with designing a proposed conceptual model.

In the highly competitive business environment, companies use patents as the intellectual asset to gain strategic competiveness. Patent prior art retrieval is a nontrivial task for invalidity and patentability search, which could help enterprises to plan their R&D strategies, patent portfolio, and avoid patent infringement issues in the future. This study adopts an efficient and effective hybrid patent prior art retrieval approach using claim structure and patent description to enhance prior art retrieval performance in terms of recall rate and exam the robustness through performing experiments in a large dataset. We obtained the best result by combining the information of claim structure and top 70 % sentences in description. We have achieved the competitive result in terms of raising the recall rate with the proposed hybrid approach, which also demonstrated the usefulness of including claim structure into patent prior art retrieval system.

Existing methods for finding near-duplicate content often fail when applied to informal user discussions spanning multiple messages, which can be found in collaborative requirement discussions. As a result, although the underlying knowledge sharing platform already contains duplicated entries the stakeholders often recreate already existing requirements discussions without contributing to the existing discussions. In this paper we therefore identify common reasons leading to near-duplicate content and develop a new algorithm for detecting near-duplicate content in multilevel requirement discussions. The algorithm is implemented using a large case study of real-world collaborative requirements engineering platforms serving hundreds of thousands of stakeholders. Our preliminary results show, that we outperform existing search algorithms and that we are able to identify near-duplicates in multilevel requirement discussions with high precision.

The most common way to organize and label documents is to group similar documents into clusters. Normally, the assumed number of clusters may be unreliable since the nature of the grouping structures among the data is unknown before processing and thus the partitioning methods would not predict the structures of the data very well. Hierarchical clustering has been chosen to solve this problem by which they provide data-views at different levels of abstraction, making them ideal for people to visualize the concepts generated and interactively explore large document collections. The appropriate method of combining two different clusters to form a single cluster needs affects the quality of clusters produced. In order to perform this task, various distance methods will be studied in order to cluster documents by using the hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Clusters very often include sub-clusters, and the hierarchical structure is indeed a natural constraint on the underlying application domain. In order to manage and organize documents effectively, similar documents will be merged to form clusters. Each document is represented by one or more concepts. In this paper, concepts that characterize English documents will be generated by using the hierarchical agglomerative clustering. One of the advantages of using hierarchical clustering is that the overlapping clusters can be formed and concepts can be generated based on the contents of each cluster. The quality of clusters produced is also investigated by using different distance measures.

The ability to visualize documents into clusters is very essential. The best data summarization technique could be used to summarize data but a poor representation or visualization of it will be totally misleading. As proposed in many researches, clustering techniques are applied and the results are produced when documents are grouped in clusters. However, in some cases, user may want to know the relationship that exists between clusters. In order to illustrate relationships that exist between clusters, a hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) technique can be applied to build the dendrogram. The dendrogram produced display the relationship between a cluster and its sub-clusters. For this reason, user will be able to view the relationship that exists between clusters. In addition to that, the terms or features that characterize each cluster can also be displayed to assist user in understanding the contents of whole text documents that stored in the database. In this paper, a Text Analyzer (VisualText) that automates the categorization of text documents based on a visualization approach using the Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering technique is proposed. This paper also studies the effect of using different inter-cluster proximities on the quality of clusters produced. Cophenetic Correlation Coefficient is measured in order to evaluate the quality of clusters produced using these three different inter-cluster distance measurements.

Stemming is one of the techniques in natural language processing that is used to reduce a word to its root. Information retrieval and knowledge management can further be improved by improving the stemming process. There are four strategies that are being used widely in stemming that includes table lookup, rule-based affix elimination, successor variety and n-gram. However, not all of these strategies are being applied in Malay stemming algorithm. The well-known strategy used in stemming Malay text documents is called a rule-based affix elimination algorithm. In this paper, several Malay stemming algorithms will be discussed such as Othman’s algorithm, Sembok’s algorithm, Idris’s algorithm, Rule Frequency Order Stemmer and Mangalam’s algorithm. This paper also discusses some of the improvements made by researchers based on previous Malay stemming algorithm and this provides the current trend of Malay stemming algorithm. Different morphologies rules also being applied in different Malay stemming algorithms. Based on this review paper, it can be concluded that there are a lot of works related to the arrangement of the morphologies rules are conducted. However, this stemming process can still be improved by applying certain background knowledge such as root words dictionaries that can be used for checking the word during the process of eliminating affix words.

The demand for relevant knowledge related to effective and efficient agricultural development has increased tremendously recently in all over the world. The web can be considered as a distributed mass of simple hypertext pages and this gives rise not only to the redundancy of information but also difficulty in managing the relationship among the concepts of information. Thus, a formal way to represent knowledge on agricultural development is crucial. Information related to agricultural development can be represented using ontological modeling that enables the integration of knowledge obtained from heterogeneous sources. Despite this fact, the semantic interpretation of users’ information needs become crucial in retrieval mechanisms. One of the successful techniques used to ensure relevant information is obtained, is to expand the input query by employing the query-related terms derived from the ontology in order to approximate the actual user’s intention. This paper reviews various relevant researches conducted in ontology-based query expansion, particularly in agriculture domain.

This paper presents Metafrastes, a system that provides users with the ability to retrieve information from Semantic Web knowledge bases through queries that are formulated in natural language. The Web system that we introduce is engineered based on several Semantic Web tools and techniques. Our contribution consists mainly of a Natural Language Processing engine, able to translate queries formulated in natural language to SPARQL queries that can be applied to existing knowledge bases. Additionally, we develop a user interface that captures the user interaction with the system. Last, we evaluate the system based on a number of pre-defined queries formulated in natural language. The proposed approach has been positively evaluated with respect to precision and for queries that are aware of the information structure from the knowledge base.

This paper presents and describes the construction of a recommender system model that classifies input information to yield product recommendations. This model was applied within the contents industry [

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] by using artificial neural networks (particularly adaptive resonance theory) as an intelligent agent. The Netflix Prize data base was used and the model’s validation and simulation was written using Matlab

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.

This paper designs and develops a prototype of Location-based Advertising and Recommending System (LBARS) system. The LBARS utilizes the techniques of GIS, GPS and location-based service to sense users’ location and send advertising message to those who are within the defined area and/or time zone. A salient function of the system mechanism is to recommend advertising messages with priority according to parameters that include user defined preference, distance and time. An illustrated example is used to demonstrate the prototype system.

Scatter plot is a useful method for visualising clusters and outliers in continuous data. However, this method cannot be used directly on nominal data due to a lack of natural ordering and ‘distance’ in nominal values. One solution to this problem is to

map

the multi-dimensional nominal data to a numeric space, and then draw a scatter plot of the data points based on the first two principal components of the numeric space. This paper reports a study on how such plots can be generated using three types of mapping: (a) Binary Input Mapping (BImap), (b) Attribute Value Frequency Mapping (AVFmap), and (c) BImap combined with AVFmap. Results show that the combined method draws upon the complementary strengths of BImap and AVFmap, to generate meaningful scatter plots for visualising categorical outliers and achieve the highest information gain among the methods tested.

This paper presents a knowledge management model to strengthen the relations between the university and the enterprise, and to facilitate joint strategies and interaction with social networks support. The use of social networks in this model focuses on creating bidirectional links between the university and the enterprise, based on informal exchange of knowledge and sharing information of interest to both actors. The expectations the model use is analyzed through the application of a survey of a population sample of Colombian university students, where the results show the good attitude of these to use social networks in knowledge management to support the relations between the university and the enterprise.

Literature has paid limited attention to the explanation model of social networking performance. It is argued that a healthy social networking should have a fitting structure among the technology characteristics (e.g., communication and cooperation), social characteristics (e.g., demands of privacy and trust), and individual characteristics (e.g., the tendency of self-realization) to develop its social values in a stable manner. In consequence, this study proposes a conceptual explanation model for social networking performance, which is called Social-Technology Fit Model (STFM). The STFM is based on the theories of technology-performance model and technology-task fit model. The STFM with theoretical arguments and instrument for variables is presented in this paper.

Blogging is becoming imperative in today’s Internet world. A literature review on blogging was presented in order to understand the importance of blogging in the action research approach. The present study, therefore, performs a more detailed investigation into the basic elements of action research in blogs and presents a case study, with a view to filling some gaps in the research concerning this topic. This paper addresses how blogs could be used for MBA education. The present study is an exploratory attempt to analyze the influence of blogs on MBA education. The process of action research offers a promising approach to achieving this objective. In the collaborative processes of action research, including context analysis, planned actions, and reflections on the lived experience, it develops the students’ own knowledge of complicated consumer behaviors. The study challenges practices that separate the students’ knowledge from the tacit knowledge and recognizes the importance of experience in MBA applied learning environment.

Social Media offer golden opportunity for information mining. However, it is a challenge to find useful knowledge from these massive data. This paper describes a solution for a common problem using top-x querying in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Seventy-five GB data were collected from Twitter, reorganized into dataset in a distributed computing platform with Hadoop. By adopting Aggregate-Rank-Delete algorithm, we used MapReduce solution to develop an algorithm, called

MapFollowee & ReduceFollower

to query the Top-X members who retweet and that have largest number of followers. This proposed approach is to effectively accelerate the querying process, in which not only the performance is faster than the matrix algorithm but also faster than the original algorithm in the stand-alone version. It also reduced the data storage from the original dataset. This result is important because it provides a new parallel paradigm as an application of MapReduce with an efficient way to resolve the practical problem in OSNs.

In today’s hyper-connected globalized world, social media and online customer interactions are changing the way companies do business from the outside in. Our investigation concerns the monitoring of social media performance within SMEs and more particularly within Wales. The continuous expansion of social media (marketing) and the concomitant growth of innovative new platforms have driven businesses to embrace new strategies presenting new challenges for current and future practice. This has led to a sustained need for organizations to engage in performance monitoring of social media. We found, however, that the timing of implementation of social media marketing into an SME is not the most important factor, rather it is more important to consider how well social media marketing can be utilized to have the best possible effect.

Decision making in the marketing field requires the efficient acquisition and interpretation of consumers’ behavior from questionnaire data. However, the data are usually full of noise, and attributes in the questionnaire data may have a high association with one another. The problem of a domain expert (or analyst) lies in determining a method to acquire accurate and useful knowledge about consumers’ attitude and behavior from the noisy data. This study describes a novel method of extracting useful knowledge from questionnaire data by performing Bayesian network modeling, accompanied by feature selection, which incorporates Cramer’s coefficient of association as an indicator. This method is capable of treating multiple objective variables in one model, handling nonlinear covariation between variables, and solving a feature selection problem. The proposed method was verified by a case study of private medical insurance products in Japan, using real data on health consciousness and private medical insurance.

In this paper, we investigate the consumers’ perception of on-line product search using a questionnaire-based survey. We identify that the information retrieval activity of the purchase process can be performed with three Web applications: a search engine, a price comparison service, and a Web shop. The study underlines the need for linked product data as proposed by the Semantic Web. We argue that linked data will result in easier product search on the Web for the consumer.

Business-to-consumer sales of electronic commerce are commonly used worldwide as an important element of the consumer market. In relation to e-business, management of customer knowledge is an important asset for online shops. However, it is difficult for online shops to deal with customer management, collect data, and translate them into basic customer knowledge. This study examines university students’ behavior and perceptions toward online shopping to provide basic customer knowledge. We used a questionnaire-based research method to elucidate students’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of online shopping. It was found that lesser is the availability and variety of goods in nearby actual shops, higher is the motivation to shop online, and that the availability of goods is a stronger incentive than cheapness in relation to the use of online shops. Conjoint analysis revealed students’ priorities with respect to several attributes of online shopping. They gave higher priority to the perception of online shops’ websites than other attributes. Surprisingly, this analysis also indicated that for students postage is a more important criterion than the price of goods. These analyses examined differences with respect to students’ living environment or experiences of online shopping. The study will contribute to the development of understanding customer knowledge and suggest effective marketing strategies regarding online shopping.

Financial crises are typically cause by a chain of credit contractions, which in turns could be caused by the rapid worsening of indexes that indicate people’s psychology, such as bank stock prices. Therefore, the prediction of bank stocks is especially important. The purpose of this analysis is to identify trigger points where bank stocks rise or fall by extracting what common points existed in financial economic indicators immediately before significant fluctuations of bank stocks occurred in the past. To conduct discriminant analysis, we used the logistic regression analysis, Support Vector Machine, J48, and the random forest. Comparison of discriminant error rates by using each analysis method confirmed that the random forest method showed the highest precision level. We also tried to extract highly important variables. This attempt showed that the following financial economic indicators are important indicators that could have an influence on bank stock movements: Money multiplier, 10-year yield of government bonds, current bank deposits, M2/nominal GDP, and repayment years for corporation borrowing.

Recent research suggests that there are two distinct behavioral components of leadership: (1) those targeted at influencing the group as a whole (group-focused); and (2) those aimed at individual group members (individual-focused). Differentiated individual-focused leadership occurs when leader exhibits varying levels of individual-focused leadership behavior across different group members. This research examines the unique influences of group-focused empowering leadership and differentiated individual-focused empowering leadership on R&D team’s processes and team effectiveness.

Agent-based virtual organizations have acquired growing relevance during the last years. While these systems can be used to model human societies, there are still some open issues to be solved when working with agent-based virtual organizations, including conflict resolution. In a virtual organization it is possible to find different conflictive situations among which is the task of assigning roles to the agents in the organization. The number of agents can vary dynamically in an organization, which has produced the need to define automatic self-adaptive mechanisms for role assignment. This paper presents an innovative linear programming mechanism for role assignment in virtual organizations of agents. With the use of linear programming it is possible to determine the roles that will be assigned to each agent based on the agent’s specific capabilities. The proposed mechanism was tested in a case study in geriatric residences and the results obtained are presented in this paper.

We propose a novel method of through which employees can identify and rank the images of the ideal leaders of an organization. In many companies, despite discussion of the images of leaders, it is difficult to hide differences in how different individuals recognize those images. Past research on leaders has not answered these questions. To clarify differences in recognition, we apply the persona technique. The persona technique was started in the user interface field of computer software development, and has spread to the product development field. The proposed method uses the following procedure: (1) set persona characters with various attributes, (2) assign the attribute values by the orthogonal design technique, (3) design questionnaires, (4) get questionnaire data on the personas from subjects, (5) evaluate the data recorded on respondent questionnaires. Using the proposed method, we successfully detected the ordering of different employee images of organization leaders.

With the coming information economy age, knowledge has become the core production factor for success of the enterprise, while how to manage the knowledge efficiently while the enterprise faces such mass information has become a new task in enterprise knowledge management. This paper has discussed development and application condition of enterprise knowledge management by cloud computing and knowledge management overview and pointed out a good method to apply the advanced cloud computing technology in enterprise knowledge management.

The practice of law is one that has been associated with the practice of knowledge and skills which invariably requires objective use of information. Law firms are now being challenged by the need to better manage their collective knowledge as an asset to their business. Traditional methods of managing human capital, innovation, and learning within law firms, have proven ineffective as they more often than not fail to contribute to a firm’s success. In an ideal setting, having a good knowledge management initiative in place may offer the opportunity for a practising lawyer to experience a better work or life balance. Some legal firms are on the threshold of embarking on comprehensive knowledge management strategies aiming to improve the way they manage their knowledge. However, such strategies are far more complex as one would imagine. Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives should not merely be seen as an attempt to alleviate some of the problems of poor control and poor use of knowledge and information resources in the face of increasing complexity but also as a means for organisations to have better leverage on what it does best. A holistic implementation of a KM initiative is deemed necessary so that such an initiative does not disrupt existing work processes, but adds value to a legal setup leading to improved productivity and better clientele services. Such an initiative should not only make a lawyer’s job easier but perhaps also result in greater work satisfaction for a lawyer over time. This case study based research dwells into embedding law firms with a holistic implementation of KM. It proposes a KM initiative for legal establishments albeit to one firm. The aforementioned legal establishment would need to remain anonymous due to the nature of the research and will hereafter be referred to as AP.

In this paper, we report a method of the dilemma solution among the stakeholders in the Information Technology (IT) system implementation. We found a difficulty to mitigate the dilemma among the stakeholders at the time of the IT system implementation so far, whereas the necessity of the IT system should be introduced for strategic objective. From this background, we propose a framework named of Change analysis matrix dilemma transformation and evaluate the effectiveness the proposed method with the person of the rank and file type expert. From the result of the evaluation, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Collaboration is a key driver of successful innovation. Knowledge sharing is not only vital for firms, but important for students in their learning too. For students to learn effectively, they must construct knowledge and collaborate with their peers. Knowledge sharing is essential to learning especially when it comes to the learning of innovation among students. However, this is not a trivial task. Business management students are reluctant to share knowledge among their peers. This paper describes the experience of a Finnish-Vietnamese international innovation course for business managers. The authors found that there are barriers to knowledge sharing among the students. This paper attempts to give theoretical underpinnings to the barriers and propose guidelines to help overcome the barriers.

E-learning is an emerging field in the intersection of education learning, and business, and refers to information and education services delivered or improved via Internet services and related technologies. This paper attempts to show how knowledge management (KM) and E-learning (EL) specifically can be of prominent support in the workplace. The model presented in this paper explains the factors or elements of support that facilitate the integration of KM and EL which is characterised by a dynamic alignment of an information systems infrastructure with team learning and flows of knowledge leading to the successful acquisition of knowledge in organisations. This framework offers integrated support and effects on the various medias involved in education systems. The model is a suggestion to improve the teaching and learning process and explains how KM can assist educational consumers in selecting and evaluating EL media. The model is based on an analysis of KM and EL literature and the information search process.

Organisations need to innovate to be competitive. People who want to start an enterprise or just want to be an outstanding employee, need to learn how to recognize opportunity, harness the resources to exploit that opportunity, exercise their creativity, and create sustainable solutions. It is important to teach, entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation. Although there are debates about whether innovation can be taught, the teaching of innovation and entrepreneurship has grown dramatically over the past decade. Through a case study describing a Finnish/Vietnamese project to teach innovation to business managers in Vietnam, this paper support the opinionthat innovation can be taught and learned. Based on the virtual enterprise methodology and blended learning environment, the training course has been delivered small and medium sized enterprises’ managers in Vietnam by both Finnist and Vietnamese experts. This paper discusses the development of the joint course, the problems encountered and draw lessons in both practical and theoretical aspects.

Knowledge sharing platforms promised to solve a number of challenges that complicate requirements engineering activities in globally distributed software engineering efforts. A systematic review of empirical studies of the impact of such knowledge sharing platforms up to and including 2011 was conducted. The selected search strategy identified 511 studies, of which 17 were identified as suitable empirical studies. The studies were evaluated according to the presented knowledge sharing platform, the requirements engineering setting as well as to the reported impact on the requirements engineering processes. This systematic review investigates what is currently known about the evidence for positive and negative impacts of knowledge sharing platforms in requirements engineering processes. The main finding of this systematic review is that currently little empirical data on knowledge sharing platforms and their use in requirements engineering processes is available and further empirical research is necessary.

With the rapid technological change in health informatics environment, the security incidents are likely to occur. Thus make it important for the employee to acquire security knowledge to minimize the incidents. Previous literature addresses the issues on motivation towards the employee in knowledge sharing. Little has pay attention on the resistance factors that become the barrier in knowledge sharing in information security. This paper identifies the similarities of Knowledge Management (KM) and Information Security Management (ISM) according to previous literature. The purpose of this paper to investigate the key resistance factors in knowledge sharing towards information security culture healthcare organization. Based on secondary data collected, the key resistance factors identified are behavior, lack of trust, lack of communication, low security awareness, personality differences, cultural differences, lack of top management commitment and openness to experience. This in-progress study will be use to design a conceptual model to show the relationship between knowledge sharing and information security culture and further tested with selected healthcare organization.

A number of Kenyan communities practise traditional rainmaking rituals. Although rainmaking processes, materials and participants vary, most communities believe that the tradition enables them to predict, cause, redirect or dispel rainfall. Although some modern scientists have dismissed the practice as irrelevant, irrational and ineffective, others advocate its integration to conventional meteorological approaches. Given the gravity of the impact of climate change in Kenya, most stakeholders concur that mainstreaming rainmaking traditions in the national climate change action plan would result in a better response to the phenomenon.Data for this study was collected through key informant interviews, documentary analysis and participation in stakeholder forum discussions. The author proposes that traditional rainmaking can be mainstreamed in the national climate change response through validation of the tradition through scientific research; integration of traditional rainmaking in modern meteorological processes; integration of traditional rainmaking in meteorological training curricula; commercialisation of the practice; patenting of rainmaking materials and processes; documentation and preservation of traditional rainmaking; and popularisation of the tradition. The author concludes that mainstreaming rainmaking in the climate change action plan has the potential to facilitate a better interpretation of weather patterns leading to equally better coping mechanisms; conservation of natural ecosystems; regulation of exploitation of the natural resources; better understanding of scientific weather forecasts through local contextualisation; and increased community participation in the management of the consequences of climate change. These findings can be used by climate change researchers, ethnographic researchers, governments as well as institutions or individuals managing climate change in Kenya and beyond.

This research is aimed at businesses or organizations that find in the information and communication technology ICT, a means to generate knowledge in project management, recognizing competitive advantages by leveraging the basic specifications that techniques, tools and applications used by ICT give as an important contribution for profit in the execution of a project. These technologies are analyzed from the main factors assessed for both success and failure of a project, among which lack of collaborative work from the project team and others involved can be evidenced, as well as their interactions and the way each individual tackles and meets their functions. In a competitive environment, highlighting that collaborative work, performed through the use and appropriation of information and communication technology is fundamental, increasing not only the sense of belonging to the execution of a project, but the application of better practices, built out of mistakes and experiences from the team members. As a consequence to this approach, this paper shows the inclusion of the use and appropriation of ICT as a means of generating knowledge in project management.