Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX239030.

Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s):Mark E. Nissen, Kenneth R. Dombroski. Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-113). Also available online.

Purpose: It has been pointed out in studies how quality in the construction industry should be improved and how the building process has potential to be more efficient. The industry's project-based approach complicates the experience feedback and one is faced with new conditions before each project. When there is so much knowledge and experience in the industry, it should also be possible to make use of it and pass it on in the company. Can a perceived experience be fed back entirely or does knowledge get lost on the way? Today there is research on how knowledge management can improve the business but there is a lack of research on how to take advantage of knowledge gained during the warranty period. The aim of the report is to identify areas for improvement in the work with experience feedback. To find the most important improvement proposals for a construction company in the work experience feedback during the warranty period. Method: The report is a qualitative study and selected research methods are literature studies, case study, interviews, and document analysis. Findings: The study concludes that there are no procedures for documentation of the guarantee measures. For the most part construction services are used to fix errors. The result of that is that the person who carried out the error is not the one who solves it which risks that knowledge is lost during returning. Digital tools are used to advantage to document and collect experiences. There is an awareness in the investigated company that a database with more experience from projects is needed and interviews show that a need for it exists. The experience can be collected in the database so all of the employees use it. Meetings prove to be a good method for disseminating experiences. Implications: The report shows the conclusion that in the present situation there is no routine or system for experience feedback during the warranty period. The results show that all warranty measures should be documented. The experience that is assessed as significant can advantageously be taken up in meetings with the person who possesses the experience to be sure that no knowledge will be lost on the way. Small actions that are documented need not be brought up to the same extent, but the information can be used to detect recurrent errors. The report highlights the importance of experience being not only documented, it then becomes no experience feedback. The feedback itself is central to the benefit and improve the quality of the building. Digital tools can serve as important tools to document and gather experience and should be used on a larger scale. Limitations: The report is limited by the focus on the housing side in one construction company. The work doesn’t immerse in the economic factors or specific construction errors. The interviews are held only with officials and the majority of the interviewees work in the same district. Document analysis is used to observe the company's management, but an in-depth analysis of the system are not executed.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) Working Group, the highest level of the country's National Information Infrastructure (NII) technical committee, held an invited workshop in May 1995 to define a research agenda for digital libraries. The shared vision is an entire net of distributed repositories in which objects of any type and any size can be organized and searched within and across different indexed collections. The ultimate goal, as described in the IITA report, is the Grand Challenge of Digital Libraries: "deep semantic interoperability -- the ability of a user to access, consistently and coherently, similar (though autonomously defined and managed) classes of digital objects and services, distributed across heterogeneous repositories, with federating or mediating software compensating for site-by-site variations...Achieving this will require breakthroughs in description as well as retrieval, object interchange and object retrieval protocols. Issues here include the definition and use of metadata and its capture or computation from objects (both textual and multimedia), the use of computed descriptions of objects, federation and integration of heterogeneous repositories with disparate semantics, clustering and automatic hierarchical organization of information, and algorithms for automatic rating, ranking, and evaluation of information quality, genre, and other properties." "The use of computed descriptions of (multimedia) objects" and "clustering and automatic hierarchical organization of information" present pressing scientific and engineering problems that have a significant potential impact on the US society in this era of the Internet and distributed, multimedia computing.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Information and knowledge management in a knowledge-intensive and time-critical environment presents a challenge to information technology professionals. In law enforcement, multiple data sources are used, each having different user interfaces. COPLINK Connect addresses these problems by providing one easy-to-use interface that integrates different data sources such as incident records, mug shots and gang information, and allows diverse police departments to share data easily. User evaluations of the application allowed us to study the impact of COPLINK on law-enforcement personnel as well as to identify requirements for improving the system. COPLINK Connect is currently being deployed at Tucson Police Department (TPD).

Information stored by managed organizations in free text documents, databases, and engineered knowledge repositories can often be processed as networks of conceptual nodes and relational links (concept graphs). However, these models tend to be informal as related to new or multi-source tasks. This work contributes to the understanding of techniques for matching knowledge elements: in informal node-link knowledge representations, drawn from existing data resources, to support user-guided analysis. Its guiding focus is the creation of tools that compare, retrieve, and merge existing information resources.Three essays explore important algorithmic and heuristic elements needed to leverage concept graphs in real-world applications. Section 2 documents an algorithm which identifies likely matches between student and instructor concept maps aiming to support semi-automatic matching and scoring for both classroom and unsupervised environments. The knowledge-anchoring, similarity flooding algorithm significantly improves on term-based matching by leveraging map structure and also has potential as a methodology for combining other informal, human-created knowledge representations. Section 3 describes a decompositional tagging approach to organizing (aggregating) automatically extracted biomedical pathway relations. We propose a five-level aggregation strategy for extracted relations and measure the effectiveness of the BioAggregate tagger in preparing extracted information for analysis and visualization. Section 4 evaluates an importance flooding algorithm designed to assist law enforcement investigators in identifying useful investigational leads. While association networks have a long history as an investigational tool, more systematic processes are needed to guide development of high volume cross-jurisdictional data sharing initiatives. We test path-based selection heuristics and importance flooding to improve on traditional association-closeness methodologies.Together, these essays demonstrate how structural and semantic information can be processed in parallel to effectively leverage ambiguous network representations of data. Also, they show that real applications can be addressed by processing available data using an informal concept graph paradigm. This approach and these techniques are potentially useful for workflow systems, business intelligence analysis, and other knowledge management applications where information can be represented in an informal conceptual network and that information needs to be analyzed and converted into actionable, communicable human knowledge.

The realization that knowledge constitutes a key organizational resource and should be managed effectively gave rise to the field of knowledge management (KM). Since then, the field has experienced tremendous growth as measured by the number of research papers, books, conferences, and consulting services. The lack of a theoretical foundation, however, has resulted in the proliferation of KM definitions and models with little underlying coherence among them. This research represents an attempt to address this shortcoming by developing and investigating a theoretically grounded model for KM. The focus of the research is twofold. First, a conceptual model is developed that combines tenets of evolutionary theory, organizational learning and organizational memory (OM) into a single integrated model. The model proposes that organizational knowledge evolves through four recursive stages. At each stage, a process is required to manage the evolving knowledge, namely, knowledge scanning process, knowledge evaluation process, knowledge transfer process, and knowledge application process. The model further proposes that, as it evolves, knowledge is enabled by and embedded in OM infrastructures namely, individuals, roles, business logic, artifacts and culture. Second, the conceptual model is then examined within an organizational setting to gain an understanding of how each of the knowledge processes and OM infrastructures function inter-dependently to contribute to the management of knowledge. Using a case study methodology, an investigation is conducted within the context of new service development in three different lines of business (LOB) (referred to as TM, PD and MM) of a major logistics company. The research shows that the LOBs with enhanced KM capability (i.e., TM and PD) share three dominant aspects: articulable (i.e., their knowledge processes and OM infrastructures are well-defined and well understood at each stage of knowledge evolution); supportive (i.e., their knowledge processes and OM infrastructures at each stage are aligned with the goals of the respective stages); and equifocused (i.e., they are attentive to all the stages of knowledge evolution). In contrast to KM at these two LOBs, KM at MM is lacking in all three key aspects. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2008-05-29 13:03:39.738

The purpose of this qualitative study was an investigation of the phenomenon of Knowledge Management (KM) program design and development. The interest in KM programs has grown during the last decade because of the increased demand for KM educational research and the importance of the emerging knowledge economy. This exploratory and explanatory investigation scrutinized two cases of graduate KM programs conceived in the year 2000. Choo’s Knowing Cycle was the conceptual framework for the study and furnished an interpretive structure for the data in terms of various processes: historical sensemaking, knowledge creation, and decision-making. Two methods were used for data collection: document analysis and structured interviews with fifteen informants—ranging from deans and directors to Advisory Board members and program support staff. Grounded theory was the analytical method used. / Le but de cette dissertation était l’étude du phénomène de création et de développement de programmes de gestion des connaissances (GC). L’intérêt pour les programmes de gestion des connaissances a augmenté au cours de la dernière décennie face à la demande de recherche en éducation de gestion des connaissances et à l’importance de l’émergence de l’économie du savoir. Cette recherche exploratoire et explicative examine deux programmes d’études supérieures en gestion des connaissances conçus en I”an 2000. Le modèle théorique du cycle du savoir de Choo a été utilisé pour cette étude et a fourni une structure d’interprétation pour les données en terme de divers processus: la signification historique, la création du savoir, et la prise de décision. Deux méthodes ont été utilisées pour la collecte des données, soient l’analyse de documents et l’entrevue structurée avec quinze informateurs: du doyen aux présidents et membres des commissions consultatives au personnel de soutien des programmes. La Grounded Theory a été la méthode analytique utilisée. fr

Companies in today's global and competitive business environment have realised that it is crucial for them to enhance their relationship with important customers in order to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. Account management has therefore received increasing attention during the last decades. Nonetheless, it seems as if the information requirements in combination with account management have so far been neglected in this discussion. / The aim of the review of contemporary theory thus is to investigate which information requirements are essential for account management, including its underlying concepts of key account management, strategic account management and global account management, and may lead to a competitive advantage. Consequently, the core questions are what kind of information is required, and how such information should be structured in an information system for account management to achieve a competitive advantage. Additionally, the terms and definitions of various researchers with respect to key account management, strategic account management and global account management as well as their interrelationship are discussed in detail within this review of the contemporary theory. / Analyses have shown that multinational corporations have recognised that only a limited number of key customers are vitally important to achieve a competitive advantage in their businesses. Since this small number of customers is of such importance to the overall business performance, a successful business relationship with these customers is highly significant. In order to achieve a successful business relationship essential information about the individual customers has to be gathered. Information management and knowledge management are prerequisites for accumulating and using data concerning important customers. Specifying and obtaining the right information can be seen as a filter that sieves the information needed for account management from the vast amount of data available from knowledge management. Furthermore, this review of contemporary theory will argue that a specific information system is an indispensable tool involved in achieving a competitive advantage in account management. / Moreover, the review of literature has visualised that only a limited amount of material has been published about how to obtain and use the right information requirements effectively for account management. Therefore, it has to be investigated to which extent the combination between the specified information requirements and account management leads to a competitive advantage. Concluding, it can be said that further research is necessary in order to identify what kind of information is required for a comprehensive and unified account management information system. / Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2007.