Im Zuge der ungebremsten Ausbreitung des Web 2.0 und der längst eingetretenen Globalisierung der Märkte entwickelt sich das Wissen über die Bedürfnisse und Meinungen von Kunden zum erfolgskritischen Faktor in jedem Unternehmen. Es können jedoch nicht alle Kunden immer profitabel sein, denn nicht jeder Kunde liefert denselben Beitrag zum Unternehmenswert. Neben den offensichtlichen ökonomisch-monetären Kriterien, wie etwa Umsatz oder Deckungsbeitrag, spielen nach, (Cornelsen, 2000) und (Homburg & Schnurr, 1999) vermehrt auch nicht ökonomische Determinanten, wie Referenz- und Informationspotenziale eine große Rolle. Der Einfluss des Einzelnen wird durch die Weiterentwicklungen im Internet, wie sozialen Netzwerken oder Blogs ermöglicht. Das soziale Netzwerk Facebook verzeichnet über 1.42 Milliarden User weltweit. In den USA sind über 50 Prozent aller Internetnutzer bei Facebook registriert. Der Microblog Service Twitter zählt 288 Millionen Nutzer weltweit. Betrachtet man sich diese Zahlen, so lassen diese keinen Zweifel an der Integration des Web 2.0 in das tägliche Leben und somit auch in das Konsumentenverhalten aufkommen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden mit Hilfe der Methoden des Text Mining als Teilbereich der Business Intelligence (BI) und der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse die Referenzpotenziale einzelner Nutzer analysiert, wobei als Quelle das Verhalten der Nutzer bei der Kommunikation in sozialen Netzwerken herangezogen wird. Dabei setzt sich das Referenzpotential nicht ausschließlich aus netzwerkbezogenen Determinanten zusammen, sondern beinhaltet vielmehr auch Komponenten wie Fachwissen. Daher ist eine Integration von Inhalten und Netzwerkstrukturen nötig, um das Referenzpotential vollständig abzubilden. Das Gestaltungsziel der Arbeit besteht aus der Integration der Ansätze der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse und der Ansätze des Text-Mining um eine adäquate Beschreibung des Referenzpotentials mit Hilfe von Struktur- sowie Inhaltsdaten aus sozialen Netzwerken zu ermöglichen.

Das vorgestellte Projekt zeigt anhand des Wissensmanagement-Modells von, welche Bausteine vor dem Hintergrund der zeitkritischen Rahmenbedingung des demografischen Wandels für einen Wasserverband priorisiert werden sollten. Der Praxispartner wird hierzu in die Vorgehensweise eingeordnet und es werden zwei Maßnahmen der Kodifizierung erläutert. Abschließend zeigt ein Fallbeispiel den bereits erzielten Nutzen.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / As the Department of Defense (DoD) begins transitioning to face the new global threats of terrorism, the new requirements of a refocused National Strategy will inherently force the DoD to transform its processes in support of the new National Strategy. In the next few years the technology used to support the DoD will continue to grow with the new demands thus, the DoD will have achieve transformation at all levels enterprise-wide. "Transformation" or radical change has been occurring successfully in the corporate business world for over 25 years and through this transformation the e-business technology has created an exponential growth in the knowledge producing information exchange systems. As the DoD looks to the e-business world for methodologies and solutions to capture this knowledge and manage it, it must also look for a surrogate definition of value or revenue that can be used as a measurement of return on the knowledge. This thesis will seek to define this value by presenting the e-business methodologies called Return on Knowledge (ROK), Knowledge Value Analysis (KVA) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) by developing a web-enabled environment called the Transformation Information Technology Enabler (TITE) as a DoD transformation solution. / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy / Lieutenant, United States Navy

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF) are vulnerable to the same kinds of threats to its information infrastructure as the rest of the industrialized nations. As an officer in the RSNF, I am familiar with the special information assurance needs and interests of my organization, and thus, I am in a position to leverage my formal Information Technology Management (ITM) education to address these needs. The United States has played a prominent lead role in establishing many educational curriculums in the area of information assurance (IA). Though the breadth and depth of educational curriculum and resource materials (i.e., universities, certification programs, computer-based training, Web content, etc.) is impressive; the shear volume can be overwhelming and intimidating to the novice. What is needed is a methodical survey of the main IA themes that are currently emphasized by the most prominent and respected institutions offering IA training and education. This survey needs to be cross-referenced to identify core areas, and any other didactic information (e.g., models, rules, best practices, etc.) that might prove useful in developing the final training product for the RSNF. / Lieutenant, Royal Saudi Naval Forces

D.Phil. / The success of an organisation depends on the mental capability of a comparatively small number of highly proficient knowledge workers who innovate and clarify the business processes others must act on (Zemke, 2004). Many organisations utilise knowledge worker expertise to create a competitive advantage, but this expertise is not incorporated into the business processes and routine operations of the organisation. Organisational design does not create the conditions under which an organisation can optimise knowledge worker expertise (Grant, 1996). As a consequence, when the knowledge worker leaves the organisation, the knowledge created is lost and the competitive advantage is not sustainable. One of the foremost objectives of an organisation must be to optimise knowledge worker expertise to produce new products, services or ways of working for sustaining competitive advantage (Gold, Malhotra & Segards, 2001). Organisational design continues to be seen as the process of assembling and fine-tuning an organisation’s structure to achieve its goal. Much has been written about knowledge, knowledge management, the knowledge-based organisation and the knowledge worker. However, current organisational design methodologies do not place emphasis on the optimisation of knowledge worker expertise (Grant, 1996). For knowledge workers to contribute sufficiently to the production of new products, services or ways of working, consideration must be given to their motivation. Despite all our achievements in technology and product improvements, knowledge workers are not thriving in the organisations they work for because organisations are not clear about where knowledge workers fit and how their contribution is valued. Covey (2004) asserts that managers are still applying the Industrial Age control model to knowledge workers. For an organisation to succeed in the new economy, knowledge workers must be intrinsically motivated so that they can reach new heights of fulfilment (Covey, 2004).

M.A. / The first part of the study is a literature review which indicate that small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) represent an important vehicle to address the challenges of job creation, economic growth and equity. Modern economy is driven by innovations and knowledge. Transforming information resources into knowledge and maximise the value of knowledge is the new challenge in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. Information resources are needed by small businesses as much as their larger counter parts but small businesses are usually in a disadvantaged position in terms of finance and expertise. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer small businesses new opportunities in the information economy. Exciting ICT applications such as Web portals provide platforms for business communities to share information and communicate more efficiently than ever. Such information resources enable small businesses to react faster and adapt better to the changing global market. The stimulation of SMMEs must be seen as part of an integrated strategy to develop the society to a higher level. The research findings of this study provide all stakeholders in small business development in South Africa including government, industries and academics a better understanding and practical guideline for delivering information resources to small business owners and managers and the design of information portals that can address the information needs of small businesses in South Africa. The empirical components that follow the literature review comprised a questionnaire survey. The survey focused on non-franchised small businesses in the retail industry in the greater Johannesburg metropolitan. A total of 150 questionnaires completed by small business owners and managers were used for statistic analysis in this research. The questionnaire consisted of four sections: business biographic information, business information and agencies, information and communication technologies usage, and community and portal activities. The survey results revealed valuable insights and trends in the use of ICTs and attitudes towards information sharing amongst small business owners and managers. Textile, clothing, footwear and leather goods were the most popular trade for the small businesses use in the survey. Nearly all respondents prefer English for business communication and the businesses are typically owner manager with a small number of employees. Infrastructure for ICTs is in place for small businesses, but the usage level is still basic. Short message service (SMS) and e-mail are the most commonly used ICT tools. Traditional media such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines remain the most important source of information for these small business owners and managers. Younger businesses adapt better to ICTs than the older businesses. Despite a mixed attitude towards sharing business information, small business owners and managers showed a high level of interest in networking with other businesses, in particular with potential customers and suppliers. Most respondents do not belong to any professional or industrial organisation primarily because they were not aware of these organisations. Based on the literature review and the empirical research, the final conclusion that was made from this research is that Web community information portals can, to a great extent, promote the use of information resources for small businesses in South Africa. The results from this research give a better understanding and are useful guidelines to stakeholders in small business development in South Africa.

This research sought to understand the knowledge management (KM) practices in use by networked southern non-profit organisations (NPOs), which directly or indirectly impact on their effectiveness. It explores the realm of NPOs, and the concepts of organisational effectiveness (OE) and KM, with the aim of identifying their interrelationships from a theoretical and practical perspective. The three organisations studied are the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), South Africa NGO Network (SANGONet) and Women’s Network (Women’sNet). Using a conceptually formulated research framework, data gathered was analysed to examine the KM concepts of people capacity, systems and procedures, information and knowledge flow and stakeholder relations within and across all three case studies and their use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) as an enabler. The research concludes with an integrated framework, an addition to the existing body of knowledge on KM theory with key elements for a KM system for effectiveness for networked southern NPOs.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Science, School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, 2017. / Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a principled mathematical framework allowing a robot to reason about the consequences of actions and observations with respect to the agent's limited perception of its environment. They allow an agent to plan and act optimally in uncertain environments. Although they have been successfully applied to various robotic tasks, they are infamous for their high computational cost. This thesis demonstrates the use of knowledge transfer, learned from previous experiences, to accelerate the learning of POMDP tasks. We propose that in order for an agent to learn to solve these tasks quicker, it must be able to generalise from past behaviours and transfer knowledge, learned from solving multiple tasks, between di erent circumstances. We present a method for accelerating this learning process by learning the statistics of action choices over the lifetime of an agent, known as action priors. Action priors specify the usefulness of actions in situations and allow us to bias exploration, which in turn improves the performance of the learning process. Using navigation domains, we study the degree to which transferring knowledge between tasks in this way results in a considerable speed up in solution times. This thesis therefore makes the following contributions. We provide an algorithm for learning action priors from a set of approximately optimal value functions and two approaches with which a prior knowledge over actions can be used in a POMDP context. As such, we show that considerable gains in speed can be achieved in learning subsequent tasks using prior knowledge rather than learning from scratch. Learning with action priors can particularly be useful in reducing the cost of exploration in the early stages of the learning process as the priors can act as mechanism that allows the agent to select more useful actions given particular circumstances. Thus, we demonstrate how the initial losses associated with unguided exploration can be alleviated through the use of action priors which allow for safer exploration. Additionally, we illustrate that action priors can also improve the computation speeds of learning feasible policies in a shorter period of time. / MT2018

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The research centered on the implementation and use of groupware technologies and on knowledge management (KM) practices in the Information Technology (IT) division of a major global energy organization. The study examined the relationships among technology, process, policy, and the cognitive frames that characterize people's understandings of them-in conjunction with other contextual and methodological factors, including technological and organizational change. The problem was presented from a business perspective and expressed in terms of two problematic gaps. The first was a methodological gap, between the existing approach to implementing and integrating KM enabling technology (Livelink groupware), structure, and culture within the research site and the approaches recommended in the literature. The second was an operational gap between the actual level-of-use of the groupware technology (and associated KM practices) within the research site and the level-of-use expected by senior leadership. Data included survey responses from 51 of 54 respondents (94%) involved in the implementation effort. There were 6 demographic questions. The remaining questions combined mostly open-ended items with 8 Yes/No and 14 Likert-type items. The open ended responses were subjected to a thematic analysis and all of the responses were analyzed in relation to 9 research questions. The research questions addressed the key organizational conditions influencing the use of groupware technology and KM practices and the process required to effectively transform an organization in the desired direction. Other questions assessed MCA member's technological frames regarding Livelink and KM, the extent to which MCA staff used Livelink and KM, as well as staff perceptions of current and previous rollout attempts. The study then identified methodological and operational deficiencies. The findings are discussed in terms of the business context, their relationship to Orlikowski's research on technological frames and organizational change, and their contribution to the broader literature on technological and organizational change and KM practices. The main conclusion is that the management of cognitive frames is critical in mediating the social and technological aspects of IT-enabled business solutions. Several conceptual prototypes for further research and business application are described. These include a comprehensive KM framework, a change/implementation process model, and an integrated cognitive-frames schema. / 2031-01-02

The trend toward open concept office floor plans reflects evolving management styles in modern organizations. Organizations typically implement architecturally open workspace designs to seed cultural change. As the popularity of open concept offices grows, however, research suggests that they are negatively impacting collaboration and productivity. This thesis examines how organizational leadership and employees perceive the transition to an open concept workspace, incorporating employees’ aesthetic experience to understand how the space is ‘physically known’. The study takes place within a conceptual framework of aesthetic knowledge as experiential, symbolic and personal. Using a qualitative, practice-based approach that incorporates participant-led photo-ethnography, semi-structured interviews were conducted with leadership and employees. Although the results are not generalizable, they suggest that the open concept workspace both positively and negatively impacts organizational collaboration but has primarily negative effects on staff productivity, and that leadership can improve open workspace outcomes by taking employees’ embodied experiences into account in the design and implementation of such spaces. The results add to our understanding of the way in which organizational strategy and aesthetic knowledge create and sustain the way of working within an open concept office space.