Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-231). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Study Supervisor: . Completed: 2008 / Purpose – To investigate the utilisation of intranet as a knowledge management (KM) tool in South African organisations Findings – The intranet is under utilised in many South African organisations, only 25 percent of the organisations represented in the survey has indicated to have been using the intranet as a tool to facilitate knowledge management. Most respondents indicated that emails and meetings were most effectively utilised as knowledge management tools in their respective organisations. The study also reveals that the content on the intranet is mainly focused on policies, employee contacts and communication bulletins. Employees do not contribute directly to the intranet content, hence the content on the intranet is mainly generic in nature; Information Technology (IT) teams, management and Human Resource (HR) teams are the main contributors of the intranet content. Research limitations/implications – Further research is needed to compare and deduce the benefits of utilising the intranet as a knowledge management tool with regard to business performance indexes such as, competitive advantage, market share, profits, long term growth, bottom line, sales, turnover, cost savings, etc.

Learning organizations is a concept which is little understood and researched in Southern Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe. The researcher chose the subject matter of learning organizations because she feels it is critical to the success of organizations. To date in most organizations the understanding of learning organizations and what they represent has been understood to a very small extent, if any at all. The concept of learning organizations has been researched and practiced mainly in the European and American parts of the world but not to the same extent in Africa. This paper seeks to examine, The extent to which organizations in Zimbabwe are learning organizations, a case study of BancABC.

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This thesis analyses the integration of knowledge (disciplinary, expert and lay) in order to contribute to the understanding of how knowledge can be integrated for conservation.  Specifically, the thesis asks: a) how the knowledge of social and natural sciences can be integrated to better manage social-ecological systems; b) what the barriers are to integrating different types of knowledge; c) what the outcomes are of integrating different forms of knowledge; d) what type of participation can best sustain action; and e) how participation can improve adaptive capacity. In Chapter 3 the underlying philosophies of the social and natural sciences are mapped out and evaluated, demonstrating how taking one philosophical stance over another influences project methodology and outcome.  The mapping process may also benefit knowledge integration by enabling researchers to make their underlying assumptions explicit.  In Chapter 4 current cross-disciplinary research in conservation is analysed: results suggests more integrative research (interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary) has a higher impact on practitioners whereas less integrative research has a higher impact on colleagues.  Using conservation case studies from England, Scotland and Wales, Chapters 5 and 6 investigate some claims made for participation in conservation.  Chapter 5 analyses the satisfaction of participants with implications for participant recruitment and retention. Chapter 6 evaluates how participation and how particular participatory approaches may influence participant learning.  Results indicate a strong link between the integration of participants and types of learning that are considered to build adaptive capacity. Findings indicate that the approach taken to integrating knowledge can directly affect who benefits from the research, methodological flexibility participant satisfaction and learning.

Learning organizations is a concept which is little understood and researched in Southern Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe. The researcher chose the subject matter of learning organizations because she feels it is critical to the success of organizations. To date in most organizations the understanding of learning organizations and what they represent has been understood to a very small extent, if any at all. The concept of learning organizations has been researched and practiced mainly in the European and American parts of the world but not to the same extent in Africa. This paper seeks to examine, The extent to which organizations in Zimbabwe are learning organizations, a case study of BancABC.

Current trends indicate that the prevalence of ontologies will continue to increase within many domains. They are already commonly used to define controlled medical terminologies and form the backbone of the Semantic Web initiative. Very few tools that support versioning of ontologies are currently available, and those that provide difference detection and visualization are particularly lacking. We have implemented a tool called PROMPT-Viz that provides advanced visualizations using treemaps to help understand the location, impact, type and extent of changes that have occurred between versions on an ontology. PROMPT-Viz runs as a plug-in for the popular ProtCgC knowledge engineering environment and as such should be applicable to a large number of ontology developers.

M.A. / The impact of the New Economy on the enterprise is major and the change drivers required for success are pervasive and significant. At the same time traditional geographic boundaries to the flow of information and commercial transactions disappear. To position for success, the requirement to develop the capability to manage risk and operate under high levels of uncertainty becomes as important as the capacity for change. This demands a paradigm shift in management’s approach away from “the answer” to an approach which allows for portfolio management and the ability to investigate, fund and manage approaches to multiple strategic and operational options. The strategic challenges lies in when to lead and when to follow, the organisational challenge then becomes building flexibility, environment-sensing capabilities and an internal capacity to develop, nurture and harness knowledge and innovation. Whilst the benefits of leveraging innovation as a strategic business growth driver is accepted, the management of the process of doing so is manifestly difficult in most enterprises. This is due to outdated management processes and organisational structures, cultural prejudices caused by the enterprise being more comfortable with core activities and a lack of adequate skills within the enterprise to research, develop and manage innovative ideas to fruition. Enterprises can manage this process of leveraging innovation in a number of ways by inter alia, staff management via continuing education and training, a corporate culture with such characteristics as: “Off-line” innovation time, internal competition, knowledge management tools, cross- functional meetings, a knowledge capture Intranet, etc. and an organisational accountability which relates to a well-defined process that affords the enterprise and its employees the opportunity to move ideas across organisational boundaries without being inhibited by the usual organisational politics and turf-protection. An approach to this is via strategic internal consulting groups or a “New Ventures” division – essentially entities set up to incubate and manage new business opportunities Such a new venture division or business incubator requires as a critical component an established process and evaluation methodology to effectively manage innovation initiatives. This research will focus on the development, application and management of such a new ventures division along the structure of a business incubator. It is an accepted adage that all “healthy” enterprises generate and use knowledge, but this is, as with the management of innovation, easier said than done. Whilst many enterprises will simply hire smart people and leave them to their own devices, research have indicated that successful knowledge generation initiatives not only address the processes but also focus on the team structure and the internally on the working circumstances. Businesses faced with disruptive technologies such as the Internet find it very difficult to redesign or rearrange their organisational structures to face the challenges of the New Economy. Also there has always been a measure of distinct tension, between the boardrooms of enterprise and the technical, scientific or other resources on which the former depends for the creation of new wealth – the net result is that the role of the traditional “Corporate R&D” is being diminished. There is a strong perception that views the arrival of the incubator as an approach for corporates / enterprises to set this mindset apart and to get some speed, vitality, action and urgency back into enterprises inhibited by, inter alia, excessive bureaucracy. Although the concept of incubators has now surfaced in Europe and in South Africa, it is not new. What today underscores the interest is the success that enterprises like Idealab!, eToys, GoTo.com and NetZero achieved. The more comprehensive intra-enterprise or corporate incubators offer a range of services that exceed that of the traditional venture capitalist. Corporate incubation grew out of the realisation that innovation and entrepreneurship were severely limited by the typical corporate environment. In addition enterprises realised that they were losing their brightest talent and best innovative ideas as people left to start their own businesses. To this threat they responded by offering employees’ incentives to either build their ideas as enhancements to the current business, extensions or entirely as new spin-offs. These incentives were modelled on share participation, a "safe" best practice rich environment and access to corporate resources that in many instances culminated in corporate business incubators. Corporate incubators constitute a logical extension to knowledge management, innovation and R&D, as a means of profiting from intellectual capital and extending competitive advantage. Indeed it has been said that the only sustainable competitive advantage is continuous innovation. Incubators of various types are sine qua non with the dot.com start-up ventures towards the latter part of the nineteen nineties. It was viewed as one of many approaches to capitalise on knowledge available and to allow for the fast tracking of innovative advances. Many of these start-up incubators failed and incubators became looked upon as not being the ideal vehicle for innovative quick-to-market and thus first mover advantage. Yet, the very nature of the approaches used in an incubator lends it to the harnessing of knowledge and innovation in an enterprise which can be applied as part of a process to gain a competitive advantage from engaging in such a process.

Student Number : 9707570P - M Com dissertation - School of Economic and Business Sciences - Faculty of Commerce / Business managers have used principles of Knowledge Management to improve organisational performance by: o Identifying the knowledge that is needed to solve various problems o Acquiring the needed knowledge from sources that already have it o Creating the needed knowledge if it is not yet available o Validating the acquired or created knowledge o Retaining the validated knowledge o Destroying invalid or obsolete knowledge o Representing the knowledge in a consistent, easily readable format o Enabling people to easily access relevant knowledge o Enabling people to share the retained knowledge o Enabling people to apply the retained knowledge to improve performance Statistical analysis of data obtained from 84 respondents confirmed that information systems practitioners can also benefit from applying the principles to their system development methods.

Knowledge Management (KM) är ett välkänt område inom företagsekonomin. KM används för att hantera kunskap inom företag exempelvis för att skapa, hantera, lagra och dela information. I den här studien har vi gått närmare in på kunskapsdelning hos säljare. Vi skriver, i denna studie, på uppdrag av Företag A, som är verksamma inom transportbranschen i Sverige. I uppdraget ingår det att ta reda på hur Företag A kan ta del av säljarnas kunskap och information om bland annat kunder och konkurrenter. Det teoretiska syftet med uppsatsen är att förstå vilka möjligheter och hinder som påverkar säljare att dela med sig av kunskap till andra i en organisation. För att kunna svara på syftet har vi använt oss av teorier som behandlar kunskapsdelning, Knowledge Transfer, Knowledge Sharing och exempelvis Nonaka & Takeuchis (1995) klassiska SECI modell samt Communities of Practice. För att se vilka hinder som påverkar kunskapsdelning har vi gått in på Rieges (2005) tre indelningar av hinder som är individuella, organisationella och tekniska hinder. Vi har gjort en kvalitativ studie och genomfört semi-strukturerade intervjuer med nio personer från företagets säljavdelning. Resultatet visar på att det finns många som delar kunskap med andra personer inom sin avdelning men även till andra personer och avdelningar internt på företaget. Vi ser bland annat att säljarna har möjlighet att snabbt se förändringar som kan ske, eftersom de har en nära dialog med sig kund. Det gör att om säljarna delar med sig av den informationen till företaget kan de utnyttja det till att bland annat ändra sina erbjudanden på att de passar kunden bättre. Vi har även kommit fram till att de IT-system som finns och används på företaget har möjlighet att förbättras, för att det upplevs av studiens respondenter att det saknas enkla sökfunktioner samt att det finns begränsade åtkomster i företagens befintliga system. I slutet på den här studien tar vi upp fler slutsatser som vi funnit samt ger praktiska rekommendationer till företaget som de kan använda för att skapa bättre förutsättningar för att dela kunskap och information internt.