Nowadays, with the radical growth of the Internet, worldwide online discussion forums have become a popular social mechanism for people to learn novel information and knowledge. Frequently asked questions (FAQs), which is a collection of questions commonly asked in the newsgroups along with presumably definitive answers, has become an important reference for readers to understand backgrounds of the newsgroup discussions and to locate their desired answers, if any. The construction of FAQs, however, is prone to errors and time-consuming. Approaches to supporting FAQ generation for administrators are desired to develop. In this paper, we propose a four-step approach to supporting the FAQ list generation based on question/answer pairs collected from newsgroup discussions without labor-intensive processes. Texts are processed, and keywords along with synonyms in context are extracted from the answer part. Cluster analysis helps to identify the answer clusters and the corresponding question clusters are formed accordingly. Representative contents of the answer clusters and the question clusters are finally extracted to support administrators to generate FAQs. Our approach is applied in a real-world case where data are collected from the newsgroup in Usenet. FAQ in a primitive form is constructed using our approach. Evaluations are the performed with satisfactory results. The feasibility of our proposed approach is thus justified.

A common form of partial ostracism, information exclusion, can be an everyday experience for some people. This study examined the role of information exclusion on subsequent information sharing behaviors. After being included or excluded on information in a previous task, participants had the opportunity to share information on a second task. When faced with the decision of how much information to share, it was framed in one of three ways: an opportunity to gain belonging and self-esteem, a chance to exercise control and meaningful existence, or no framing at all. Results indicated that participants that were in the loop shared more information than participants that were out of the loop. However, there was no difference for task framing on information sharing. The results of the study also indicated that in-the-loop participants reported stronger fortification of the inclusionary cluster (belonging and self esteem) and provocation cluster (control and meaningful existence) of fundamental needs than out-of-the-loop participants. On the other hand, there was no difference for task framing on the fortification of fundamental needs.

Abstract Business competition is violent due to globalization and large-scale production. For the purpose of improving competition advantage, enterprises had integrated their business flow in Supply chain. Business move their competition advantages from firm base to supply chain base gradually.The flow of supply chain was redesigned not only considering of cost down by the way of collaboration ,also transfer Supply Chain Management to Demain Chain Management further. To respond the need from customer quickly and compete with the rival, market requirement pulling instead the material planning pushing. This article is a case study in stainless steel industry to interpret the requirement of inbound and outbound information in demand chain management. The main inbound information is market requirement forecasting that could planning the requirement from customer in order to process efficient supply and reduce cost in production. The information in outbound include sales¡Bmaking¡Bdelivery message to support customer know the situation of purchasing order well. Also,it can help customer do a good planning for resale or reprocess in B2B transaction. The research focus on three domains: 1.Industrial environment-including partnership¡Binformation intension, 2.Business management:including information level¡Binformation quality and source, 3.Information technology:including information infrastructure. After analysis the impact of the information sharing factors ,we found firm scale and business model influence the level of business information. While business collaboration in progress due to the considering of benefits and limitation of information infrastructure,the informations sharing couldn,t proceed efficiently,So, the information between two business couldn¡¦t integrated and no efficient business model was created. Business management model and IT ability determine the need¡Bwish and ability of demand chain information sharing. The content of information sharing in transaction should be distinct to find what measurement should be consider.Then we could recognize the necessity and benefit of information sharing ,and find solution to drive out the obstacle of information sharing.

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The current research examined the effects of the cost of sharing information and individual levels of agreeableness on participants' willingness to help out-of-the-loop individuals. In this study, 119 students from undergraduate psychology courses played the role of a CEO of a pharmaceutical company with three regional managers under their supervision. The participants were given the opportunity to give any number of facts to both in-the-loop managers and the single out-of-the-loop manager. Participants in the high-cost condition were informed that they would be required to spend an additional 2 minutes in the lab explaining the usefulness of the facts distributed for every fact they gave a general manager. Participants in the low-cost condition were told they would be required to spend an additional 10 seconds for each fact they gave a regional manager. After distributing facts among the three regional managers under their supervision, the participants were asked to complete an agreeableness scale, a conscientiousness scale, a needs assessment, and a demographics questionnaire. The results indicated that only the amount of time it would cost an individual to share facts dictated how many facts they would share. The results also found that neither condition nor individual level of agreeableness significantly influenced the difference between the number of facts individuals gave to out-of-the-loop individuals versus in-the-loop individuals.

Yes / This chapter introduces four theoretical approaches to the challenge of multi-professional information sharing in public service delivery. Two of the four approaches are then described in more detail as lenses through which to explore what happens in the practice of integrated children’s services. The two approaches explored in detail are the systems approach and the approach that underpins much of this book: Etienne Wenger’s ‘communities of practice’. The focus of the chapter is on the professionals delivering the services and not primarily on the children, young people or their families who are in receipt of these services. This approach however is in no way antagonistic to the idea that it is the interests of the children and young people that must always come first when redesigning organizations, policies, procedures and guidance for practice in children’s services.

Since the business environment of today is characterized to be dynamic and service-driven, corporations are looking for solutions how to cut costs and still keep their competitive advantage in the market, and also how to decrease lead-time and flexibility. In this environment are 3PL-providers operating with an incentive to always please the customer. This study will investigate a 3PL-provider´s information sharing with its customer and how value can be extracted from this type of sharing. The purpose of this thesis is to understand and investigate the value of information sharing between the 3PL-provider and its customer. Two research questions have been dictated; R1: How do the respondents at the 3PL-provider perceive the relationship with their customer? R2: How are information requirements met? For the frame of reference have theories in the area of third-party logistics, information, relation, and value been studied. The carrying out of the study has been performed with a bounded ethnography approach since this study has essences from both the scientific and ethnographic approaches. The research reasoning is mainly inductive but with deductive elements. The research strategy is of qualitative character, where the data collection has been carried out through interviews/discussions within multiple case studies. There were several interviews launched within the target 3PL-relationships. The analysis of the empirical findings has been done through the existing theories in the frame of reference. The investigation showed that improvements of the information requirements and utilization of the communication methods improves the quality of the information sharing, and the conclusion drawn is that the information requirements and communication methods are big contributors for the information sharing as a whole. Since the information sharing is considered a big contributor to the customer value one can use the customer value as reference for how to value the information sharing. A main conclusion is therefore that the value of information sharing is dependent on its contribution for the customer value.

The coordination of all supply chain members has become a crucial issue in ensuring the success of supply chain management. The streamline of the inter-organizational coordination such as material flow/distribution, information flow/exchange, and product planning/development are required to facilitate the efficient operation of supply chain. To further sustain the competitive edge (e.g.,time-to-market) of a supply chain, the coordination mechanism has become an emerging research issue in current supply chain management. This study looks into a cause model of the information sharing of supply chain members.The impact of trust and commitment on information sharing mechanism is then examined. The data from 122 senior managers participating in Supply Chain Management activeities were collected and empirically tested. The results show that the trust is significantly impact on the quality of information sharing in e-business supply chain. The member¡¦s long-term commitment also affects the dedicated partner-based process of supply chain management. Moreover, the dedicated partner-based processes will effectively reduce the supply chain uncertainty and high quality information improves significantly the operation efficiency between supply chain enterprises.

Original equipment manufacture(OEM) is typically the role played by the high-tech or traditional industries in Taiwan, and is marked by highly efficient vertical supply chains where division of manufacturing function is done very well. Supply chain management could help companies to integrate their business process and information systems. Moreover, what kind of strategies needed to be adopted, and what kind of information needed to be exchanged transaction. The research issues regarding supply chain strategy and information sharing become apparently important. In the study, supply chain type and supply chain uncertainty are the two major constructs that guide our research. Convergent assembly supply network is type of supply chain selected for case study, and the automotive industry is the actual case for research. The research results indicated that information sharing is most intensive between suppliers and manufacturers. The lack of coordination between production and sale in manufacturer was resulted from supply chain uncertainty which can be addresses by the aspects of procurement, manufacturing, and demand respectively. The current supply chain strategy of manufacturer has push more inventory to its suppliers. This is due to the made-to-stock(MTS) method applied by the manufacturer. In addition, continuous flow process has occupied part of the manufacturing process for automobile production, and high uncertainty resulted from this stage often led to problems for delivery of product parts in the subsequent stages. Furthermore, demand uncertainty and mass customization requirement from the manufacturer have push suppliers to get timely sale information in order to have quick response to orders. Based on the case findings, this research suggested propositions regarding supply chain strategies and information sharing for the convergent assembly supply network. Because of relatively high procurement and demand uncertainty, the MTS production strategy should be switched to assembly-to-order(ATO). In addition, it is necessary for the manufacturer to establish stable relationship with suppliers, and incorporate them into product development process. This will help the manufacturer to achieve ATO and shorten product development time due to the notion of design for assembly and concurrent engineering. For information sharing in supply chains, the focus is upon shop floor information transparency between suppliers and the manufacturer, exchange of sale information between suppliers and distributors, and exchange of information regarding quality, management capability, product development between suppliers and the manufacturer.

This research proposes a methodology to solve distributed optimization problems where quasi-autonomous decision entities directly interact with each other for partial information sharing. In the distributed system we study the quasi-autonomy arising from the assumption that each decision entity has complete and unique responsibility for a subset of decision variables. However, when solving a decision problem locally, consideration is given to how the local decisions affect overall system performance such that close-to-optimal solutions are obtained among all participating decision entities. Partial information sharing refers to the fact that no entity has the complete information access needed to solve the optimization problem globally. This condition hinders the direct application of traditional optimization solution methods. In this research, it is further assumed that direct interaction among the decision entities is allowed. This compensates for the lack of complete information access with the interactive exchange of non-private information. The methodology is tested in different application contexts: manufacturing capacity allocation, single machine scheduling, and jobshop scheduling. The experimental results show that the proposed method generates close-to optimal solutions in the tested problem settings.