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Taiwan, as an island country, should place future aspiration on the usages of ocean energy and marine resources, such as offshore wind power and deep ocean water. The sound development of marine services relies on a strong industry of maritime engineering. The perilous marine environment has posed the highest risk for all maritime civil engineering activities. It is therefore imperative to restrain the risk associated with current maritime work, other than just engineering technique itself. By doing so, the quality of maritime work can be assured, and as the improvement of overall engineering capability, Taiwan can compete worldwide in the maritime engineering industry. Maritime works have developed their own standard construction procedures. To mitigate risk of maritime works depend mainly on the domain experts¡¦ experience and know-how. However, problems appear when less experienced experts are available, or qualitative experience exists in a narrative form. It is therefore important to structure clearly an engineering risk factor relation, and quantify and control these risk factors. The proposed study will first collect and review related literatures, and then interview an expert from the designate maritime service company to establish the risk factors associated with offshore piping. Eventually a complete Bayesian network (BN) was formulated based on the cause-effect diagram, using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM), and experts¡¦ experience was transformed into a set of prior and conditional probability to be embedded in the BN. The BN can clearly show that certain earlier operational factors affect final operational process deeply. Besides, the backward reasoning using the BN is possible to identify the factors causing a project failure.

Platform-centric startups that generate value by facilitating interactions between two or more interdependent groups digitally transform and disrupt the business environment, leading to significant changes in how people purchase, sell, communicate, and even live. Some of these, such as Uber and Airbnb, have become among the most beloved and successful brands, though they had serious challenges in building up their brands at the early stages due to lack of resources. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a framework of branding in platform-centric startups by identifying the pillars of brand‐building and linking the relevant factors. This study employs qualitative method to propose a four-level framework including passion, innovation, co-creation, and moralization for brand-building in startups. The novelty of this framework reveals that the locus of brand-building is gradually expanding from the founders to the company, then to the customers, and finally to a larger societal constituency. The framework can assist founders and stakeholders in monitoring the growth of a new venture in the real business world while guiding branding scholars to investigate the discipline of startup branding.

yes / Cybersecurity is a serious issue that many organizations face these days. Therefore, cybersecurity management is very important for any organization. Organizations should learn to deal with these cyber threats through effective management across all business functions. The main purpose of this study is to identify the factors that affect cybersecurity within an organization and analyze relationships among these factors. The modified total interpretive structural modeling (M-TISM) technique is used to build a hierarchical model and define the common interactions between the factors. This study presents the impact of collaboration, training, resources and capabilities, information flow, technology awareness, and technological infrastructure on effective cybersecurity management. In addition, the study also explains the interrelationships among the identified factors in the M-TISM model.

abstract: This dissertation investigated positive intergroup contact and communication in the experiences of fans at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Guided by concepts from Intergroup Contact Theory (ICT), formerly Allport’s (1954) Contact Hypothesis, I asked fans to identify and discuss factors that were relevant to their experiences at the event. These factors are reported in previous literature to foster positive intergroup relations. The fan participants also provided detailed, experience-based rationales for why and how the factors supported each other and created individual models of their experiences of ICT at the Olympics. The study relied on participant-centered, in-depth qualitative interviews using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) software. Based on an integration of ICT, communication theories, social capital concepts, and calls from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and mega-sporting event industry, the dissertation sought to answer four research questions. It started with a broad approach to the array of previous scholars’ ICT factors in order to identify what factors were present and relevant in fans’ experiences. It also sought to understand why and how the factors worked together by analyzing the ways factors related to and supported each other in Olympic fans’ experiences and producing a composite meta-structure of the factors’ relationships. Additionally, through thematic analysis, the research explored where and when in fans’ experiences the factors emerged and were active. Finally, the study identified the functions that each ICT factor served in fostering positive intergroup contact and communication and offered suggestions for practitioners and organizers of intergroup contexts. The study aimed to make theoretical contributions by addressing gaps and calls in ICT literature, as well as practical contributions by providing insight about how to organize intergroup contexts to foster positive contact and communication. In addition to addressing its research questions, the study provided a comprehensive list of previous scholars’ ICT factors, a preliminary, tentative model of ICT for ideal intergroup contexts adapted from Pettigrew’s (1998) model of group membership transformation for problematic contexts, and promising future directions given the unique, ideal, and unexplored features of the Olympics. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2017

National Health Insurance (NHI) can be said to play the most significant role among all the other social securing systems. People pay great attention to its policy and institution. NHI is an obligatory social insurance, protecting all the citizens in Taiwan. The insured is required to enroll into the NHI only by their employers¡V be it a school, a business company, an institution, an organization, private business employer or any other work unit. When the insured are underwritten by or withdrawing from the system, all the changes must be made through the employers who refer to and enroll their employees with the NHI. The Bureau of National Health Insurance, operating in coordination with the e-government policy that aims to provide much more convenience to the Taiwanese people and to improve government efficiency, as well as for the sake of energy conservation and carbon reduction, has been encouraging people to use on-line applications for the NHI affairs. As much effort as they have put on promoting such policy to the employers who are responsible to insure their employees with the NHI, currently, the popularity of using on-line applications for NHI affairs is barely satisfactory, as a matter of fact. Many parties are involved in the procedure of processing on-line applications for NHI affairs; therefore, this dissertation uses Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) from Interactive Management (IM) theories conducting the research. All participating parties will have conversations with one another; therefore, there will be a workshop. The purpose and subject for this workshop is to explore practical strategies that would effectively promote the usage of on-line applications with the NHI affairs. Through such an interactive dialogue collecting diverse viewpoints, there are thirteen strategies concluded to be effectively helpful achieving the aim: The NHI sectors responsible for on-line applications should (1) provide favorable incentives for on-line applicants, (2) simplify the net identification procedure and the NHI operational network and (3) the logging-in system, (4) increase the network bandwidth, (5) resolve NHI insurers¡¦ qualms of network security using online-applications. Also, they may need to redesign the network platform and (6) simplify procedure for users, and (7) more frequently promote the advantages using on-line applications and expand contents of their service, so that (8) the web search function for the NHI will be able to provide wider, faster, more efficient service. (9) the relative NHI sectors should really receive guidance and assistance carrying out this project, and (10) negotiate the assigned policy with their superior supervisory sectors to give clear order to their subordinate sectors using on-line applications and (11) set up trainings for instructors to establish future training resource, and (12) hold workshops to give more information and verification on the scene permitting the participants of the workshops to use on-line applications, and (13) finally achieve the aim that to have applications for NHI affairs completely done on-line. Among them all, strategy 3, ¡¥simplifying logging-in system¡¦, ranks 11 using NGT sequencing (strategy 11, 12, 13 all get the same points in the vote). However, in the enhancement structure, strategy 3 ranks number 1, has net score points 10. Therefore, strategy 3 should be given as much priority as to and carried out with strategy 1 ¡¥providing favorable incentives for online applicants¡¦ that gets the most points, in the NGT sequencing process. This research has given the participants questionnaires at two stages during the interactive workshop. The participants¡¦ concern, or understanding of using on-line applications for NHI affairs, appears to have risen after the workshop. There is unexpected, significant satisfaction over the promising conclusions from the workshop, which proves the workshop to be non-redundant and have reached consentient results. Also, the research, primarily using ISM program, has reduced the voting numbers when comparing two strategies from 156 times to 58. This has saved great amount of the time from the voting procedure in discussion, so that the workshops was able to finish in one day and hence did not exhaust the participants¡¦ enthusiasm. ISM is therefore proved to be efficient in saving time and assures that not losing the participants in different stages of the workshop.