The aim of this study is to develop a model for knowledge synchronisation in organisations. The research aim is further broken down into two research objectives that are handled during this study: • Examine and measure the gap between a typical organisation and a Learning Organisation and the corresponding organisation’s Subjective Knowledge and Knowledge Management Systems, and • Examine and create appropriate models and methods to synchronise organisation’s Subjective Knowledge and Knowledge Management Systems. This research attempts knowledge synchronisation in view of creation and maintenance of Learning Organisations. This study combines three broad areas in an organisation: Learning Organisations, Intellectual Capital, and Knowledge Management Systems. This research proposes a new organisational epistemology in the context of the Subjective and Objective Knowledge. The organisational ontology consists of five hierarchical layers: observation, data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom and observations, being embodied, are subjective in nature and they are referred to as Subjective Knowledge throughout the thesis. Data, information and knowledge of an organisation, being objective in nature, are contained in Information Systems or Knowledge Management Systems; and throughout the thesis they are referred to as Objective Knowledge. The significance of this research and its major contribution resides in the development and validation of a comprehensive model for Subjective - Objective Knowledge synchronisation, with a view of creation and maintenance of Learning Organisations. A Knowledge Synchronisation Model (KSM) has been proposed to measure the gap between a typical organisation and a Learning Organisation. Furthermore, KSM also deals with the gap between an organisation’s Subjective Knowledge and Knowledge Management Systems. A web-based survey has been conducted to validate the proposed Knowledge Synchronisation Model. The unit of analysis has been ‘an organisation’ with Knowledge Management initiatives. Snowball sampling technique has been used to contact such organisations and five hundred and ten responses have been received. Four hundred and seventy responses have been considered for analysis. Responses have been classified into four clusters: Learning Organisations, whose Subjective Knowledge and Knowledge Management Systems have been in sync, Technology oriented organisations with high Knowledge Management Systems and relatively low Subjective Knowledge, People oriented organisations with high Subjective Knowledge and relatively low Knowledge Management Systems, and finally, the organisations with no Knowledge Management strategy. Regression analysis has been used to validate the hypotheses. The orientation towards technology or people will present itself as missing organisational characteristics. Two organisations from the survey participants have been selected for knowledge synchronisation through Action Research Studies. The first organisation has been identified as technology oriented and lacking organisational ‘Awareness’ and ‘Systems Thinking’. A Community of Practice (CoP) and a knowledge portal have been suggested to the first organisation for knowledge synchronisation. The second organisation has been identified as people oriented and lacking ����Personal Mastery����. A Community of Practice (CoP) and a knowledge base have been suggested to the second organisation. The limitation posed by the sampling technique ‘snowball sampling’ is a significant limitation in this research. This research does not consider the effects of location and investor capital on the proposed model. This is another limitation of this research. This research has academic implications for the theories of Learning Organisations, Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management. Further investigations will be necessary to study the effects of location and investor capital, human related issues such as trust and culture, and the latest technologies such as web 2.0 and mobile devices, on the proposed model. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis investigates an innovative framework and process coordination technologies for peer-to-peer based decentralised workflow systems. The aim of this work is to address some of the unsolved problems in the contemporary workflow research rudimentally from an architectural viewpoint. The problems addressed in this thesis, i.e., bad performance, vulnerability to failures, poor scalability, user restrictions, unsatisfactory system openness, and lack of support for incompletely specified processes, have become major obstacles for wide deployment of workflow in real-world. After an in-depth analysis of the above problems, this thesis reveals that most of these problems are mainly caused by the mismatch between application nature, i.e., distributed, and system design, i.e., centralised management. Thus, the old-fashioned client-server paradigm which is conventionally used in most of today�s workflow systems should be replaced with a peer-to-peer based, open,collaborative and decentralised framework which can reflect workflow�s distributed feature more naturally. Combining workflow technology and peer-to-peer computing technology, SwinDeW which is a genuinely decentralised workflow approach is proposed in this thesis. The distinguished design of SwinDeW removes both the centralised data repository and the centralised workflow engine from the system. Hence, workflow participants are facilitated by automated peers which are able to communicate and collaborate with one another directly to fulfil both build-time and run-time workflow functions. To achieve this goal, an innovative data storage approach, known as �know what you should know�, is proposed, which divides a process model into individual task partitions and distributes each partition to relevant peers properly according to the capability match. Based on such a data storage approach, the novel mechanisms for decentralised process instantiation, instance execution and execution monitoring are explored. Moreover, SwinDeW is further extended to support incompletely-specified processes in the decentralised environment. New technologies for handling incompletely-specified processes at run-time are presented. The major contributions of this research are an innovative, decentralised workflow system framework and corresponding process coordination technologies for system functionality. Issues regarding system performance, reliability, scalability,user support, system openness, and incompletely-specified process support are discussed deeply. Moreover, this thesis also contributes the SwinDeW prototype which implements and demonstrates this design and functionality for proof-of concept purposes. With these outcomes, performance bottlenecks in workflow systems are likely to be eliminated whilst increased resilience to failure, enhanced scalability, better user support and improved system openness are likely to be achieved with support for both completely- and incompletely-specified processes. As a consequence, workflow systems will be expected to be widely deployable to real world applications to support processes, which was infeasible before.

<p>The aim of this thesis work was to develop a management information system model for process-oriented healthcare organisations. The study explores two questions: “What kinds of requirements do healthcare managers place on information systems?” and “How can the work and information systems of healthcare managers and care providers be incorporated into process-oriented healthcare organisations?”</p><p>The background to the study was the process orientation of Swedish healthcare organisations. The study was conducted at the paediatric clinic of a county hospital in southern Sweden. Organisational process was defined as “a sequence of work procedures that jointly constitute complete healthcare services”, while a functional unit was the organisational venue responsible for a certain set of work activities.</p><p>A qualitative research method, based on a developmental circle, was used. The data was collected from archives, interviews, observations, diaries and focus groups. The material was subsequently analysed in order to categorise, model and develop small-scale theories about information systems.</p><p>The study suggested that computer-based management information systems in processoriented healthcare organisations should: (1) support medical work; (2) integrate clinical and administrative tools; (3) facilitate the ability of the organisation to measure inputs and outcomes.</p><p>The research effort concluded that various healthcare managers need the same type of primary data, though presented in different ways. Professional developers and researchers have paid little attention to the manner in which integrated administrative, financial and clinical systems should be configured in order to ensure optimal support for process-oriented healthcare organisations. Thus, it is important to identify the multiple roles that information plays in such an organisation.</p> / Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC-2003:14. On the day of the public defence the status of the article I was: In press and the status of article II was: Submitted.

With the increasing pervasiveness of mobile technologies such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants and hand held computers, mobile technologies promise the next major technological and cultural shift. Like the Internet, it is predicted that the greatest impact will not come from hardware devices or software programs, but from emerging social practices, which were not possible before. To capitalize on the benefits of mobile technologies, organizations have begun to implement nomadic computing environments. Nomadic computing environments make available the systems support needed to provide computing and communication capabilities and services to the mobile work force as they move from place to place in a manner that is transparent, integrated, convenient and adaptive. Already, anecdotes suggest that within organizations there are social implications occurring with both unintended and intended consequences being perpetuated. The problems of nomadic computing users have widely been described in terms of the challenges presented by the interplay of time, space and context, yet a theory has yet to be developed which analyzes this interplay in a single effort. A temporal human agency perspective proposes that stakeholders’ actions are influenced by their ability to recall the past, respond to the present and imagine the future. By extending the temporal human agency perspective through the recognition of the combined influence of space and context on human action, I investigated how the individual practices of eleven nomadic computing users changed after implementation. Under the umbrella of the interpretive paradigm, and using a cross case methodology this research develops a theoretical account of how several stakeholders engaged with different nomadic computing environments and explores the context of their effectiveness. Applying a literal and theoretical replication strategy to multiple longitudinal and retrospective cases, six months were spent in the field interviewing and observing participants. Data analysis included three types of coding: descriptive, interpretive and pattern coding. The findings reveal that patterns of technology use in nomadic computing environments are influenced by stakeholders’ temporal orientations; their ability to remember the past, imagine the future and respond to the present. As stakeholders all have different temporal orientations and experiences, they exhibit different practices even when engaging initially with the same organizational and technical environments. Opposing forces emerge as users attempt to be effective by resolving the benefits and disadvantages of the environment as they undergo different temporal, contextual and spatial experiences. Insights about the ability to predict future use suggest that because they are difficult to envisage in advance, social processes inhibit the predictability of what technologies users will adopt. The framework presented highlights the need to focus on understanding the diversity in nomadic computing use practices by examining how they are influenced by individual circumstances as well as shared meanings across individuals.

Information systems are designed to support human and organizational purposes. To achieve their ends, information systems must be used. Although this may seem to be self-evident, there are many aspects of systems usage that are not so, and yet, in spite of this, there has been little intense conceptual scrutiny of this construct in past research. The objective of this thesis, therefore, is to develop new in-depth perspectives for studying system usage. Drawing on critical realist assumptions and studies of research diversity, I explain how epistemological factors enable while ontological factors constrain the diversity of meanings of system usage, and I build on this reasoning to advance a systematic approach for conceptualizing and measuring system usage in an appropriate way for a given research context. To demonstrate the approach and judge its usefulness, I carry out three empirical studies to test whether measures of system usage that are selected according to the proposed approach provide more explanatory power and lead to more coherent results in specific research contexts than other measures of system usage. Exploring the relationship between system usage and user task performance among 804 users of spreadsheet software, the experiments reveal support for the usefulness of the approach and demonstrate how it can enable researchers to conceptualize and measure system usage in an appropriate manner for a given research context. Together, the conceptual approach and empirical studies contribute by: (1) providing a systematic way to conceptualize and measure system usage for a given study context, (2) revealing rich new directions for research on the nature of system usage, its antecedents, and its consequences, and (3) suggesting a new approach for construct development and investigation in IS research.

GENERATING USER-CENTRIC DYNAMIC AND ADAPTABLE KNOWLEDGE MODELS FOR WORLD WIDE WEB By LEI LI JUNE, 2007 Committee Chair: Dr. Vijay Vaishnavi Major Department: Computer Information Systems In the current Internet age, more and more people, organizations, and businesses access the web to share and search for information. A web-based resource is often organized and presented based on its knowledge models (categorization structures). The static and inflexible knowledge models of web-based resources have become a major challenge for web users to successfully use and understand the information on the web. In this dissertation, I propose a research approach to generate user-centric dynamic and adaptable knowledge models for web-based resources. The user-centric feature means that a knowledge model is created based on a web user specified perspective for a web resource and that the user can provide feedback on the model building process. The dynamic feature means the knowledge models are built on the fly. The adaptable feature means the web user can have control of the user adaptation process by specifying his or her perspective for the web resource of interest. In this study, I apply a design science paradigm and follow the General Design Cycle (Vaishnavi and Kuechler 2004) during the course of research. A research prototype, Semantic Facilitator TM SM V2.0, has been implemented based on the proposed approach. A simulation-based experimentation is used to evaluate the research prototype. The experimental results show that the proposed research approach can effectively and efficiently create knowledge models on the fly based on a web user preferred perspective for the web resource. I found that incorporating user feedback into the modeling building process can greatly improve the quality of the knowledge models. At the end of the dissertation, I discuss the limitations and future directions of this research.

A Contextualist Approach to Telehealth Innovations By Sunyoung Cho Abstract Healthcare is considered one of the most important social issues in the U.S. as well as in other societies with ever-increasing costs of medical service provision. The information-intensive nature of the healthcare industry and the perception of information technology (IT) as a way to ease up healthcare costs and improve quality have lead to increased use of and experiments with IT-based innovations. These activities present interesting research opportunities for IS researchers and they have led to an increasing body of knowledge on healthcare information systems. This research aims at contributing to this line of research by adopting a contextualist approach to examine the adoption, use, and further diffusion of telehealth innovations. A contextualist approach provides a particularly interesting and relevant perspective to study adoption and diffusion processes of healthcare innovations. The adopted contextualist approach is process-oriented, it applies multiple levels of analysis, and it accommodates different theoretical lenses to make sense of the two telehealth innovations under investigation. A key assumption is that innovations should be understood as ongoing processes of change, not just technologies, or isolated change events with clear boundaries. Healthcare innovations have in this view much broader connotations, including development of IT-based applications, their adoption and diffusion over time, and the interactions between many stakeholders and organizations that shape the innovation in a specific context. The contextualist approach suggested by Pettigrew is adopted as an overarching framework for multiple studies based on empirical investigation of two telehealth innovations; the main focus is on a telestroke innovation in the U.S. while a radiology innovation in Sweden serves as a complementary case. Each study is documented as an independent research publication with its own theoretical perspective and contributions. The overall contextualist approach and the related findings are then summarized across the individual studies. Telehealth innovations are particularly interesting examples of healthcare information systems. They leverage contemporary network infrastructures and interaction devices to allow provision of healthcare services, clinical information, and education over distance, thereby reducing the costs and improving the availability of medical services. The two telehealth innovations are investigated through in-depth case studies. This theses summary presents the theoretical background for the studies; it motivates and details how the qualitative case studies based on critical realist assumptions were designed and conducted; it outlines the resulting research publications; and it discusses the contributions of investigating telehealth innovations from a contextualist approach.

An individual’s bad news reporting behavior has been studied from a number of perspectives and has resulted in a variety of research streams including the MUM effect (or reluctance to transmit bad news), whistle-blowing, and organizational silence. While many scholars in different areas have studied reporting behavior, it has not been widely discussed in the information systems literature. This dissertation research addresses an individual’s bad news reporting behavior (and its antecedents) in the troubled IT project context. Many social phenomena are multi-causal (Hollander 1971). The silence phenomenon involved in an individual’s bad news reporting behavior is multi-causal too. While prior research has identified many antecedents to the bad news reporting behavior, it has not provided any systematic approach for categorizing them. In this dissertation, the antecedents are categorized into three different levels: personal factors (i.e., individual-level factors), situational factors (i.e., project-level factors), and organizational factors. This research empirically investigates how the antecedents at different levels affect (i.e., encourage or discourage) an individual’s decision to report or not report bad news in the IT project context. The dissertation follows a multi-paper model, and includes three independent, empirical studies, each with its own research model focusing on personal, situational, and organizational factors.

This study investigates the impact of environmental factors on the decision to electronically integrate operations with international customers and/or suppliers. The following research question motivates the study: How does the environmental context affect the level of electronic integration of an organization with its international partners? This study elaborates on the concept of electronic integration. Studies on integration in general and electronic integration in particular adopt a loose definition of integration: they all agree in that integration is the opposite of markets, but they define this opposite in different terms: relationship contracting, long-term contracting, coordination, etc. Finally, the study also responds to Wathne and Heide’s (2004) call for a more comprehensive study of governance mechanisms in B2B, with emphasis on monitoring mechanisms.

Despite recent interest in the role of trust in Information Systems, the potential of IS to foster trust in business relationships remains largely untapped. In order to better realize this potential, this dissertation examines three areas of IS trust research for which research is particularly limited: (1) the IT artifact as a target of trust, (2) IS-based source credibility as an antecedent of trust, and (3) the effect of anonymity on trust in online environments. The objective of this dissertation is to examine the effects of IS on trust in each of these areas. To do so, a multi-paper dissertation format is adopted in which each area examined constitutes a distinct, though complimentary, study. Together, these studies further research on how IS can enhance trust in business relationships.