Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

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In the modern era, the developments in information technology have been dramatically shaping the ways people live as well as the ways in which organisations handle business in their professional domains. Implementing various kinds of information system, such as Enterprises Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Knowledge Management Systems (KMS), has been recognised as one of the necessary tasks organisations have to perform in order to survive (Alavi 2001). Despite the tremendous effort companies worldwide have devoted to the implementation of knowledge management systems, organisations in Libya are still suffering from the failure of Knowledge Management (KM) implementation. The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive investigation of factors that can help organisations to understand the context of KMS implementation. With accurate assessments, this can in turn help them to develop effective strategies or policies to maximise the probability of success in implementing KMS. Therefore, this research will address the development of a KM adoption framework to fill this gap and develop a model that serves as an instrument in adopting KMS in general and the Libyan oil sector in particular.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2008. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Creative Technologies and Media. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 242-249)

After the break-up of the former Soviet Union in 1991, several states declared independence, including the Republic of Kazakhstan. Under the centralised soviet system Kazakhstan provided mainly raw materials to the USSR, and agriculture operated under a Moscow-based command and control model. Kazakhstan possesses vast wealth of mineral and energy resources and its agricultural land is well able to ensure national food security. However, after independence the rapid and frequently unplanned state actions such as land reform, taken to move from socialism to a market economy, were not always successful and the state of agriculture was initially one of chaos. A major exodus from the land to the cities ensued. Gradually Kazakhstani agriculture recovered some of its productivity but still lags well behind developed nations in the use of ICT supported agricultural information management (AIM). This research contributes to new knowledge in the area of ICT-based AIM by supplementing the limited statistical and scientific analyses of Kazakh agriculture by seeking to discover, through semi-structured interviews, the views and perceptions of agrarians who are both the customers and end users of ICT-based AIM in a post-soviet state. The researcher established that agrarian stakeholders were aware of the need for a centralised AIM system, but felt that to implement it, more assistance was required from the state. Kazakhstan can learn from the experiences of both developed and developing countries in furthering ICT-based AIM, and although its situation is unique, understanding of the perceptions of end users, who have had to make a series of flawed initiatives work, will arguably be relevant to policy makers in other post-soviet states.

In this dissertation I explore the role and importance of patent strategy for appropriating returns from innovation. In particular, I examine the mechanisms through which firms increase appropriability from patenting by employing complementary resources and capabilities and gauge their contribution to firm performance. To this end, I perform three empirical studies. In the first study, I focus on measuring patent value and demonstrate that the importance of firm resources and capabilities is much higher than previously thought. I interpret these results as providing strong support for the view that the design of patent strategy is crucial for profiting from innovation. In the second study, I look into a sample of technology acquisitions and examine under what circumstances firms profit from combining previously separate patent rights. I demonstrate that the merging of overlapping patent portfolios give rise to inimitable synergies, albeit only in complex technology industries. In addition, I find that firms are more likely to acquire targets with patents when their patent productivity is low, when they have a technologically diverse patent portfolio in complex technology industries and when they face an increased threat of being involved in patent suits. In the third study, I explore the role of patent strategies in the non-technological domain. I demonstrate that recent regulatory changes enabling the patenting of business methods can help patentees capture value from business model and management innovations. Moreover, I find that patenting experience and access to complementary assets are both crucial elements of a patenting strategy aimed at increasing appropriability. Taken together, these studies contribute towards bringing studies of patenting and the resource-based view of the firm closer together, to mutual advantage. This results in a better understanding of the effectiveness of patents at the firm-level and in a clearer operationalization of concepts of resources and resource interdependence.

Every attempt by the NSW State Government to site waste treatment and disposal facilities has been met by opposition from local communities. Increasing interest is being shown in community consultation and public participation in the decision-making processes concerning the siting of waste management technologies. This thesis examines the rationale behind, and potential of, community consultation through an examination of two case studies. The thesis concludes that the reasons and remedies for local opposition typically given by experts and regulatory authorities are flawed. The engineering concerns which have dominated approaches to choosing and siting waste management technologies are of little consequence to the way in which communities judge whether the facilities pose an acceptable societal risk. The issues of concern to communities include the legitimacy of the decision-making process, the relative fairness of the decision to site, and whether the institutions responsible for managing and operating the technologies are trustworthy. If waste management technologies rely on local acceptability for their siting, the approach taken to resolve the waste problem must include societal as well as engineering concerns in the design of courses of action to manage the risk. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph.D)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Mavris, Dimitri N.; Committee Member: German, Brian J.; Committee Member: Osburg, Jan; Committee Member: Ruffin, Stephen M.; Committee Member: Schrage, Daniel P.. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

This study examines factors that influence the intent to use and actual use of decision support software (DSS) technology by emergency management officials to facilitate disaster response management. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology popularized by scholars from the field of information sciences (IS) for the private sector is adapted and extended to examine technology use in the public sector, specifically by emergency managers. An e-survey was sent to 1, 452 city and county emergency management officials from FEMA region VI and complete responses obtained from 194 were analyzed. Findings suggest that social influence is the strongest predictor of intent to use DSS technology by emergency managers, unlike private sector studies where performance expectancy was the strongest predictor. Additionally, effort expectancy, collaboration, social vulnerability, professionalism, performance expectancy, and gender explained 40 percent of their intent to use DSS technology. Factors explaining actual use of technology were intent to use technology, having an in house GIS specialist, and age of the emergency manager. This research successfully closes the gap in IS and disaster literature by being the first to focus on factors influencing technology use by emergency managers for decision making in disaster response. It underscores the importance of collaboration not only for post-disaster activities but also as a precursor to better disaster preparedness planning that calls for information sharing and technology acceptance and adoption across partnering jurisdictions.

This dissertation studies firms' strategic interactions in anticipation of random service disruption following technology failure. In particular it is aimed at understanding how contracting decisions between a vendor and one or multiple clients affect the firms' subsequent decisions to ensure disruption response and recovery are managed as efficiently as possible. This dissertation consists of three studies that were written as standalone papers seeking to contribute to the literature on contract design and technology management in operations management. Together, the three studies justify the importance of structuring the right incentives to mitigate disruption risks. In the first study we contribute to this literature by means of an analytical model which we use to examine how a client and vendor should balance investments in response capacity when both parties' efforts are critical in resolving disruption and each may have different risk preferences. We study the difference in the client's optimal expected utility between a case in which investment in response capacity is observable and a case in which it is not and refer to the difference in outcomes between the two cases as the cost of complexity. Firstly, we show that the cost of complexity to the client is decreasing in the risk aversion of vendor but increasing in her own risk aversion. Secondly, we find that a larger difference in risk aversion between a client and vendor leads to underinvestment in system uptime in case the client's investment is observable, yet the opposite happens when the client’s investment is not observable. In the second study we further examine the context of the first study through a controlled experiment. We examine how differences in risk aversion and access to information on a contracting partner’s risk preferences interact in affecting contracting and investment decisions between the client and vendor. Comparing subject decisions with the conditionally optimal benchmarks we arrive at two observations that highlight possible heuristic decision biases. Firstly, subjects tend to set and hold on to an inefficiently high investment level even though it is theoretically optimal to adjust decisions under changing differences in risk preferences. Secondly, subjects tend to set and hold on to a penalty that is too high when interacting with more risk averse vendors and too low in case the vendor is equally risk averse. Furthermore, cognitive feedback on the vendor’s risk aversion appears to have counterproductive effects on subject’s performance in the experiment, suggesting cognitive overload can have a reinforcing effect on the heuristic decision biases observed. In the third study we construct a new analytical model to examine the effect of contract design on a provider's response capacity allocation in a setting where multiple clients may be disrupted and available response capacity is limited. The results show that while clients may be incentivized to identify and report network disruptions, competition for scarce emergency resources and the required investment in understanding their own exposure may incentivize clients to deliberately miscommunicate with the vendor.