<p>Date: 2008-06-04</p><p>Course: EIK 034 Masters Thesis</p><p>Authors: Laxmi Rao & Zarina Osmonalieva</p><p>Tutor: Ole Liljefors</p><p>Title: Which factors facilitate the management of external knowledge?</p><p>Introduction: Today more and more organisations are realising that handling internal and external knowledge is a key issue for successful performance. Different theories describe the importance of this topic, for instance, Porter’s Five Forces model and Hedman & Kalling’s General Business Model demonstrate how organizations are strongly influenced by external forces. Hedman & Kalling’s model particularly demonstrates that organizations need to have the competence, capability and resources to effectively manage external knowledge in order to increase their competitiveness and develop and improve their long term survival.</p><p>Purpose: Nicholas Carr highlights that for the past decade organizational investment in IT and IS has reached nearly 50% of capital expenditure, while the organizations see little or no performance improvement as a result of this investment. While IT systems are good at storing and retrieving information, the success of the systems heavily relies on the quality of the external and internal knowledge used both during development and usage. A deeper awareness of factors which facilitate the management of external knowledge is relevant to IT managers (indeed all managers) as it will help to facilitate the development and implementation of information systems and technology which are designed to facilitate knowledge management in organisations.</p><p>Methodology: In the thesis factors related to effective management of external knowledge are identified and described. The General Business Model was used as a tool to identify and categorize the literature review into key themes.</p><p>Conclusions One of the findings is that most published research focuses on factors internal to organizations such as activities and resources and there are few papers dealing with external factors for knowledge management. It was also found that literature which focussed on external factors mainly focused on the role of individuals as resources who cross the boundary of the organization in order to acquire and diffuse the external knowledge. In general the topic of external knowledge management is not studied in a holistic way. The acquisition and diffusion processes have been investigated as separate, but not as the whole process.</p>

Using external information to gain insights is becoming increasingly important in today’s knowledge based economies. However, from both research and practice it is somewhat unclear how organizations manage these activities. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to explore how four different organizations manage their insight creation process from external information. To do this, a literature review about insight creation is done to create an analytical framework. Based on this framework, the insight creation process is analyzed within the organizations to find characteristics of each process. Next, a cross case analysis is conducted that reveal the main differences between the organizations. The results indicate two main styles of managing the insight creation process that can be differentiated with regards to formality. As such, this paper complements previous research within the area of competitive intelligence and knowledge management in the sense that it increases the understanding of the insight creation process.

We present an algorithm for imputation of incomplete datasets based on Bayesian exchangeability through Pólya sampling. Each (donee) unit with a missing value is imputed multiple times by observed (real) values on units from a donor pool. The donor pools are constructed using auxiliary variables. Several features from kernel estimation are used to counteract unbalances that are due to sparse and bounded data. Three balancing features can be used with only one single continuous auxiliary variable, but an additional fourth feature need, multiple continuous auxiliary variables. They mainly contribute by reducing nonresponse bias. We examine how the donor pool size should be determined, that is the number of potential donors within the pool. External information is shown to be easily incorporated in the imputation algorithm. Our simulation studies show that with a study variable which can be seen as a function of one or two continuous auxiliaries plus residual noise, the method performs as well or almost as well as competing methods when the function is linear, but usually much better when the function is nonlinear. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: In press. Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.</p>

[Truncated abstract] There is overwhelming evidence that PD leads to impairments in executing voluntary movements. However, it is less clear whether it also leads to impairment in the preparation of movement. The current investigation first aims to further our understanding of motor preparation in people with PD. Two techniques are commonly used to assess motor preparation. These are the manipulation of response complexity and cueing response-related information in advance of the imperative signal. They were both incorporated into a motor task in which participants performed two-movement sequences on a response board. In Experiment 1, people with PD (comprising two groups one on their anti-Parkinsonian medication, and the other following a delay in its normal administration) showed patterns in their motor performance that was similar to healthy age-matched adults. They showed lengthening in their reaction time (RT) with increased response complexity, indicating that the sequences were prepared before their initiation. In addition, both of the PD groups, as well as the healthy adult group, showed shorter RTs with valid cueing and longer RTs with invalid cueing relative to the neutral cue condition. In response to a part-invalid cue (with both valid and invalid information) all three groups had very similar RTs to that in the neutral cue condition. ... in the third experiment, participants were first presented with a sequence to perform, and then, while initiating and executing that sequence, they were presented with a second sequence, providing either valid or invalid visual information about the twomovement sequence. It was expected that if invalid visual information evokes a stronger obligatory response in people with PD, then these participants would experience greater difficulties ignoring such information. This was not found to be the case. Rather the PD group showed a similar pattern of performance to the healthy adults. This indicates that they were able to ignore visual information when it was invalid and unhelpful, and so suggests that people with PD use external information strategically. The results presented in this thesis suggest that motor preparation is largely intact in people with PD. Motor preparation may, however, be incomplete under reduced visual information. Furthermore, while visual information may be particularly important to people with PD, it does not seem to evoke a stronger obligatory response than in healthy adults. Rather, people with PD seem to use external information strategically.

Date: 2008-06-04 Course: EIK 034 Masters Thesis Authors: Laxmi Rao &amp; Zarina Osmonalieva Tutor: Ole Liljefors Title: Which factors facilitate the management of external knowledge? Introduction: Today more and more organisations are realising that handling internal and external knowledge is a key issue for successful performance. Different theories describe the importance of this topic, for instance, Porter’s Five Forces model and Hedman &amp; Kalling’s General Business Model demonstrate how organizations are strongly influenced by external forces. Hedman &amp; Kalling’s model particularly demonstrates that organizations need to have the competence, capability and resources to effectively manage external knowledge in order to increase their competitiveness and develop and improve their long term survival. Purpose: Nicholas Carr highlights that for the past decade organizational investment in IT and IS has reached nearly 50% of capital expenditure, while the organizations see little or no performance improvement as a result of this investment. While IT systems are good at storing and retrieving information, the success of the systems heavily relies on the quality of the external and internal knowledge used both during development and usage. A deeper awareness of factors which facilitate the management of external knowledge is relevant to IT managers (indeed all managers) as it will help to facilitate the development and implementation of information systems and technology which are designed to facilitate knowledge management in organisations. Methodology: In the thesis factors related to effective management of external knowledge are identified and described. The General Business Model was used as a tool to identify and categorize the literature review into key themes. Conclusions One of the findings is that most published research focuses on factors internal to organizations such as activities and resources and there are few papers dealing with external factors for knowledge management. It was also found that literature which focussed on external factors mainly focused on the role of individuals as resources who cross the boundary of the organization in order to acquire and diffuse the external knowledge. In general the topic of external knowledge management is not studied in a holistic way. The acquisition and diffusion processes have been investigated as separate, but not as the whole process.

Forecasting is an important analysis technique to support decisions and functionalities in many application domains. While the employed statistical models often provide a sufficient accuracy, recent developments pose new challenges to the forecasting process. Typically the available time for estimating the forecast models and providing accurate predictions is significantly decreasing. This is especially an issue in the energy domain, where forecast models often consider external influences to provide a high accuracy. As a result, these models exhibit a higher number of parameters, resulting in increased estimation efforts. Also, in the energy domain new measurements are constantly appended to the time series, requiring a continuous adaptation of the models to new developments. This typically involves a parameter re-estimation, which is often almost as expensive as the initial estimation, conflicting with the requirement for fast forecast computation. To address these challenges, we present a framework that allows a more efficient integration of external information. First, external information are handled in a separate model, because their linear and non-linear relationships are more stable and thus, they can be excluded from most forecast model adaptations. Second, we directly optimize the separate model using feature selection and dimension reduction techniques. Our evaluation shows that our approach allows an efficient integration of external information and thus, an increased forecasting accuracy, while reducing the re-estimation efforts.

In recent years, many Personal Health Record (PHR) systems have been developed to retrieve patients&rsquo / Electonic Health Records (EHRs) from external sources. However, current PHRs can provide access to only a small number of EHR systems, since there are many dierent interfaces, data formats and medical terminologies among dierent systems. When this is the case, all these diversity yields high integration costs. Development of such systems is dicult and expensive because of the reasons such as accessing to evidence based medical information, utilization of social networks to share information, incorporation of available medical knowledge models, etc. Due to the technical diversity of external information systems, a developer of a PHR system faces a dicult integration process when he wants to integrate a new source or service. Integration of medical devices is also important and necessary in a PHR system. However, most of the medical device vendors use proprietary formats and protocols for communicating their devices with external systems / again, causing high integration eorts and costs. In this thesis, these problems and challenges are addressed by providing an on-line personal iv healthcare management platform, i.e. eSaglikKaydim which is built on top of a highly modular architecture and provides services based on worldwide standards. In this way, eSaglikKaydim platform can be integrated with any external health information service and medical device so that it maximizes the data variety retrieved from all kinds of external health data sources. The work presented in this thesis is part of the OSAmI project supported by European ITEA and funded by the TU&uml / BI

This thesis is about primary care medicine in the United States today. Specifically, I look into primary care providers’ experiences working with patients in the context of the public’s current access to extensive health and medical information online. In this thesis, I discuss and analyze my conversations with physicians, nurse practitioners, and a physicians’ assistant about their objectives in primary care, the challenges they face, and their perceptions of patients’ ability to seek out information on their own. I explore providers’ educational emphasis in primary care consultations, and argue that this focus on education informs their views of patients’ independent research and involvement in care. I further argue that regardless of my informants’ enthusiasm about patient involvement and the merits of patient-education, these providers still hold and express a strong authority over medical knowledge and decisions. Thus in looking at the influence of what could be seen as a democratization of medical knowledge through public access and the Internet, it seems that the limitations of such access are still great in U.S. medical practice.

Submitted by MAYRA DO PRADO null (mayradoprado@gmail.com) on 2017-04-19T20:37:25Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação de mestrado - Mayra do Prado.pdf: 1400725 bytes, checksum: 055cbed46144aa15aeeeeb229bd8d70f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luiz Galeffi (luizgaleffi@gmail.com) on 2017-04-19T20:44:46Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 prado_m_me_mar.pdf: 1400725 bytes, checksum: 055cbed46144aa15aeeeeb229bd8d70f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-19T20:44:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 prado_m_me_mar.pdf: 1400725 bytes, checksum: 055cbed46144aa15aeeeeb229bd8d70f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-27 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O período que compreende o regime militar brasileiro foi marcado pela apropriação e aplicação de uma nova concepção estratégica de segurança baseada na Doutrina de Segurança Nacional (DSN). Os conceitos de “fronteira ideológica”, “inimigo interno” e a própria flexibilização do termo “comunismo” conduziram os governos autoritários do Brasil e do Cone Sul a um alinhamento ideológico e à cooperação na área de segurança que se materializaram, entre outras formas, na constituição de uma comunidade de informações. No Brasil, as atividades de busca, coleta e produção de informações em âmbito interno estiveram sob o controle do Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI) e, externamente, a cargo do Centro de Informações do Exterior (CIEx), o qual teve significativa importância na consolidação e difusão da perspectiva anticomunista no continente sul-americano. Sua existência e seu vínculo com o Ministério das Relações Exteriores suscitam questionamentos sobre a participação deste em atividades realizadas durante o regime autoritário, ainda que sempre tenha buscado manter uma imagem de neutralidade quanto às questões de política interna, e indica um possível envolvimento diplomático na Operação Condor. As informações reveladas pelos documentos oficiais recém-abertos e as raras e divergentes opiniões de pesquisadores sobre a participação do Itamaraty no regime militar são fontes de análise desta pesquisa, cujo objetivo é compreender o funcionamento do CIEx durante o regime militar brasileiro, tendo em vista três formas de atuação que o mesmo empreendeu ao longo de sua existência. A análise consiste na comparação entre a dinâmica de desenvolvimento do sistema nacional de Inteligência nas principais potências mundiais e nos países do Cone Sul, especialmente o Brasil, onde a criação de um órgão como o CIEx refletiu a “reexternalização” do conflito ideológico. / The appropriation and application of a new strategic concept of security based on the National Security Doctrine (NDS) have marked the Brazilian military regime’s period. The concepts of "ideological borders", "internal enemy" and the flexibility given to the term "communism" led the Brazil and Southern Cone’s authoritarian governments to an ideological alignment and cooperation in the area of security, which has turned into a Constitution of a community of information. In Brazil, the National Information Service (NIS) was in the control of collecting the activities reports collection and producing of information in the internal scope, whereas the External Information Center (EIC) played an important role in the consolidation and dissemination of anti-Communist perspective on the South American continent. Its existence and its link with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) raise questions about the participation of this Ministry in activities held during the authoritarian regime, although it has always sought to maintain an image of neutrality on the issues of domestic politics, and indicate a possible diplomatic involvement in Operation Condor. The information revealed by the newly opened official documents and the rare and divergent opinions of researchers on the participation of the MFA in the military regime are sources of analysis of this research, whose goal is to understand the functioning of EIC during the Brazilian military regime, take into consideration three forms of action that it has taken over its existence. This analysis compares the dynamics of development of the national intelligence system in major world powers and the Southern Cone countries’, especially Brazil, where the creation of a mechanism like EIC reflected the "reexternalization" of ideological conflict.