Integrating Knowledge Management maturity with associated Continuous Improvement efforts in order to remain competitive, is absent in most Operational Excellence initiatives. Furthermore, the intertwined relationship of Continuous Improvement and work development becomes a crucial focus area for organisations that wish to establish a continuously evolving management system consisting of core values, methodologies and tools with the aim of creating more satisfied customers with less resources. The old industrial paradigm that focused on labour, capital, materials, and energy viewed technology and knowledge as external influences on production. This framework is now being challenged and a new trend is emerging. This trend seeks to transform the old industrial system to that of a knowledge-based which one can lead to innovation and hence economic advantage. Continuous Improvement as a concept has roots in many other fields, including social-technical system design, human relations progress and the discussion surrounding ‘lean manufacturing’. This study will focus on Continuous Improvement as a noun, referring to on the outcome of the process of a stream of emergent innovations. The primary objective of the study is to create a model that will present an organisation with a three-layer knowledge reference process grid, which will align and depict the surrounding business knowledge functions, knowledge-enabling processes and knowledge-manipulating processes aiming for enabling Operational Excellence. This study promotes the theory that the cognitive domain layer, functional domain layer and resources layer of an organisation can be increasingly stimulated by focusing effort through Continuous Improvement routines towards the associated inter-organisational knowledge processes sustaining Operational Excellence. The proposed model is structured to review, compare, evaluate and integrate existing Knowledge Management practices of ii an organisation within the context of clear definitions for important concepts of Knowledge Management. Additionally the model provides an assessment instrument for evaluating the organisation’s Knowledge Management maturity level. The study concerns itself with two concepts towards business value creation which will lead to increased Operational Excellence. Firstly, the maturity of Knowledge Management processes, and secondly the level of the organisation wide process of focused and continuous incremental improvement namely, Continuous Improvement. A case study with PriceWaterhouseCoopers was concluded and an on-line Internet survey was used with a stratified sample from knowledge workers to test the factors from both a Knowledge Management and Continuous Improvement perspective. These factors were verified by means of a hypotheses network, describing in a structured and descriptive way, the importance of Knowledge Management and Continuous Improvement collectively on sustainable Operational Excellence as an integral development of Operational Excellence. With respect to Knowledge Management practices, the hypothesis network proposed at least three domains, which of knowledge generation, knowledge mobilisation and knowledge application as important input to the proposed process grid of knowledge development and associated layer elements. From a Continuous Improvement principles perspective it is apparent that elements from Continuous Improvement routines and Continuous Improvement characteristics are associated with the organisation Continuous Improvement ability. These findings are also a result of the deliberate design of processes, tools, structures and environments with the intent to increase, renew, share or improve the use of knowledge represented in any of the three elements for structural, human and social of intellectual capital. The proposed model combines the framework of the Boyd cycle as it is conceptualized as self-assessment activities, for it becomes possible to use them as basis of a self-assessment with sense making navigational properties across iii the proposed knowledge process grid for the model. The model will facilitate the concept of a three-layer knowledge reference process grid, which represents the main components of the knowledge processes within the cognitive domain layer, functional layer and resources layer of an organisation. The proposed model will deliver a single value that co-exists with the Knowledge Management maturity level and Continuous Improvement readiness index rating attained. Logical relationships to dynamic, evolving and flexible enabling Knowledge Management practices for each layer of the proposed three-layer knowledge reference process grid will be integrated as output of the proposed model. The research has limitations as Knowledge Management practices were measured using a subjective norm scale. It is suggested that a more comprehensive measure of Knowledge Management maturity processes may be needed to represent this construct. The complexity of the proposed model and the number of associated variables included in the results need further confirmation using possible multiple samples and additional measures of Knowledge Management maturity and Continuous Improvement readiness elements. The benefit of the proposed model as a practical Operational Excellence tool is to overcome the perceived gap of implementing Knowledge Management practices and Continuous Improvement principles collectively to deliver and sustain Operational Excellence.

This design/research study is located at the disciplinary interstices of Indigenous education and information science. It is motivated by the weaknesses of the dominant library knowledge organization systems (KOS) in representing and organizing documents with Indigenous content. The study first examines the nature of the problem and then explores ways in which Indigenous conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches can generate new directions for KOS design. It thereby addresses the central research question, “How can Indigenous approaches to knowledge inform principles of design of library knowledge organization systems to serve Indigenous purposes?” An Indigenous theoretical lens, @ Cultural Interface, is assembled for the study composed of Martin Nakata’s (2007b) Cultural Interface, and Dwayne Donald’s (2009b) Indigenous Métissage. It is integrated with domain analysis in information science (Hjørland & Albrechtsen, 1995) to produce a methodology, domain analysis @ Cultural Interface, used to study the domain of Indigenous knowledge within post-secondary education. Information was gathered through expert interviews with nine Indigenous designers of Indigenous KOS from four countries; a user study with nine First Nations, Aboriginal, and Métis graduate students; and theoretical analyses. The study produced a theoretical framework for Indigenous knowledge organization based on four main findings: (1) knowledge organization is integral to educational infrastructure and is consequential for Indigenous learners and all learners; (2) a definition of the domain of Indigenous knowledge in post-secondary education, its boundaries and the boundary marker of Indigeneity; (3) an articulation of Indigenous knowledge organization as a field of study including a (partial) history, typology of design practice, objectives, and evaluation framework; and (4) a design workspace for conceptual enquiry. These findings are synthesized in a theoretical framework, Indigenous knowledge organization @ Cultural Interface, which can be applied in the design, study, and critique of knowledge organization for Indigenous purposes. It is noted that this study and its theoretical framework have been constructed incrementally based on selected theorists, particular participants, experiences, and literatures and offer only one of many possible interpretations. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

M.Comm.

The goal of this diploma thesis is to translate theoretical concepts of knowledge management into the context of providing end user support by the service desk. It strives to define specifics caused by globalized and outsourced way of providing customer service. The thesis extends the traditional interpretation of knowledge management in this field by setting up a balanced view regarding both explicit and tacit knowledge and considers also appropriate tools and methods for its efficient creation, maintenance and sharing. Final part contains a case study, showing those applied concepts in practice of a company. The thesis is concluded by a set of generally usable recommendations for more effective management of customer support knowledge.

In the workplace many work orders are handwritten on paper rather than recorded in a digital format. Despite being archived, these documents are neither referenced nor analyzed after their creation. Tacit knowledge gathered though employee documentation is generally considered beneficial, but only if it can be easily gathered and processed. This study attempted to determine if value exists within these handwritten documents; in this case from a public work organization possessing work orders. As employees make notes in the field, they generate work orders containing free-form handwritten comments. These work orders are brought back and, after their initial review, are no longer used. To assess these work orders, the researcher created a model that allows an expert panel to systematically assess the value of the handwritten comments. This model followed a recursive procedure in order to form a general consensus. From this consensus, the results were compared to the experts' suggestions of value within an acceptable significance range. The model was also analyzed for repeatability both in a single instance as well as across multiple implementations. Once the prototype system had been tested, a secondary implementation of the instrument was used to further validate the model. Through a quantitative test and a qualitative survey, the researcher was able to determine that the work order assessment process was valid for this study. The consensus ratings were found to have statistically significant similarities, and this was further strengthened by the feedback from the expert panel. While there was some concern over the cost effectiveness of the survey, the expert panel agreed that the process was generalizable for other topics and repeatable for future implementations. A quantitative test based on metrics defined by the expert panel revealed that the overall value of the repositories was less than the minimum threshold. Despite a lack of positive results for overall value, the researcher proposed future work and discussed potential areas of study that may still be applicable to the domain of handwritten comments.

The competitive nature of the world of work today and the resultant opportunities in global career mobility for knowledge workers is gaining momentum across industries. This emergence of the global economy has prompted the need to investigate the differences or similarities of career capital components and methods of acquisition and accrual across industries.The research was conducted in two phases. The first quantitative phase was set out to investigate career capital components and methods of acquisition in the manufacturing industry. The results obtained on phase 1, were used together with the secondary data previously obtained through three pieces of research done on career capital in three different industries, to ascertain the differences in career capital components and methods of accrual across four different industries. The total sample size representing the four industries was 200.The research has defined specific career capital components and methods used to acquire career capital that are relevant to knowledge workers in the manufacturing industry. The findings have been used to develop a model to help organisations understand the career needs of the manufacturing knowledge worker with specific enablers and core career capital highlighted. The research further helped draw conclusions on the differences and similarities of career capital components and methods used by knowledge workers across industries. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

The next generation of artificial intelligence is based on human knowledge and experience that can assist the evolution of artificial intelligence towards learning the capability of planning and reasoning. Although knowledge collection and organiza- tion have achieved tremendous progress, it is non-trivial to construct a comprehen- sive knowledge graph due to different data sources, various construction methods, and alternate entity surface forms. The difficulty motivates the study of knowledge association. Knowledge association has attracted the attention of researchers, and some solutions have been proposed to resolve the problem, yet these current solutions of knowledge association still suffer from two primary shortages, i.e., generalization and robustness. Specifically, most knowledge association methods require a sufficient number of labeled data and ignore the effective exploration and utilization of complex relationships between entities. Besides, prevailing approaches rely on clean labeled data as the training set, making the model vulnerable to noises in the given labeled data. These drawbacks motivate the research on generalization and robustness of knowledge association in this dissertation. This dissertation explores two kinds of knowledge association tasks, i.e., entity alignment and entity synonym discovery, and makes innovative contributions to ad- dress the above drawbacks. First, semi-supervised entity alignment frameworks, which take advantage of both labeled with unlabeled entities, are proposed. One em- ploys an entity-level loss that is based on the cycle-consistency translation loss, and another one dually minimizes both entity-level and group-level loss by utilizing opti- mal transport theory to ease the strict constraint imposed by the cycle-consistency loss and match the whole picture of labeled and unlabeled data in different data sources. Second, robust entity alignment methods are proposed to solve the draw- back of robustness. One is designed by following adversarial training principle and leveraging graph neural network, and is optimized by a unified reinforced training strategy to combine its two components, i.e., noise detection and noise-aware entity alignment. Another one resorts to non-sampling and curriculum learning to address the negative sampling issue and the positive data selection issue remaining in the previous method. Lastly, a set-aware entity synonym discovery model that enables a flexible receptive field by making a breakthrough in using entity synonym set informa- tion is proposed to explore the complex relationship between entities. The contextual information of entities and entity synonym sets are arranged by a two-level network from which both of them can be mapped into the same space to facilitate synonym discovery by encoding the high-order contexts from flexible receptive fields.

This study investigated the pedagogical content knowledge supposedly held by two FET mathematics teachers from Mpumalanga Province as they taught quadratic functions in grade 11 classes. The criterion for selecting the two teachers was that they had consistently produced good results (overall pass rate of 80% or more) in the grade 12 mathematics examinations of the National Senior Certificate for the past three years or more and thus, they were classed as effective. The two teachers prepared and taught lessons on quadratic functions in grade 11 whilst they were being observed. The study focused on teacher knowledge base as exemplified in the teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Three elements of PCK were investigated; namely; (i) knowledge of the subject matter; (ii) knowledge of teaching strategies and (iii) knowledge of learners’ conceptions. Qualitative research approach using the case study research method was used to collect qualitative data on the pedagogical content knowledge of the two teachers through lesson observations, lesson plan analysis and interviews. Analysis of the results suggests that the two teachers have adequate subject matter knowledge but have limited knowledge on the aspects of teaching strategies and knowledge of learners’ pre-conceptions and misconceptions on the topics of quadratic functions that they taught. The study recommends that teachers be exposed to workshops that deal specifically with the various topic specific teaching strategies and knowledge of learners’ pre-conception and misconceptions on the topic of quadratic functions. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / unrestricted

A model is designed for the restructuring of knowledge. By way of suitably designed ontologies knowledge can be analysed to facilitate the creation of new knowledge and to render the knowledge suitable for reuse and for linkage to word-wide ontologies. / SUMMARY The need for this research emanated from the requirement for learning and adaptation in the fast-changing world we live in today. The changing world goes along with developments in communication means, whereby information becomes more accessible and sophisticated daily. A vast number of resources is available and accessible, distributing an enormous amount of information. The need is to turn these vast amounts of information into usable knowledge for use by an engineer in practice. Restructuring of knowledge is one way of approaching this need and is addressed in this study. This process can be facilitated by experienced persons who know what knowledge is needed in practice. There is a decline in the numbers of experienced civil engineers, leaving a gap between the supply and demand for suitably qualified and experienced civil engineers. The objective of this study is to meet the need for the restructuring of knowledge by the design a model (referred to as a logic base in this study) for the acquisition, reuse and the creation of engineering knowledge in a civil engineering environment. The main research question posed in this study is as follows: What are the key characteristics of a model (termed a “logic base” in this study) for the acquisition, reuse and the creation of knowledge in a civil engineering environment? This research commences with a set of research questions, followed by a literature review. Consideration is given to theories of knowledge, various methods of knowledge creation and knowledge acquisition. Several problem-solving techniques are reviewed. The structuring and architecture of knowledge and ontologies are researched and the role of systems engineering is studied. Various research methods are investigated and it is shown that case study research is the most suitable for the development of ontologies in civil engineering. The ontology of the logic base is therefore based on typical topics of case studies. Concept maps are employed to structure knowledge. This is done by defining appropriate concepts and classifying these into several ontological levels. The relationships among concepts and other influencing domains are studied. Knowledge of these relationships enables the application of several problem-solving techniques that enhance and stimulate the creation of knowledge. A logic base is designed containing three modules, namely an input module whereby concept maps are used to capture and structure knowledge entities. The second module consists of an analysis module where problem-solving can be done. The third module contains the output of work and processes where engineering knowledge can be documented for reuse. The contribution of this research lies in the design of an application in knowledge management in the field of civil engineering. Integration is done of ontologies, knowledge theories, knowledge acquisition and knowledge creation through problem-solving techniques. Knowledge is structured that can be linked to other external civil engineering taxonomies and ontologies. This enhancement of knowledge makes knowledge explicit and renders it suitable for reuse. When engineers are equipped in the use of the logic base, problems can be addressed in a holistic way and the underlying thought processes can be documented. This may be of great value to inexperienced engineers and for the preservation of valuable knowledge. Some case studies are analysed to demonstrate the functioning of the model. / Thesis (DPhil) University of Pretoria 2018. / Information Science / DPhil / Unrestricted

An underexplored aspect of moral experience is the experience of apprehending ("seeing") other people as mattering, grasping the significance of whether their interests are set back or enhanced. I refer to these as value-apprehensional (v-a) experiences. I argue (in Ch. 2), partly on the basis of data regarding moral cognition in psychopaths, that experiencing other people's value is one way that we attain adequate systematic comprehension of morality, understanding that others' welfare is the point behind rules against harming them. I then turn to a positive account (in Ch. 3) of what capacities we should expect to facilitate value-apprehensional experiences. I suggest we should look to the capacity to care emotionally about others: roughly, to feel emotions congruent with someone else's well-being, for her sake. I argue that this 'emotional caring' is better suited to explain value-apprehensional experience than other constructs, including empathy (which I understand as feeling what one takes another to be feeling). The broader hypothesis this raises is that emotional caring enables and improves our value-apprehensional abilities. To the extent that is true, I argue (in Ch. 4), we should (all else being equal) consider caring people to have more trustworthy moral intuitions than others, especially if they are not just competent, but skilled at caring about others. Emotions are, of course, biased in various ways, so I suggest attention-refocusing strategies for mitigating these biases. These are epitomized by an unaffiliated caring perspective, one removed from affiliation with any of a morally relevant situation's protagonists, but informed through emotional caring about the (weight of) the interests of each. Finally, I turn (in Ch. 5) to special value-apprehensional experiences that we have in intense, reciprocal relationships of caring with individuals who are special to us (I call these 'special others'). I argue that, if we accept that general v-a experiences reveal people's moral significance, we have even more reason to think that special v-a experiences reveal the special moral significance not only of the parties in the relationship, but of their participation in the relationship, for both their sakes. That is, there are moral reasons to devote caring attention to special others, even if we could otherwise do objectively more good (within reason). Emotional cares reveal not only values within everyone but reasons to devote ourselves to the individuals we care about. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / November 11, 2014. / caring, emotions, moral epistemology, partiality, special relationships, understanding / Includes bibliographical references. / David McNaughton, Professor Directing Dissertation; Roy Baumeister, University Representative; Michael Bishop, Committee Member; Piers Rawling, Committee Member.