Doctor of Philosophy / An organisation’s knowledge base is a valuable asset that serves as a source of sustainable competitive advantage for the firm. Organisations have become increasingly reliant on the application of knowledge work and the contributions of professionals to the creation of valued organisational knowledge. Implicitly, the literature has assumed permanency in the employment relationship between professionals and organisations and focused on issues such as organisational identification and commitment, and extra-role behaviours of professionals as impacting on their knowledge sharing behaviours. However, the nature of professional or expert employment has become more transient. There has been a marked increase in the use of professionals in contractual roles where the association with the organisation is often temporary and contingent. But the organisational implications of such practices remain largely unexplored. In particular, there is a dearth of research examining the impact of contract professionals on knowledge flows within the firm and on their motivations to participate in knowledge sharing within organisations. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature. This study examines the knowledge sharing practices of contract professionals in contemporary organisations. Conceptualising knowledge as socially situated and constructed, this qualitative study examines professionals employed as contractors in two large organisations: a large bank and an insurance company; and, based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with contractors and managers, considers why and how professionals engaged as contractors choose to share what they know with the contracting organisation. Engaging with research literatures from knowledge management, professional identity, newer career forms, and psychological contracts, the study generates a typology of contract professionals that suggest distinct knowledge sharing orientations. The study constructs three categories of contractors: Free Agents, Specialists and Consultants, identifies factors that influence and inhibit the knowledge sharing motivations of these categories of contractors and provides recommendations for a more holistic knowledge management strategy for organisations utilising contract professionals. The findings from this doctoral research show how identity work can have practical implications for knowledge management. For example, by exploring the dynamics of professional identity and image construction, the research shows how identity and image influences both the contractor’s knowledge sharing behaviours and the organisation’s knowledge management strategies. Exploring new areas of professional contingent work, this research aims to make a significant contribution to the understanding of knowledge sharing, professional identity and the management of contract professionals within organisations.

<p>Information technology (IT) is considered as a driving force in the development of organizations but earlier research has shown that technology is not enough to build, improve and increase organizational capabilities and performances. This means that organizational learning (OL) is an effective theory to capture and nourish knowledge in order to create knowledge driven competitive advantage. IT, however, plays a major role to create and share new knowledge to promote organizational learning. In today’s competitive environment it is an urgent requirement that organizations must develop and utilize IT based applications or systems to create a learning environment so that both employees and organizations can learn in an innovative ways, but the question remains how IT impacts OL in such a way that organizations can improve performances and capabilities complying with organization’s strategic goals.</p><p>This thesis deals with the use of IT in organizational learning at both levels; 1) learning at individual level to know that how individuals learn in an organization and how IT support learning at this stage and 2) learning at organizational level that focuses on how an organization learns and how IT affects it. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between IT and OL and describe the role of IT in promoting OL through the study of two selected companies, Accenture and ABB, employing the OL concept. To achieve the purpose of this study a qualitative approach has been used as it provides a thorough understanding about the role of IT in OL.</p><p>The analysis presents a thorough insight of organizational learning dividing it into learning at individual level which is based on the Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995)’s SECI model for knowledge conversion and learning at organizational level using the Huber (1991)’s learning processes to develop as well as facilitate the organizational learning. The role of IT is analyzed through the knowledge management strategies from Hansen et al. (1999).</p><p>The results show that information technology has an impact over organizational learning as IT facilitates OL at both the individual level and the organizational level in creating knowledge which ultimately enables organizations to improve capabilities and enhance performances to cope with change. Companies are using various IT application or tools to promote OL either through knowledge depository database, online training, staff rotation planning or various IT based communication channels. The use of knowledge management strategy and the role of IT on OL coincide with the strategic objective set by the company. Companies also use different combinations between tacit and explicit knowledge in respond to the strategic goal. Both tacit and explicit knowledge are always used in all companies but the mixture produces different results. It is the management that has to determine the right combination between them to create the maximum impact on OL. IT can be a tool help managing tacit and explicit knowledge but people are more important in the process of knowledge creation as it is individuals who possess the critical minds led to learning. It is important to realize a fact that organization will never learn if its people do not learn.</p><p>The work is of great interest to the parties involved in organizational learning using information technology.</p>

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain of natural language processing, it will provide the world knowledge much needed for semantic processing of natural language. To acquire knowledge from contributors not trained in knowledge engineering, I take the following four steps: (i) develop a knowledge representation (KR) model for simple assertions in natural language, (ii) introduce cumulative analogy, a class of nearest-neighbor based analogical reasoning algorithms over this representation, (iii) argue that cumulative analogy is well suited for knowledge acquisition (KA) based on a theoretical analysis of effectiveness of KA with this approach, and (iv) test the KR model and the effectiveness of the cumulative analogy algorithms empirically. To investigate effectiveness of cumulative analogy for KA empirically, Learner, an open source system for KA by cumulative analogy has been implemented, deployed, and evaluated. (The site "1001 Questions," is available at http://teach-computers.org/learner.html). Learner acquires assertion-level knowledge by constructing shallow semantic analogies between a KA topic and its nearest neighbors and posing these analogies as natural language questions to human contributors. Suppose, for example, that based on the knowledge about "newspapers" already present in the knowledge base, Learner judges "newspaper" to be similar to "book" and "magazine." Further suppose that assertions "books contain information" and "magazines contain information" are also already in the knowledge base. Then Learner will use cumulative analogy from the similar topics to ask humans whether "newspapers contain information." Because similarity between topics is computed based on what is already known about them, Learner exhibits bootstrapping behavior --- the quality of its questions improves as it gathers more knowledge. By summing evidence for and against posing any given question, Learner also exhibits noise tolerance, limiting the effect of incorrect similarities. The KA power of shallow semantic analogy from nearest neighbors is one of the main findings of this thesis. I perform an analysis of commonsense knowledge collected by another research effort that did not rely on analogical reasoning and demonstrate that indeed there is sufficient amount of correlation in the knowledge base to motivate using cumulative analogy from nearest neighbors as a KA method. Empirically, evaluating the percentages of questions answered affirmatively, negatively and judged to be nonsensical in the cumulative analogy case compares favorably with the baseline, no-similarity case that relies on random objects rather than nearest neighbors. Of the questions generated by cumulative analogy, contributors answered 45% affirmatively, 28% negatively and marked 13% as nonsensical; in the control, no-similarity case 8% of questions were answered affirmatively, 60% negatively and 26% were marked as nonsensical.

Literacy is an important phenomenon in all societies today. Nations around the world put in a great deal of effort and allocate a lot of funding for educational purposes to improve literacy rates of children and to help them to become literate citizens so that they can function better in society. Studies of teacher education in the United States have shown that many of the in-service teachers lack the basic foundation of linguistic constructs needed to improve literacy skills in elementary classrooms. Further, it has been shown that students who were taught by teachers with a linguistic background performed better on reading, writing, and spelling skills than those children who were taught by teachers without such a linguistic background. These studies have recommended better teacher training programs that incorporate classes to specifically teach linguistic constructs. However, there are various factors that may affect literacy development in school children, such as family background and number of books available at home. The majority of these studies have been conducted in the United States and what is true for the U.S. may not be true for other countries. The purpose of this study is to examine the linguistic knowledge of elementary classroom teachers and how it impacts children’s achievement in literacy skills in the North West region of Cameroon where English is the predominant language of instruction in schools. Data were collected from 100 primary school teachers and 200 third grade children from the rural and urban regions, then analyzed using independent t-tests at a 0.05 level of significance. Overall the teachers exemplified a lack of linguistic knowledge; however, when comparing rural to urban, the urban teacher’s linguistic knowledge was significantly higher. Similarly, the children’s results also revealed a higher performance rate from the urban children. Based on the results it is recommended that teacher preparatory programs should foster content and pedagogic expertise and include essential features in literacy instruction. The quality of teachers teaching in the primary schools is important and the Ministry of National Education in Cameroon should ensure a better teacher education program that can prepare confident and knowledgeable teachers.

Information technology (IT) is considered as a driving force in the development of organizations but earlier research has shown that technology is not enough to build, improve and increase organizational capabilities and performances. This means that organizational learning (OL) is an effective theory to capture and nourish knowledge in order to create knowledge driven competitive advantage. IT, however, plays a major role to create and share new knowledge to promote organizational learning. In today’s competitive environment it is an urgent requirement that organizations must develop and utilize IT based applications or systems to create a learning environment so that both employees and organizations can learn in an innovative ways, but the question remains how IT impacts OL in such a way that organizations can improve performances and capabilities complying with organization’s strategic goals. This thesis deals with the use of IT in organizational learning at both levels; 1) learning at individual level to know that how individuals learn in an organization and how IT support learning at this stage and 2) learning at organizational level that focuses on how an organization learns and how IT affects it. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between IT and OL and describe the role of IT in promoting OL through the study of two selected companies, Accenture and ABB, employing the OL concept. To achieve the purpose of this study a qualitative approach has been used as it provides a thorough understanding about the role of IT in OL. The analysis presents a thorough insight of organizational learning dividing it into learning at individual level which is based on the Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995)’s SECI model for knowledge conversion and learning at organizational level using the Huber (1991)’s learning processes to develop as well as facilitate the organizational learning. The role of IT is analyzed through the knowledge management strategies from Hansen et al. (1999). The results show that information technology has an impact over organizational learning as IT facilitates OL at both the individual level and the organizational level in creating knowledge which ultimately enables organizations to improve capabilities and enhance performances to cope with change. Companies are using various IT application or tools to promote OL either through knowledge depository database, online training, staff rotation planning or various IT based communication channels. The use of knowledge management strategy and the role of IT on OL coincide with the strategic objective set by the company. Companies also use different combinations between tacit and explicit knowledge in respond to the strategic goal. Both tacit and explicit knowledge are always used in all companies but the mixture produces different results. It is the management that has to determine the right combination between them to create the maximum impact on OL. IT can be a tool help managing tacit and explicit knowledge but people are more important in the process of knowledge creation as it is individuals who possess the critical minds led to learning. It is important to realize a fact that organization will never learn if its people do not learn. The work is of great interest to the parties involved in organizational learning using information technology.

An Extension to the Composite Rule Induction System Discovering knowledge from data is an important task for knowledge management and development of intelligent systems, which is called knowledge acquisition or data mining. Many techniques have been developed for such purpose. For example, ID3, C4.5 (tree induction techniques) and Artificial Neural Networks are among the popular techniques in ¡§Classification and Prediction¡¨ area. However, these methods often use the same criteria to analyze nominal and non-nominal attributes, which is very likely to produce biased knowledge due to mis-match between data type and their algorithms. In Liang (1992), he proposed a composite approach called CRIS to inducing knowledge that introduces statistical concepts and data mining heuristics and found the composite method outperformed other methods including tree induction, discriminant analysis, and neural networks. However, the paper focuses on the classification of binary objects and did not describe how the approach can be applied to a problem with more than two classes in the dependent variable. In this research, we extend the previous approach to solve the problem with more than two classes. We also enhance the approach by adding steps to prioritizing attributes using their identification power and controlling the growth of generated hypothesis. In order evaluate the extended CRIS method, a prototype system, eCRIS, was developed and compared with a commercial data mining package, XLMiner3 (developed by Cytel Software Corporation) using three existing datasets in data mining research. The results indicate that the extended CRIS outperforms tree induction and backpropagation in neural networks in datasets that include both nominal and non-nominal data and performed equally well with them.

The goal of this study is to describe and analyse the knowledge management and sharing in a project team. The brief results of the study showed that the investigated project team at Ericsson manages knowledge gained from their project within knowledge management systems. However, the practices used by the project team in order to manage knowledge have risks of inefficiency. The major shortcomings in project knowledge management were noticed in knowledge presentation, validation and distribution process. The main source for sharing knowledge within the project team is through project meetings before, during and after the completion of project apart from Scrum meetings, communities of practice, and pair programming. Additionally, the project specific factors showed their potential to really influence the knowledge sharing within the project team.

Abstract A PROCESS TO REUSE EXPERIENCES VIA NARRATIVES AMONG SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGERS By STACIE CLARK PETTER APRIL, 2006 Committee Chair: Dr. Vijay Vaishnavi Major Department: Computer Information Systems Software project management is a complex process requiring extensive planning, effective decision-making, and proper monitoring throughout the course of a project. Unfortunately, software project managers rarely capture and reuse the knowledge gained during a project on subsequent projects. To enable the repetition of prior successes and avoidance of previous mistakes, I propose that software project managers can improve their management abilities by reusing their own and others’ past experiences with written narratives. I use multiple methodologies – including literature review, grounded theory, design science research, and experimentation – to create a process for software project managers to reuse knowledge gained through experiences on software projects. In the literature review, I examine relevant research areas to inspire ideas on how to reuse knowledge via written narratives in software project management. Interviews with software project managers, analyzed using grounded theory, provide insight into the current challenges of reusing knowledge during a project. I leverage design science research methodology to develop a process of experience reuse that incorporates narratives and wikis to enable software project managers to share their experiences using written narratives. Experimentation evaluates whether the process developed using the design science research methodology improves the current knowledge reuse practices of software project managers.

Kunskapsöverföring har ansetts vara av vikt inom företag och organisationer för att bevara kunskapen, informationen och för att kunna förmedla den vidare till andra medlemmar. Studiens primära syfte var att genom forskningsteorier och intervjuer effektivisera Rädda barnens Ellen och Allan projekt i deras kunskapsöverföring. 5 aktiva medlemmar inom Ellen och Allan projektet intervjuades samt 1 kontrollintervju genomfördes med en rutinerad projektledare från Svenska kyrkan, för att få fram dennes syn på projektets nuvarande situation gällande kunskapsöverföring.      Resultatet visade att det finns en viss otrygghet i rollerna och framförallt hos projektledarna, som inte har någon specifik roll- eller uppdragsbeskrivning. Genom resultatet kunde vi även se att kunskapsöverföringen bör vara ett ingående moment i organisationens projektbeskrivning för att det ska fungera på bästa sätt. Fysiska möten och god kommunikation mellan deltagarna bör även prioriteras för att effektivisera kunskapsöverföringen inom projektet.

The current approaches for the induction of medical procedural knowledge suffer from several drawbacks: the structures produced may not be explicit medical structures, they are only based on statistical measures that do not necessarily respect medical criteria which can be essential to guarantee medical correct structures, or they are not prepared to deal with the incremental arrival of new data. In this thesis we propose a methodology to automatically induce medically correct clinical algorithms (CAs) from hospital databases. These CAs are represented according to the SDA knowledge model. The methodology considers relevant background knowledge and it is able to work in an incremental way. The methodology has been tested in the domains of hypertension, diabetes mellitus and the comborbidity of both diseases. As a result, we propose a repository of background knowledge for these pathologies and provide the SDA diagrams obtained. Later analyses show that the results are medically correct and comprehensible when validated with health care professionals.