This thesis study explores the existing knowledge management and sharing practices in donor organizations, particularly working in the developing countries. The potentional of knowledge management and sharing to facilitate development organizations in carrying out development work has been recognised in the literature. Literature presented mix of critique and appreciation to the existing efforts of donor agencies. Knowledge sharing platforms revolves around the country initiatives and donor agencies like UNDP and World Bank which are proactive in establishing these platforms for partner organizations. This research contributes practical insight to the question of delivery of these platforms, through an empirical investigation based on the development professionals' experiences. As earlier research shows enormous amount of literature on individual, team and organizational level knowledge sharing, this study sets prime focus on community level or external knowledge sharing, an area where there exist a dearth of emperical research or contributing literature on examing the role of sharing initiatives and possible contribution in improving risk management in development projects. Literature shows the potential of knowledge management and sharing practices, as their possible contribution in the global development practices and in bridging gap between North-South stakeholders. However, cultural, technological, organizational and individual level issues escalate with external level of knowledge sharing and thesis rightly, identifies success factors from the literature alongwith their viability from the professionals. It is even more inadequate when it comes to projects of donor organizations in under developed and developing countries. With 80% of documented failure rates of knowledge sharing systems, external knowledge sharing with partner organizations or network organizations is really not adequate and do not have supporting culture. As this whole process of sharing knowledge, heavily relies on the perceived motivation and willingness to share, study has tried to identify the challenges facing wider use of these sharing systems. Study also contributes with suggestions for knowledge management and sharing system developers, policy and decision makers and system users, to improve the overall contribution of knowledge sharing in better risk management. Apart from the cultural barriers, there are technical and policy level issues which need more concerted efforts to improve the use of these sharing systems by various organizations and individuals. / House No. 174-A, St. 61, I-8/3, Islamabad, Pakistan Contact: +92-336-5666065, Email: noman-1985@hotmail.com

The diploma thesis focuses on the issue of knowledge management, its principles and its application. The first part focuses on theoretical foundations. These are then used for analytical and practical part, which is dedicated to a proposal of own solution, where I propose practices to eliminate the identified weaknesses.

Knowledge refinement tools seek to correct faulty rule-based systems by identifying and repairing faults indicated by training examples that provide evidence of faults. This thesis proposes mechanisms that improve the effectiveness and efficiency of refinement tools by the best use and selection of training examples. The refinement task is sufficiently complex that the space of possible refinements demands a heuristic search. Refinement tools typically use hill-climbing search to identify suitable repairs but run the risk of getting caught in local optima. A novel contribution of this thesis is solving the local optima problem by converting the hill-climbing search into a best-first search that can backtrack to previous refinement states. The thesis explores how different backtracking heuristics and training example ordering heuristics affect refinement effectiveness and efficiency. Refinement tools rely on a representative set of training examples to identify faults and influence repair choices. In real environments it is often difficult to obtain a large set of training examples, since each problem-solving task must be labelled with the expert's solution. Another novel aspect introduced in this thesis is informed selection of examples for knowledge refinement, where suitable examples are selected from a set of unlabelled examples, so that only the subset requires to be labelled. Conversely, if a large set of labelled examples is available, it still makes sense to have mechanisms that can select a representative set of examples beneficial for the refinement task, thereby avoiding unnecessary example processing costs. Finally, an experimental evaluation of example utilisation and selection strategies on two artificial domains and one real application are presented. Informed backtracking is able to effectively deal with local optima by moving search to more promising areas, while informed ordering of training examples reduces search effort by ensuring that more pressing faults are dealt with early on in the search. Additionally, example selection methods achieve similar refinement accuracy with significantly fewer examples.

Each disaster presents itself with a unique set of characteristics that are hard to determine a priori. Thus disaster management tasks are inherently uncertain, requiring knowledge sharing and quick decision making that involves coordination across different levels and collaborators. While there has been an increasing interest among both researchers and practitioners in utilizing knowledge management to improve disaster management, little research has been reported about how to assess the dynamic nature of disaster management tasks, and what kinds of knowledge sharing are appropriate for different dimensions of task uncertainty characteristics. Using combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods, this research study developed the dimensions and their corresponding measures of the uncertain dynamic characteristics of disaster management tasks and tested the relationships between the various dimensions of uncertain dynamic disaster management tasks and task performance through the moderating and mediating effects of knowledge sharing. Furthermore, this research work conceptualized and assessed task uncertainty along three dimensions: novelty, unanalyzability, and significance; knowledge sharing along two dimensions: knowledge sharing purposes and knowledge sharing mechanisms; and task performance along two dimensions: task effectiveness and task efficiency. Analysis results of survey data collected from Miami-Dade County emergency managers suggested that knowledge sharing purposes and knowledge sharing mechanisms moderate and mediate uncertain dynamic disaster management task and task performance. Implications for research and practice as well directions for future research are discussed.

In today’s society it is expected that individuals completing teacher education programs harness the skill of critical thinking before entering into the classroom practice. This qualitative case study focuses on three (3) pre-service teachers’ experience in a teacher education course that was redesigned to foster and develop critical thinking skills and knowledge growth by the introduction of online discussion forums. This study was guided by the following question “How has the implementation of online discussion boards in the redesign of the two sections of a mandatory course of the Bachelor of Education program at a Canadian university supported the development of pre-service teachers critical thinking and contributed to their knowledge growth related to course content”? Data was collected from three (3) participants enrolled in the course, using semi-structured interviews and the data from the online discussion threads. Results show participants do not have a unified understanding of critical thinking and that online discussion boards can impact participant’s critical thinking development and knowledge growth provided they are given a strong foundation in the content area and have adequate time to reflect on the information presented. As well, findings revealed that participants used online discussion boards as a type of social media interface. By examining the participant’s perceptions and postings of online discussion boards, this study provides insights into how critical thinking can be developed in pre-service teachers through an online medium. Additionally, this study considers and how these skills might be translated into classroom practice.

The theme of this diploma thesis is Knowledge Management that is becoming the focus of business companies. The theoretical part of the work is divided into several chapters that discuss the basic principles of Knowledge Management. The aim of this work is to describe the principle of knowledge management and create a basic draft of the knowledge base for the KPMG company. In the introductory part of the work, terms commonly used in knowledge management are explained. Further, the knowledge capital of the company, types of knowledge management and the related knowledge strategies are described. Second half of the theoretical part concerns the responsibilities, tasks and roles in knowledge management. The last chapters of the theoretical part describe the individual phases of knowledge management introduction in a company. The practical part of this thesis is focused at analysis of KPMG company knowledge management and design of a knowledge base that can substantially reduce the time necessary for completion of certain deliverables. The chapter concerns mainly with description of the system architecture of the knowledge base, that the author has designed for the KPMG company.

Recent contributions highlight the importance of international knowledge transfer as a fundamental source of competitive advantage of MNCs. Due to the traditional assumption that parent firms are the prime source of knowledge, majority of studies have focused on knowledge transfer from headquarters to subsidiaries. However, the role of subsidiaries within MNCs has changed dramatically; many subsidiaries have gained a creative role by generating new resources depending on the comparative advantage of the location in which they operate, and through the process of reverse knowledge transfer, they subsequently contribute to the competence upgrading of the MNC. In reviewing the extant literature on MNC knowledge transfer and in particular reverse knowledge transfer, this research unleashes several gaps, notably in the understanding of factor affecting subsidiary knowledge development and reverse knowledge transfer within the service sector. Borrowing concepts from the knowledge-based and network views, a series of hypotheses were tested using the result of a web-based survey of the subsidiaries that were located in the UK, had a non-UK parent firm, and were active in the KIBS sector. Responses from 187 general managers, managing directors, or chief executives of subsidiaries confirm that those subsidiaries that develop and maintain business relationships with their internal (sister subsidiaries and headquarters) and external actors (customers, universities, suppliers, competitors) and have high level of autonomy are more capable of developing knowledge. With regards to determinants of reverse knowledge transfer, while subsidiary characteristics (knowledge development and willingness) and relationship characteristics (socialization mechanisms) are emerged as the main facilitators of reverse knowledge transfer, knowledge characteristics (tacitness and complexity) appeared as the main hindrances of this phenomenon. Moreover, the results indicate that, (a) socialisation mechanisms augment the extent of shared values and subsidiary-parent firm embeddedness and (b) willingness mediates the impacts of shared values and subsidiary-parent firm embeddedness on reverse knowledge transfer. The key contributions of this research are two-fold: firstly, it examines the process of reverse knowledge transfer and knowledge development exclusively within the KIBS sector. Secondly, it investigates the joint impacts of relationship characteristics, knowledge characteristics, and subsidiary (sender) characteristicson reverse knowledge transfer.

Although research and practice agree that visions are essential for organizations, the process of vision development remains elusive in academic literature. Presenting the "theory wave", this paper proposes a knowledge-based theory for developing sustainable visions to guide the creation of measures and actions in the future. Central to the theory wave, we suggest three features that characterize the development of sustainable visions; (1) learning from an envisioned future, (2) need orientation and (3) a wavelike process combining top-down and bottom-up approaches. Furthermore, by enhancing the creation of different kinds of knowledge, the theory-wave entails aspects of research on knowledge creation and thereby, it provides a new perspective on the field of vision development.

The previous research has illustrated that knowledge management (KM) is an important source of a competitive advantage, and there is a relationship between organizational culture and knowledge management. This dissertation extends the concept from knowledge management to knowledge business (k-business), and explores the relationship between organizational culture and KM strategies. This research intends to determine: Can k-business transform an organization? What are the antecedents that affect the choice of codification and personalization strategies? A survey containing four instruments was used: Cameron & Quinn's (1999) OCAI, Lawson's (2002) KMAI, Choi & Lee (2003)'s Knowledge Management Strategy Instrument, and Skyrme's (2001) K-Business Readiness Instrument. The survey link was forwarded to the companies who have been acknowledged for their knowledge management achievement by KMWorld; a total of 193 complete responses were analyzed. The results revealed that k-business can create a competitive advantage for organizations; different culture types can be the antecedent of different types of KM strategy. Clan culture is positively related to personalization strategy; significant association exists between hierarchy culture and codification strategy; and there is a significant correlation between adhocracy culture and personalization strategy. Market culture does not significantly affect knowledge management strategies.

It is a widely held belief that those who are attractive generally experience an easier life; that the door to success is opened by perfect bone structure and a sparkling white smile. However, this might not be the case. Attractiveness might play a far lesser role in individual’s achieving their objectives than has previously been thought. Is it possible that an individual’s qualifications may have a greater influence regarding the perceptions of managers who question the suitability of a candidate to fill the position of a Knowledge Worker? The main purpose of this research was not only to identify the existence of the so-called Beauty Premium in the Knowledge Economy but, to determine that if it does indeed exist, how to explore the influence of this aspect regarding the hiring decisions for which managers are responsible. A two-phased experimental design was followed that investigated the existence and strength of the Beauty Premium amongst a group of managers who were provided with fictitious resumes coupled with photographs of the applicants. These managers were requested to make a hiring decision based on the information in front of them. The results revealed the existence of a Beauty Premium but that is was relatively weak and that the qualification of an individual had a far greater influence on a manager’s perception of the suitability of a candidate to fill a position of a Knowledge Worker. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / zkgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / Unrestricted