Knowledge management is considered a necessary precursor to organizational success. This view is increasingly prevalent in the case of the health care sector. Two main knowledge management strategies are recognized: codification and personalization strategies. An organizations choice of knowledge management strategy depends on its objectives and the dominant form of knowledge informing its decision-making processes.<p>Health care decision-makers have access to a wealth of knowledge with which to inform their decisions. Little is known, however, about how the various types of knowledge are managed to optimize their use in decision-making. This study examines the knowledge management strategies of health care decision-makers working in the context of a regionalized health care system. The potential of communities of practice as a conceptual means for understanding health care knowledge management is also explored.<p>Members of Regional health authorities (RHAs) in the province of Saskatchewan constitute the unit of analysis for the study, which is guided by a qualitative research design. Interviews were used as the main data collection technique. For data analysis, open and axial coding methods based on the inductive and deductive approaches were adopted.<p>The study concludes that regional health authority (RHA) members utilize more fully explicit rather than tacit forms of knowledge. One of the main knowledge management practices adopted by the RHA members is the use of professional reports. This indicates that RHA members pursue a codification strategy more strongly than a personalization strategy. Moreover, it was found that the practices and strategies associated with managing knowledge were in place, despite the absence of a stated knowledge management policy. Finally, RHAs cannot be regarded as communities of practice, even though they exhibit many of their features.<p>Recommendations include the following: (1) the need for RHAs to institutionalize a knowledge management policy to guide their knowledge management processes and strategies, and (2) the cultivation of online communities of practice to marshal the tacit knowledge of RHA members, and that of the public, as an intervention to complement the use of explicit knowledge.

This study examines the personalization of shown travel destination visual images using professional photography upon travel motivations, feelings, and purchase intentions of consumers in the online environment. The research design was experimental and used data from a questionnaire via Qualtrics. A pilot test of the instrument was conducted. The final questionnaire contained 25 items. A total of 194 questionnaires were collected and participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups. Each group of 50 participants was exposed to a specific set of travel destination visual images. Further, several hypotheses related to the effects of personalization, professional photography toward travel motivation, emotion, and purchase intention were tested. The results indicated that: (1) travel motivation was affected by both personalization, and professional photography of travel destination visual image; (2) personalization had an influence on positive emotion, but professional photography did not; (3) it was expected that personalization would act as a “push” factor on travel motivation, and professional photography would influence the “pull” factor on travel motivation, but these two hypotheses were not supported; (4) travel motivation and emotion positively affected purchase intention, however this was only partially supported. Furthermore, the results of the present study implied that the “push – pull” travel motivation theory was considered not entirely separate. Practical recommendations are presented for online tourism marketers to enhance their service.

Knowledge management is considered a necessary precursor to organizational success. This view is increasingly prevalent in the case of the health care sector. Two main knowledge management strategies are recognized: codification and personalization strategies. An organizations choice of knowledge management strategy depends on its objectives and the dominant form of knowledge informing its decision-making processes.<p>Health care decision-makers have access to a wealth of knowledge with which to inform their decisions. Little is known, however, about how the various types of knowledge are managed to optimize their use in decision-making. This study examines the knowledge management strategies of health care decision-makers working in the context of a regionalized health care system. The potential of communities of practice as a conceptual means for understanding health care knowledge management is also explored.<p>Members of Regional health authorities (RHAs) in the province of Saskatchewan constitute the unit of analysis for the study, which is guided by a qualitative research design. Interviews were used as the main data collection technique. For data analysis, open and axial coding methods based on the inductive and deductive approaches were adopted.<p>The study concludes that regional health authority (RHA) members utilize more fully explicit rather than tacit forms of knowledge. One of the main knowledge management practices adopted by the RHA members is the use of professional reports. This indicates that RHA members pursue a codification strategy more strongly than a personalization strategy. Moreover, it was found that the practices and strategies associated with managing knowledge were in place, despite the absence of a stated knowledge management policy. Finally, RHAs cannot be regarded as communities of practice, even though they exhibit many of their features.<p>Recommendations include the following: (1) the need for RHAs to institutionalize a knowledge management policy to guide their knowledge management processes and strategies, and (2) the cultivation of online communities of practice to marshal the tacit knowledge of RHA members, and that of the public, as an intervention to complement the use of explicit knowledge.

The purpose of this BA-thesis was to study how three daily Swedish newspapers use a specific type of exemplars, which are recognized by a number of attributes. A photograph of the person that is interviewed always illustrates this type of exemplars and at least two persons are asked the same question.    The three newspapers that have been compared in this study each represent one of the major types of Swedish newspapers: morning press, tabloids and local press. By using a quantitative content analysis, one month was examined in all three newspapers in the year of 1997 and 2007.  Two of the theories that have been central in the thesis are Colin Sparks model of tabloidization, which demonstrates the process of tabloidization and McQuail′s description of commercialization.  The results of the study indicate that there are many similarities between the three newspapers use of exemplars. However, there are some differences when it comes to frequency and function. Noteworthy is that the newspaper “Dagens Nyheter” did not publish a single exemplar the first year of the study, 1997. Ten years later the very same paper published 15 exemplars during the month of examination.

How to build customer loyalty and retain customers are important issues for most businesses. Personalized services have been used as a strategy for such purposes. The advancement of information technology has enabled a business to keep track of customer preferences and provide personalized services accordingly. Several theories have been proposed to explain the effect of positive customer attitude toward personalized services, such as reducing information overload and the Elaboration Likelihood Model. This study is focus on the perspective of intimate relationship with customers through personalized services, and proposes that the intimacy relationship induced from personalized advertising plays a major role in building customer loyalty. An experiment was designed to test our hypotheses. An experimental website was developed to interact with the subjects for building relationship. Experimental advertisement was then sent to the subject for evaluation. The experiment results in 355 completed data, which were then analyzed using the SPSS and SmartPLS. The results reveal that (1)personalized content has a significant effect intimacy;(2) Personalized message doesn¡¦t influence intimacy;(3)customer intimacy has effects on the attitude toward advertising and customer¡¦s purchasing intention. We also find that the relationship between customer intimacy and the recommendation effect was not significantly different for different product categories.

With the advances in information and networking technologies and the proliferation of e-commerce and knowledge management applications, individuals and organizations generate and acquire tremendous amount of online information that is typically available as textual documents. To manage the ever-increasing volume of documents, an individual or organization frequently organizes his/her documents into a set or hierarchy of categories in order to facilitate document management and subsequent information access and browsing. Furthermore, document clustering is an intentional act that reflects individual preferences with regard to the semantic coherency and relevant categorization of documents. Hence, effective document-clustering must consider individual preferences for supporting personalization in document categorization and should be capable of organizing documents into a category hierarchy. However, document-clustering research traditionally has been anchored in analyses of document content. As a consequence, most of existing document-clustering techniques are not tailored to individuals¡¦ preferences and therefore are unable to facilitate personalization. On the other hand, existing document-clustering techniques generally are designed to generate from a document collection a set of document clusters rather than a hierarchy of document clusters. In response, we develop in this study a hierarchical personalized document-clustering (HPEC) technique that takes into account an individual¡¦s folder hierarchy representing the individual¡¦s categorization preferences and produces document-clusters in a hierarchical structure for the target individual. Our empirical evaluation results suggest that the proposed HPEC technique outperformed its benchmark technique (i.e., HAC+P) in cluster recall while maintaining the same level of cluster precision and location discrepancy as its benchmark technique did.

This thesis focuses on three of the main components of an e-learning system: Infrastructure model, data integration and personalization. For the infrastructure model, our aim is to get best use of heterogeneously structured, geographically distributed data resources. Therefore, a detailed analysis of the available infrastructure models is carried out and an open source reference implementation based on grid technology is implemented. Furthermore, a simple data integration mechanism is proposed for the suggested reference implementation. For personalization, a statistical algorithm is proposed based on extracting and utilizing the learner model. The learner model based on Felder-Silverman learning style is extracted automatically using NBTree classification algorithm in conjunction with Binary relevance classifier for basic science learners. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed automated learner modelling approach is consistent with the results, obtained by the questionnaires traditionally used for learning style assessment. In the thesis, the classification results are further utilized for providing the user with personalized queries. Keywords: Interactive learning environments / personalization in e-learning

With the increasing amount of data on web, people start to need tools which will help them to deal with the most significant ones among the thousands. The idea of a system which recommends items to its users emerged to fulfill this inevitable need. But most of the recommender systems make recommendations for individuals. On the other hand, some people need recommendation for items which they will use or for activities which they will attend together. Group recommenders serve for these purposes. Group recommenders diverge from individual recommenders such that they need to aggregate members of the group in a joint model, and in order to do so, they need a user satisfaction function. There are two different aggregation methods and a few different satisfaction functions for group recommendation process. Reading groups domain is a new domain for group recommenders. In this thesis we propose a web based group recommender system which is called BoRGo: Book Recommender for Reading Groups , for reading groups domain. BoRGo uses a new information filtering technique and present a media for post recommendation processes. We present comparative evaluation results of this new technique in this thesis.

<p>Bakgrund: Företag som huvudsakligen agerar med Internet som kontaktkanal möter sällan eller aldrig sina kunder fysiskt, vilket leder till ett behov av att komplettera frånvaron av fysisk kontakt med andra former av kommunikation. Som lösning på detta problem har företag börjat tillämpa personligt anpassad e-postmarknadsföring vid kontakt med konsumenter för att bättre tillgodose kunders behov av relevant information. Samtidigt som personlig anpassning ger möjligheten att erbjuda kunden mervärde och öka kundens lojalitet kan också kunden uppfatta tekniken som falsk och konstruerad. Otillräcklig kunskap om konsumenters värderingar i frågor som berör personlig anpassning av e-post kan leda till att företag får svårt att knyta sig till potentiella kunder samt behålla befintliga kunder.</p><p>Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka till vilken grad e-handelskonsumenter föredrar personligt anpassade e-postutskick, hur e-postutskick bör framställas samt vilken betydelse konsumentens relation till företaget har. Detta ska resultera i rekommendationer till företag som genom personlig anpassning vill utveckla sin e-handelsstrategi.</p><p>Metod: För att kunna bekräfta eller förkasta de uppsatta hypoteserna tar uppsatsen ett hypotetiskt deduktivt angreppssätt. En kvantitativ enkätundersökning används för att samla in empirisk data vilken har analyserats statistiskt med hjälp av t-test. Undersökningens population omfattar ett e-handelsföretags kunder.</p><p>Resultat: Uppsatsens empiriska studie visar att e-handelskonsumenter av manligt kön föredrar personligt anpassade e-postutskick framför opersonliga e postutskick. I allmänhet uppfattas personlig anpassning som relevanshö-jande teknik, särskilt om den personliga anpassningen är genuin och om konsumenten tidigare uttryckligen angett sitt intresse för e-postutskicket. I uppsatsen studeras våra resultat närmare för att identifiera i vilka situationer som e-handlarnas värderingar skiljer sig åt. Företag bör beakta att kunden är mer öppen för personlig anpassning av e postutskick när denne har kontroll över hur företaget tillämpar den personliga anpassningen. Demografiska faktorer som utbildningsnivå och till viss del geografisk lokalisering har ock-så betydelse för hur personlig anpassning uppfattas.</p> / <p>Background: Companies that primarily act with Internet as channel of contact meet their customers in real life very rarely or never, which creates a need to complement the absence of physical contact with other forms of communication. As a solution to this problem companies have begun to implement personalized e-mail marketing in order to better satisfy customers’ need for relevant information. Still, as personalization gives the possibility to offer the customer added value while increasing the customer loyalty, the technology can also be perceived as deceitful and artificial. Insufficient knowledge regarding the customers’ perception of issues that concern personalization can result in difficulties for companies to attract new and retain existing customers.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to study to what extent e-consumers prefer personalized e-mail marketing, how e-mail campaigns should be created and what significance the relation has between consumers and companies. This is expected to result in recommendations to e-tailors that want to develop their business through the use of personalization in their e-mail marketing efforts.</p><p>Method: In order to be able to verify or to falsify the set hypotheses, the research takes a hypothetical deductive approach. A quantitative survey has been used to collect the empirical data which has been statistically analyzed with the use of t-tests. The research population consists of the customers of an e-tailor.</p><p>Conclusions: The empirical study shows that male e-consumers prefer personalized e mail marketing more than non-personalized e-mail marketing. Personalization is in general perceived as a technique to increase the level of relevance of the e-mail, thus being looked upon as added value, especially when the technique is genuine and if the consumer explicitly has given his or hers area of interest for the e-mail campaigns. In the thesis the research results are studied closer in order to investigate in which situations opinions part. Companies should also consider that customers are more open towards personalized e-mail marketing when she or he has control over how the companies apply personalization. Demographic factors such as level of education and to a certain extent geographical location also have an impact on how personalization is perceived.</p>

<p>Abstract</p><p><strong>Purpose – </strong>The purpose of this paper is to investigate the success of a consulting agency’s KMS, examine the relationships between the factors constituting to its success, and explore possible effects of the knowledge management strategies codification and personalization on these correlations.</p><p><strong>Design/methodology/approach – </strong>This paper is a case study researching a Swedish consulting company’s KMS success using a KMS success model by Wu & Wang (2006). The survey’s results were interpreted using standard multiple regression analysis, which helped to investigate and interpret the correlations between the dimensions constituting KMS success.</p><p><strong>Findings – </strong>The findings in this paper suggest that personalization and codification have an influence on the quality of the correlations between the KMS success dimensions leaving the overall structure intact. Additionally the influence of System Quality on Perceived KMS Benefits and User Satisfaction on System Use were not found significant. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Research limitations/implications – </strong>This study ‘s main limitiation is a sample size and the case study approach, which limit the generalizability of the results to other contexts.</p><p><strong>Practical implications – </strong>The most important implication of this research is the importance of the user for KMS success. A company needs to focus on improving the benefits a user receives from a KMS, which can mainly be achieved by improving the knowledge made available through the KMS, and by providing a proper basis for the KMS, in order to ensure a minimum level of System Quality. Other factors influencing the success of a KMS are incentives, which can help to increase system use and the quality of system use.<strong></strong></p><p><strong>Originality/value – </strong>The paper shows that when researching KMS success one should take the structure of the company’s knowledge management strategy into consideration. It further proves the applicability of the model in different contexts and its validity for accurately measuring KMS success.<strong></strong></p>