Knowledge Sharing within IT Projects

Even though today’s corporations recognize that they need to understand modern project management techniques (Schwalbe, 2002, p2), many researchers continue to provide evidence of poor IT project success. With Kotnour, (2000) finding that project performance is positively associated with project knowledge, a better understanding of how to effectively manage knowledge in IT projects should have considerable practical significance for increasing the chances of project success. Using a combined qualitative/quantitative method of data collection in multiple case studies spanning four continents, and comprising a variety of organizational types, the focus of this current research centered on the question of why individuals working within IT project teams might be motivated towards, or inhibited from, sharing their knowledge and experience in their activities, procedures, and processes. The research concluded with the development of a new theoretical model of knowledge sharing behavior, ‘The Alignment Model of Motivational Focus’. This model suggests that an individual’s propensity to share knowledge and experience is a function of perceived personal benefits and costs associated with the activity, balanced against the individual’s alignment to a group of ‘institutional’ factors. These factors are identified as alignments to the project team, to the organization, and dependent on the circumstances, to either the professional discipline or community of practice, to which the individual belongs.

Developing a supportive culture for teaching and learning : a university, faculty and school perspective

In the early 1990's the University of Salford was typical of most pre-1992 Universities in that whilst students provided much of it's income, little attention was paid to pedagogy. As Warren Piper (1994) observed, University teachers were professional in their subject areas but generally did not seek to acquire a pedagogy of HE. This was the case in Alsford. Courses were efficiently run but only a minority of staff were engaged in actively considering learning and teaching issues. Instead staff time was spent on research and commercial activity.----- In the mid-1990's the teaching environment began to change significantly. As well as Dearing, the advent of QAA and teaching quality reviews, Salford was already experiencing changes in the characteristics of its student body. Wideing access was on our agenda before it was so predominant nationally. With increasing numbers and heterogeneity of students as well as these external factors, new challenges were facing the University and teaching domain.----- This paper describes how a culture which values teaching, learning and pedagogic inquiry is being created in the university. It then focuses on parts of this process specific to the Faculty of Business and Informatics, namely the Faculty's Learning and Teaching Research Network and the establishment of the Centre for Construction Education in the School of Construction and Property Management.----- The Faculty of Business and Informatics' Learning and Teaching Research Network aims to raise the profile, quality and volume of pedagogic research across the five schools in the faculty. The initiative is targeted at all academics regardless of previous research experience. We hope to grow and nurture research potential where it exists and to acknowledge and use the existing expertise of subject-based researchers in collaborative ventures. We work on the principle that people are deliged to share what they know but need appreciation and feedback for doing so. A further ain is to surface and celebrate the significant amount of tacit knowledge in the area of pedagogy evidenced by the strength of student and employer feedback in many areas of the faculty's teaching.----- The Faculty embraces generic and core management expertise but also includes applied management disciplines in information systems and construction and property management where internationally leading research activities and networked centres of excellence have been established. Drawing from this experience, and within the context of the Faculty network, a Centre for Construction Education is being established with key international external partners to develop a sustainable business model of an enterprising pedagogic centre that can undertake useful research to underpin teaching in the Faculty whilst offering sustainable business services to allow it to benefit from pump-priming grant funding.----- Internal and external networking are important elements in our plans and ongoing work. Key to this are our links with the LTSN subject centres (BEST and CEBE) and the LTSN generic centre. The paper discusses networking as a concept and gives examples of practices which have proved useful in this context.----- The academic influences on our approach are also examined. Dixon’s (2000) work examining how a range of companies succeed through internal knowledge sharing has provided a range of transferable practices. We also examine the notion of dialogue in this context, defined by Ballantyne (1999) as ‘The interactive human process of reasoning together which comes into being through interactions based on spontaneity or need and is enabled by trust’ Social constructionist principles of Practical Authorship (Shotter, 1993, Pavlica, Holman and Thorpe, 1998)) have also proved useful in developing our perspective on learning and knowledge creation within our community of practice.

Encounters and content sharing in an urban village : reading texts through an archaeological lens

Archaeology provides a framework of analysis and interpretation that is useful for disentangling the textual layers of a contemporary lived-in urban space. The producers and readers of texts may include those who planned and developed the site and those who now live, visit and work there. Some of the social encounters and content sharing between these people may be artificially produced or manufactured in the hope that certain social situations will occur. Others may be serendipitous. With archaeology’s original focus on places that are no longer inhabited it is often only the remaining artefacts and features of the built environment that form the basis for interpreting the social relationships of past people. Our analysis however, is framed within a contemporary notion of archaeological artefacts in an urban setting. Unlike an excavation, where the past is revealed through digging into the landscape, the application of landscape archaeology within a present day urban context is necessarily more experiential, visual and based on recording and analysing the physical traces of social encounters and relationships between residents and visitors. These physical traces are present within the creative content, and the built and natural elements of the environment. This chapter explores notions of social encounters and content sharing in an urban village by analysing three different types of texts: the design of the built environment; content produced by residents through a geospatial web application; and, print and online media produced in digital storytelling workshops.

Quality-based benefit design in health insurance : the impact of a product benefit design change on the utilisation of oral health services by members of a private health insurance fund in regional and rural New South Wales, Australia

Objective: To examine the impact on dental utilisation following the introduction of a participating provider scheme (Regional and Rural Oral Health Program {RROHP)). In this model dentists receive higher third party payments from a private health insurance fund for delivering an agreed range of preventive and diagnostic benefits at no out-ofpocket cost to insured patients. Data source/Study setting: Hospitals Contribution Fund of Australia (HCF) dental claims for all members resident in New South Wales over the six financial years from l99811999 to 200312004. Study design: This cohort study involves before and after analyses of dental claims experience over a six year period for approximately 81,000 individuals in the intervention group (HCF members resident in regional and rural New South Wales, Australia) and 267,000 in the control group (HCF members resident in the Sydney area). Only claims for individuals who were members of HCF at 31 December 1997 were included. The analysis groups claims into the three years prior to the establishment of the RROHP and the three years subsequent to implementation. Data collection/Extraction methods: The analysis is based on all claims submitted by users of services for visits between 1 July 1988 and 30 June 2004. In these data approximately 1,000,000 services were provided to the intervention group and approximately 4,900,000 in the control group. Principal findings: Using Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts, special cause variation was identified in total utilisation rate of private dental services in the intervention group post implementation. No such variation was present in the control group. On average in the three years after implementation of the program the utilisation rate of dental services by regional and rural residents of New South Wales who where members of HCF grew by 12.6%, over eight times the growth rate of 1.5% observed in the control group (HCF members who were Sydney residents). The differences were even more pronounced in the areas of service that were the focus of the program: diagnostic and preventive services. Conclusion: The implementation of a benefit design change, a participating provider scheme, that involved the removal of CO-payments on a defined range of preventive and diagnostic dental services combined with the establishment and promotion of a network of dentists, appears to have had a marked impact on HCF members' utilisation of dental services in regional and rural New South Wales, Australia.

Building Information Modelling for FM at Sydney Opera House

“SOH see significant benefit in digitising its drawings and operation and maintenance manuals. Since SOH do not currently have digital models of the Opera House structure or other components, there is an opportunity for this national case study to promote the application of Digital Facility Modelling using standardized Building Information Models (BIM)”. The digital modelling element of this project examined the potential of building information models for Facility Management focusing on the following areas: • The re-usability of building information for FM purposes • BIM as an Integrated information model for facility management • Extendibility of the BIM to cope with business specific requirements • Commercial facility management software using standardised building information models • The ability to add (organisation specific) intelligence to the model • A roadmap for SOH to adopt BIM for FM The project has established that BIM – building information modelling - is an appropriate and potentially beneficial technology for the storage of integrated building, maintenance and management data for SOH. Based on the attributes of a BIM, several advantages can be envisioned: consistency in the data, intelligence in the model, multiple representations, source of information for intelligent programs and intelligent queries. The IFC – open building exchange standard – specification provides comprehensive support for asset and facility management functions, and offers new management, collaboration and procurement relationships based on sharing of intelligent building data. The major advantages of using an open standard are: information can be read and manipulated by any compliant software, reduced user “lock in” to proprietary solutions, third party software can be the “best of breed” to suit the process and scope at hand, standardised BIM solutions consider the wider implications of information exchange outside the scope of any particular vendor, information can be archived as ASCII files for archival purposes, and data quality can be enhanced as the now single source of users’ information has improved accuracy, correctness, currency, completeness and relevance. SOH current building standards have been successfully drafted for a BIM environment and are confidently expected to be fully developed when BIM is adopted operationally by SOH. There have been remarkably few technical difficulties in converting the House’s existing conventions and standards to the new model based environment. This demonstrates that the IFC model represents world practice for building data representation and management (see Sydney Opera House – FM Exemplar Project Report Number 2005-001-C-3, Open Specification for BIM: Sydney Opera House Case Study). Availability of FM applications based on BIM is in its infancy but focussed systems are already in operation internationally and show excellent prospects for implementation systems at SOH. In addition to the generic benefits of standardised BIM described above, the following FM specific advantages can be expected from this new integrated facilities management environment: faster and more effective processes, controlled whole life costs and environmental data, better customer service, common operational picture for current and strategic planning, visual decision-making and a total ownership cost model. Tests with partial BIM data – provided by several of SOH’s current consultants – show that the creation of a SOH complete model is realistic, but subject to resolution of compliance and detailed functional support by participating software applications. The showcase has demonstrated successfully that IFC based exchange is possible with several common BIM based applications through the creation of a new partial model of the building. Data exchanged has been geometrically accurate (the SOH building structure represents some of the most complex building elements) and supports rich information describing the types of objects, with their properties and relationships.