Community of Practice: Aligning Knowledge Work with Organisational Knowledge Strategy

&quot;This book combines research on the cultural, technical, organizational, and human issues surrounding the creation, capture, transfer, and use of knowledge in today's organizations. Topics such as organizational memory, knowledge management in enterprises, enablers and inhibitors of knowledge sharing and transfer, and emerging technologies of knowledge management, offering information to practitioners and scholars in a variety of settings&quot;--Provided by publisher. <br />

An overview of IT outsourcing in public secto agenices

For the past 15 years, governments in the developed, Western world have been contracting out, or outsourcing, services as a key part of public sector reforms. Outsourcing has been argued to lead to cost savings, improved discipline, better services, access to scarce skills, and the capacity for managers to focus more time on the core business of their organizations (Domberger, 1998). Government outsourcing initiatives have encompassed a range of services, but given the large sums of money invested in IT assets, the outsourcing of IT services (IT outsourcing, or ITO) has been a major initiative for many agencies. Lacity and Willcocks (1998, p. 3) defined ITO as &quot;handing over to a third party [the] management of IS/IT assets, resources and/or activities for required results.&quot; For public-sector outsourcing, this handover is usually made by way of a competitive tender. Case studies have reported ITO successes and failures (e.g., Currie &amp; Willcocks, 1998; Rouse &amp; Corbitt, 2003; Willcocks &amp; Currie, 1997; Willcocks &amp; Lacity, 2001; Willcocks &amp; Kern, 1998), but much of the evidence presented to public-sector decision makers to justify this reform is anecdotal and unsystematic, and when investigated in depth, does not necessarily support widespread conclusions.<br />

Security protection for critical infrastructure

Understanding and managing information infrastructure (II) security risks is a priority to most organizations dealing with information technology and information warfare (IW) scenarios today (Libicki, 2000). Traditional security risk analysis (SRA) was well suited to these tasks within the paradigm of computer security, where the focus was on securing tangible items such as computing and communications equipment (NCS,1996; Cramer, 1998). With the growth of information interchange and reliance on information infrastructure, the ability to understand where vulnerabilities lie within an organization, regardless of size, has become extremely difficult (NIPC, 1996). To place a value on the information that is owned and used by an organization is virtually an impossible task. The suitability of risk analysis to assist in managing IW and information infrastructure-related security risks is unqualified, however studies have been undertaken to build frameworks and methodologies for modeling information warfare attacks (Molander, Riddile, &amp; Wilson, 1996; Johnson, 1997; Hutchinson &amp; Warren, 2001) which will assist greatly in applying risk analysis concepts and methodologies to the burgeoning information technology security paradigm, information warfare.<br />

Complementing a region descriptor for shape retrieval

In this paper, we propose to complement a region descriptor for shape retrieval with a contour descriptor; the descriptor thus obtained is a composite descriptor. We use a combination of a region descriptor and contour descriptor to obtain the proposed descriptor. A contour extraction technique is also proposed; it is required for extracting the contour of the image prior to applying a contour descriptor. Normalization of descriptors is required before disparate descriptors can be combined into a single descriptor. Hence, we test the performance of two common methods for normalization of descriptors and adopt the better performing method. Experiments are performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor for retrieval of 2d images. Sets of composite descriptors, obtained by assigning different weights to the region component and the contour component, are also evaluated. Item S8 within the MPEG-7 Still Images Content Set is used for performing experiments; this dataset consists of 3621 still images. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptor is effective.<br />