Increasing the use of simulation in business

The nature of Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) and the use of DES in organisations is changing. Two important developments are the use of Visual Interactive Modelling systems and the use of DES in Business Process Management (BPM) projects. Survey research is presented that shows that despite these developments usage of DES remains relatively low due to a lack of knowledge of the benefits of the technique. This paper considers two factors that could lead to a greater achievement and appreciation of the full benefit of DES and thus lead to greater usage. Firstly in relation to using DES to investigate social systems, both in the process of undertaking a simulation project and in the interpretation of the findings a 'soft' approach may generate more knowledge from the DES intervention and thus increase its benefit to businesses. Secondly in order to assess the full range of outcomes of DES the technique could be considered from the perspective of an information processing tool within the organisation. This will allow outcomes to be considered under the three modes of organisational information use of sense making, knowledge creating and decision making which relate to the theoretical areas of knowledge management, organisational learning and decision making respectively. The association of DES with these popular techniques could further increase its usage in business.

Communities of implementation

The concept of communities of practice (CoPs) has rapidly gained ground in fields such as knowledge management and organisational learning since it was first identified by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Brown and Duguid (1991). In this article, we consider a related concept that we have entitled “communities of implementation.” Communities of implementation (CoIs) are similar to communities of practice in that they offer an opportunity for a collection of individuals to support each other and share knowledge in a dynamic environment and on a topic in which they share interest. In addition, and to differentiate them from CoPs, a community of implementation extends the responsibilities of a CoP by having as its focus the implementation of a programme of change. This may well extend to designing the change programme. Thus, whereas a main purpose of a CoP is to satisfy “a real need to know what each other knows” (Skyrme, 1999) in an informal way, we argue that a main purpose of a community of implementation is to “pool individual knowledge (including contacts and ways of getting things done) to stimulate collective enthusiasm in order to take more informed purposeful action for which the members are responsible.” Individual and collective responsibility and accountability for successfully implementing the actions/change programme is a key feature of a community of implementation. Without these pressures the members might lower the priority of implementation, allowing competing priorities to dominate their attention and resources. Without responsibility and accountability, the result is likely to be (at best) an organisation which has not begun a change programme, or (at worst) an organisation which is stuck halfway through another failing initiative. To achieve these additional objectives beyond those of a CoP, the CoI needs to provide heightened support to its members. In fact often the members will collectively strategise the development and implementation of the change programme they are leading in the organisation. Other concepts similar to CoPs have appeared in the literature, for example “communities of knowing” (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995), but none have a specific focus on implementation. Perhaps the closest example of a CoI, as suggested by our definition, is reported by Karsten, Lyytinen, Hurskainen, and Koskelainen (2001) who describe a CoP in a paper machinery manufacturer which seems to have the necessary focus on implementation. The theoretical aspects of this article will explore the relationship between CoPs and CoIs, and the needs for different arrangements for a CoI. The practical aspect of this article will consist of a report on a case study of a CoI that was successful in its implementation of a programme of change that aimed to improve its organisation’s knowledge management activities. Over two years the CoI implemented a suite of complementary actions across the organisation. These actions transformed the organisation and moved it towards achieving its ‘core values’ and overall objectives. The article will explore: the activities that formed and gelled the community, the role of the community in the implementation of actions, and experiences from key members of this community on its success and potential improvements.

A concept-based framework for retrieving evidence to support emergency physician decision making at the point of care

The goal of evidence-based medicine is to uniformly apply evidence gained from scientific research to aspects of clinical practice. In order to achieve this goal, new applications that integrate increasingly disparate health care information resources are required. Access to and provision of evidence must be seamlessly integrated with existing clinical workflow and evidence should be made available where it is most often required - at the point of care. In this paper we address these requirements and outline a concept-based framework that captures the context of a current patient-physician encounter by combining disease and patient-specific information into a logical query mechanism for retrieving relevant evidence from the Cochrane Library. Returned documents are organized by automatically extracting concepts from the evidence-based query to create meaningful clusters of documents which are presented in a manner appropriate for point of care support. The framework is currently being implemented as a prototype software agent that operates within the larger context of a multi-agent application for supporting workflow management of emergency pediatric asthma exacerbations. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Cultural impact of wireless networks:emerging experiences in the healthcare sector

Culture defines collective behavior and interactions among people in groups. In organizations, it shapes group identity, work pattern, communication schemes, and interpersonal relations. Any change in organizational culture will lead to changes in these elements of organizational factors, and vice versa. From a managerial standpoint, how to cultivate an organizational culture that would enhance these aforementioned elements in organizational workplace should thus be taken into serious consideration. Based on cases studies in two hospitals, this paper investigates how organizational culture is shaped by a particular type of information and communication technology, wireless networks, a topic that is generally overlooked by the mainstream research community, and in turn implicates how such cultural changes in organizations renovate their competitiveness in the marketplace. Lessons learned from these cases provide valuable insights to emerging IT management and culture studies in general and in wireless network management in the healthcare sector in particular.

The limits of open innovation:openness and (quasi-)markets in the organization of innovation

Recent studies have stressed the importance of ‘open innovation’ as a means of enhancing innovation performance. The essence of the open innovation model is to take advantage of external as well as internal knowledge sources in developing and commercialising innovation, so avoiding an excessively narrow internal focus in a key area of corporate activity. Although the external aspect of open innovation is often stressed, another key aspect involves maximising the flow of ideas and knowledge from different sources within the firm, for example through knowledge sharing via the use of cross-functional teams. A fully open innovation approach would therefore combine both aspects i.e. cross-functional teams with boundary-spanning knowledge linkages. This suggests that there should be complementarities between the use cross-functional teams with boundary-spanning knowledge linkages i.e. the returns to implementing open innovation in one innovation activity is should be greater if open innovation is already in place in another innovation activity. However, our findings – based on a large sample of UK and German manufacturing plants – do not support this view. Our results suggest that in practice the benefits envisaged in the open innovation model are not generally achievable by the majority of plants, and that instead the adoption of open innovation across the whole innovation process is likely to reduce innovation outputs. Our results provide some guidance on the type of activities where the adoption of a market-based governance structure such as open innovation may be most valuable. This is likely to be in innovation activities where search is deterministic, activities are separable, and where the required level of knowledge sharing is correspondingly moderate – in other words those activities which are more routinized. For this type of activity market-based governance mechanisms (i.e. open innovation) may well be more efficient than hierarchical governance structures. For other innovation activities where outcomes are more uncertain and unpredictable and the risks of knowledge exchange hazards are greater, quasi-market based governance structures such as open innovation are likely to be subject to rapidly diminishing returns in terms of innovation outputs.

Virtual manufacturing:a study of some important issues relating to the transformation of traditional manufacturing organisations

This thesis starts with a literature review, outlining the major issues identified in the literature concerning virtual manufacturing enterprise (VME) transformation. Then it details the research methodology used – a systematic approach for empirical research. next, based on the conceptual framework proposed, this thesis builds three modules to form a reference model, with the purpose of clarifying the important issues relevant to transforming a traditional manufacturing company into a VME. The first module proposes a mechanism of VME transformation – operating along the VME metabolism. The second module builds a management function within a VME to ensure a proper operation of the mechanism. This function helps identify six areas as closely related to VME transformation: lean manufacturing; competency protection; internal operation performance measurement; alliance performance measurement; knowledge management; alliance decision making. The third module continues and proposes an alliance performance measurement system which includes 14 categories of performance indicators. An analysis template for alliance decision making is also proposed and integrated into the first module. To validate these three modules, 7 manufacturing organisations (5 in China and 2 in the UK) were investigated, and these field case studies are analysed in this thesis. The evidence found in these organisations, together with the evidence collected from the literature, including both researcher views and literature case studies, provide support for triangulation evidence. In addition, this thesis identifies the strength and weakness patterns of the manufacturing companies within the theoretical niche of this research, and clarifies the relationships among some major research areas from the perspective of virtual manufacturing. Finally, the research findings are summarised, as well as their theoretical and practical implications. Research limitations and recommendations for future work conclude this thesis.

Learning sentiment classification model from labeled features

We propose a novel framework where an initial classifier is learned by incorporating prior information extracted from an existing sentiment lexicon. Preferences on expectations of sentiment labels of those lexicon words are expressed using generalized expectation criteria. Documents classified with high confidence are then used as pseudo-labeled examples for automatical domain-specific feature acquisition. The word-class distributions of such self-learned features are estimated from the pseudo-labeled examples and are used to train another classifier by constraining the model's predictions on unlabeled instances. Experiments on both the movie review data and the multi-domain sentiment dataset show that our approach attains comparable or better performance than exiting weakly-supervised sentiment classification methods despite using no labeled documents.

A novel framework of training hidden Markov support vector machines from lightly-annotated data

Natural language understanding (NLU) aims to map sentences to their semantic mean representations. Statistical approaches to NLU normally require fully-annotated training data where each sentence is paired with its word-level semantic annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework which trains the Hidden Markov Support Vector Machines (HM-SVMs) without the use of expensive fully-annotated data. In particular, our learning approach takes as input a training set of sentences labeled with abstract semantic annotations encoding underlying embedded structural relations and automatically induces derivation rules that map sentences to their semantic meaning representations. The proposed approach has been tested on the DARPA Communicator Data and achieved 93.18% in F-measure, which outperforms the previously proposed approaches of training the hidden vector state model or conditional random fields from unaligned data, with a relative error reduction rate of 43.3% and 10.6% being achieved.

Changing career models and capacity for innovation in professional services

A number of professional sectors have recently moved away from their longstanding career model of up-or-out promotion and embraced innovative alternatives. Professional labor is a critical resource in professional service firms. Therefore, changes to these internal labor markets are likely to trigger other innovations, for example in knowledge management, incentive schemes and team composition. In this chapter we look at how new career models affect the core organizing model of professional firms and, in turn, their capacity for and processes of innovation. We consider how professional firms link the development of human capital and the division of professional labor to distinctive demands for innovation and how novel career systems help them respond to these demands.

Joint sentiment/topic model for sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining aims to use automated tools to detect subjective information such as opinions, attitudes, and feelings expressed in text. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic modeling framework based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), called joint sentiment/topic model (JST), which detects sentiment and topic simultaneously from text. Unlike other machine learning approaches to sentiment classification which often require labeled corpora for classifier training, the proposed JST model is fully unsupervised. The model has been evaluated on the movie review dataset to classify the review sentiment polarity and minimum prior information have also been explored to further improve the sentiment classification accuracy. Preliminary experiments have shown promising results achieved by JST.