Do rumours contribute to knowledge management - and will we ever know?

Organisational rumour mongering and informal knowledge transfer share common characteristics. They both rely on informal social groups for communication. Uncertainty caused from changing environments leads to increased activity in both. The process of rumour mongering involves discussing content. Implicit in the informal knowledge transfer process is the same. Although they share characteristics, rumour and informal knowledge transfer are treated differently. The former is seen as negative and destructive while the latter is a positive influence. This paper reports on an empirical pilot study carried out at a university to see if organisational rumour contributes toward informal knowledge transfer. The discussion focuses on the challenges encountered and limitations of researching a sensitive area such as rumour

Investigating the death of a Legend

Includes image: '___', 1927.AbstractThe untimely death of the New Zealand iconic figure John Mulgan shortly after leaving liberated Greece in 1945 has fuelled popular conjecture about his suicide. An analysis of the investigation archive is carried out to determine to what extent one could argue he did not take his own life but was a victim of a British conspiracy. The degree of ambiguity, a key variable in conspiracy theorising, in the extended investigations of Mulgan's death, is considered, as well as any possible motivation for a cover-up

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse