Lessons learnt from the broadband diffusion in South Korea and the UK: Implications for future government intervention in technology diffusion

Governments around the globe are rapidly introducing e-government initiatives with the role of the internet being regarded as pertinent. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer the capacity to an improved internet. Broadband technology is a form of ICT that is currently being adopted and diffused in many countries. In this paper, we outline how the role of the government can sustain broadband adoption. We use a framework developed by King et al. regarding institutional actions related to IT diffusion and examine the institutional actions taken by the South Korean government (hereafter referred as Korea) and we compare them with relevant policies pursued in Britain (hereafter referred as UK). We demonstrate that a comparison between the IT policies of the two countries allows research to extract the 'success factors' in government intervention in supporting technology diffusion, in order to render favourable results if applied elsewhere

Managing Wireless Networks in the Healthcare Sector: Emerging Experiences of Cultural Impacts

The existing body of knowledge has generally supported that organizational culture plays a significant role in shaping group identity, work pattern, communication schemes, and interpersonal relations; all of these cultural elements are important organizational factors that shape workplaces and operational routines. In the context of emerging information technology, it has also been suggested that organizational culture could affect IT implementation and management. However, little is known about how emerging information technology shapes organizational culture, which in turn helps reshape the organization as a whole. The purpose of this paper is thus to build empirical understanding of how IT in general and emerging wireless networks in particular reshapes organizational culture. Case studies conducted in two hospitals situated in southwest U.S.A. illustrated that the implementation of wireless networks indeed helped shape and/or reshape organizational culture in the healthcare sector and in turn enhance healthcare organizations’ competitiveness in the marketplace. For IT managers and practitioners in healthcare institutions, effective strategy to plan and manage emerging ITs such as wireless networks will thus have long-term implications on cultivating organizational culture that could eventually reshape workplace and competitiveness

Knowledge Management Practice at a Bulgarian Bank: A Case Study

This paper reports on knowledge management (KM) practices in the customer service and lending departments of one of Bulgaria's top retail banks and investigates how KM processes can be further improved. The Bank's KM activities have been studied using observations, interviews and informal discussions for data collection. Findings were compared and contrasted with existing literature in similar contexts. Although rudiments of knowledge sharing are evident from the KM activities in different departments of the bank, the limitations such as resistance to change of the implemented KM systems are impeding the effectiveness of the knowledge management process. More training and incentives are needed to increase knowledge creation and sharing. Moreover, a clearly articulated KM strategy along with success criteria and commitment and support from senior management is needed. There is a severe lack of knowledge management studies in Bulgarian context in general and Bulgarian banking sector in particular. The authors' findings will potentially help in improving knowledge sharing practice as well as provide a valuable insight into knowledge management related issues in the Bulgarian context. The findings from this research can be useful to companies from Eastern Europe and other regions in improving their knowledge sharing practice

Issues of standardization concerning organizational culture in change management

This paper is a challenge in taking another view on cultural elements, considered to be more specific then any other strategic issues of management. The paper is structured into the following parts: cultural dimensions and variables; barriers to the organizational culture change and organizational culture change and its adaptation to world values. Conclusions lead to the possibilities of standardizing some related to organizational culture issues, such as: communication, relations and organization’s flexibility, which may be considered as organizational culture elements that are to be standardized.change management; organizational culture; standardization

Integrating digital document acquisition into a university library : A case study of social and organizational challenges

In this article we report on the effort of the university library of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration to integrate a digital library component for research documents authored at the university into the existing library infrastructure. Setting up a digital library has become a relatively easy task using the current data base technology and the components and tools freely available. However, to integrate such a digital library into existing library systems and to adapt existing document acquisition work-flows in the organization are non-trivial tasks. We use a research frame work to identify the key players in this change process and to analyze their incentive structures. Then we describe the light-weight integration approach employed by our university and show how it provides incentives to the key players and at the same time requires only minimal adaptation of the organization in terms of changing existing work-flows. Our experience suggests that this light-weight integration offers a cost efficient and low risk intermediate step towards switching to exclusive digital document acquisition