Intranet and Knowledge Management: Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

This paper explores the use of intranet-technology to support knowledge intensive decision-making in a technical service delivery process of a major oilfield services company. Our findings show that creating, mobilizing, and exchanging knowledge through an intranet-technology based system delivers forms of benefits to both the organization and its clients, and understanding what organizational knowledge is to be managed and the process of managing it define the role of technology that enables knowledge management

Preschool growth and nutrition service - addressing common nutritional problems: a community based primary care led intervention

Childhood obesity has been prioritised by the World Health Organization in a recent report, which calls for a holistic multiagency approach to tackling and reducing future risks of obesity and its associated co-morbidities. This article examines a health service approach to improving recognition and management of pre-school nutritional problems as part of training health care professionals. It explores the practicalities of setting up a local pathway for managing cases in the community with appropriate specialist support. This model, developed for the management of weight faltering, has now been adapted to tackle childhood obesity

The Internet's Effects on Global Production Networks: Challenges and Opportunities for Managing in Developing Asia

Placing global production networks (GPN) on the Internet poses a fundamental challenge, but also creates new opportunities for managing in Developing Asia. Network flagships can now select best-performing suppliers on a global scale, increasing the pressure on Asian suppliers. But the transition form EDI to the Internet may also provide new opportunities for Asian suppliers, by reducing barriers to network entry, and by enhancing knowledge diffusion. A conceptual framework is introduced to assess how the Internet reshapes business organization and GPN. That framework is applied to one of the role models of managing in Asia, Taiwan's Acer Group. The paper highlights a vicious circle that must be broken to reap the benefits of the Internet: Asian firms must reduce a huge efficiency gap between manufacturing and the management of supporting digital information systems (DIS). The challenge is to embrace the Internet as flexible infrastructures that support not only information exchange, but also knowledge sharing, creation and utilization. The Internet facilities this task: it provides new opportunities for the outsourcing of mission-critical support services.

Framework of Social Customer Relationship Management in E-Health Services

Healthcare organization is implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as a strategy for managing interactions with patients involving technology to organize, automate, and coordinate business processes. Web-based CRM provides healthcare organization with the ability to broaden service beyond its usual practices in achieving a complex patient care goal, and this paper discusses and demonstrates how a new approach in CRM based on Web 2.0 or Social CRM helps healthcare organizations to improve their customer support, and at the same time avoiding possible conflicts, and promoting better healthcare to patients. A conceptual framework of the new approach will be proposed and highlighted. The framework includes some important features of Social CRM such as customer's empowerment, social interactivity between healthcare organization-patients, and patients-patients. The framework offers new perspective in building relationships between healthcare organizations and customers and among customers in e-health scenario. It is developed based on the latest development of CRM literatures and case studies analysis. In addition, customer service paradigm in social network's era, the important of online health education, and empowerment in healthcare organization will be taken into consideration.Comment: 15 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1204.3689, arXiv:1203.3919, arXiv:1204.3685, arXiv:1203.4309, arXiv:1204.3691, arXiv:1203.392

Outsourcing: guidelines for a structured approach

Outsourcing is a management approach by which an organization delegates some noncore functions to specialized and ef®cient service providers. In the era of ªglobal marketº and ªe-economyº, outsourcing is one of the main pillars of the new way to conceive the relationships among companies. Despite outsourcing large diffusion, huge business cases and big deals of documentation available on network or press, there is no structured procedure able to support the govern of the evolution of a generic outsourcing process. In accordance with the principles of total quality management, this paper describes a proposal of a new approach for managing outsourcing processes. The model, which can be easily adapted to different application ®elds, has been conceived with the main aim of managing strategic decisions, economic factors and human resources. The approach is supported by different decision and analysis tools, such as benchmarking techniques, multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) methods, cost analysis, and other process-planning methodologies. An application of the method to a real case is also provide

The Organization of New Service Development in the USA and UK

We understand a great deal about the organization and management of new product development in the manufacturing sector, but we know relatively little about how applicable this research and practice is to the service sector. In this paper we introduce and test a framework for managing new product development in services. This framework is derived and tested by analyzing 108 service firms in a combined US and UK dataset, and then each national sub-sample separately. Our results generally support the predictive capability of the framework, and suggest that the development strategy, processes, organization and tools derived from manufacturing, specially those of concurrent engineering, are applicable to services. However, the framework better fits the US than UK data, which may question the notion of a 'best practice' applicable to different contexts.product development, services, concurrent engineering, simultaneous development

Placing the Networks on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities for Managing in Developing Asia

Placing the networks on the Web poses a fundamental challenge, but also provides new opportunities for managing in Developing Asia. There is a huge efficiency gap between the region's manufacturing systems and the management of complementary, knowledge-intensive support services. The challenge is to reduce this gap as quickly as possible by embracing the Internet as a core business function, despite a weak base of accumulated knowledge of how to manage IT-based information systems. Asian companies, even the best, lag substantially behind their American and European counterparts. There is a potential vicious circle that needs to be broken: a belated transition to IT-based information systems has prevented the accumulation of knowledge, through trial-and-error, of how to design and implement an appropriate IT organization that reflects the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of diverse Asian management systems. Limited resources prevent any attempt to address these problems in a big leap forward. This implies that in-house efforts need to be supplemented with outsourcing of IT services. There is also a need for strategic partnering with major suppliers of Internet software and networking equipment. The opportunity is that the Internet provides almost unlimited opportunities for the outsourcing of mission-critical support services, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), HRM (human resource management). Furthermore, fierce competition among major producers of Internet software and networking equipment has created a buyers' market - placing Asian firms in a reasonably strong bargaining position. These developments are generally not well covered by existing studies, which are primarily focused on developments in the U.S. and Europe. The paper tries to fill this gap, and explores how placing global production networks on the Web affects managing in Developing Asia. A conceptual framework is introduced in parts 1 to 3. That framework is then applied to one of the role models of managing in Asia, Taiwan's Acer Group. Part 1 introduces a taxonomy of expected benefits from Internet-enabled transformations of business organization. In part 2, we argue that the real issue is to analyze how the Internet reshapes the organization of global production networks. In part3, we access conflicting claims on how an increased use of the Internet to manage global production networks affects international knowledge diffusion. In part 4, the example of Taiwan's Acer Group is used to describe the challenge for Asian firms to embrace the Internet as a key management function. And in part 5, we ask what Acer's experience tells us about Developing Asia's opportunities.

Are There Managerial Practices Associated with Service Delivery Collaboration Success?: Evidence from British Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships

Little empirical work exists measuring if interagency collaborations delivering public services produce better outcomes, and none looking inside the black box at collaboration management practices. We examine whether there are collaboration management practices associated with improved performance of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, a crossagency collaboration in England and Wales. These exist in every local authority in England and Wales, so there are enough of them to permit quantitative analysis. And their aim is crime reduction, and crime data over time are available, allowing actual results (rather than perceptions or self-reports) to be analyzed longitudinally. We find that there are management practices associated with greater success at reducing crime, mostly exhibited through interaction effects such that the practice in question is effective in some circumstances but not others. Our findings support the arguments of those arguing that effective management of collaborations is associated with tools for managing any organization, not ones unique to managing collaborations: if you want to be a good collaboration manager, you should be a good manager, period.