Joint Online Thesis and Research System (JOTARS)

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a web-enabled database which facilitates research related connections and communication among Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) students, professors and DOD organizations. The proposed name for the prototype website is the Joint Online Thesis and Research System (JOTARS). The specific functional objectives of JOTARS are to establish standard infrastructure and processes that allow DOD organizations to dynamically propose research topics, view research in progress, and a means to suggest topics for class projects. JOTARS will also enable NPS students to conduct refined searches of proposed research topics.http://archive.org/details/jointonlinethesi109452544Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Share the Sky: Concepts and Technologies That Will Shape Future Airspace Use

The airspace challenge for the United States is to protect national sovereignty and ensure the safety and security of those on the ground and in the air, while at the same time ensuring the efficiency of flight, reducing the costs involved, protecting the environment, and protecting the freedom of access to the airspace. Many visions of the future NAS hold a relatively near-term perspective, focusing on existing uses of the airspace and assuming that new uses will make up a small fraction of total use. In the longer term, the skies will be filled with diverse and amazing new air vehicles filling our societal needs. Anticipated new vehicles include autonomous air vehicles acting both independently and in coordinated groups, unpiloted cargo carriers, and large numbers of personal air vehicles and small-scale point-to-point transports. These vehicles will enable new capabilities that have the potential to increase societal mobility, transport freight at lower cost and with lower environmental impact, improve the study of the Earth s atmosphere and ecosystem, and increase societal safety and security by improving or drastically lowering the cost of critical services such as firefighting, emergency medical evacuation, search and rescue, border and neighborhood surveillance, and the inspection of our infrastructure. To ensure that uses of the airspace can continue to grow for the benefit of all, a new paradigm for operations is needed: equitably and safely sharing the airspace. This paper is an examination of such a vision, concentrating on the operations of all types of air vehicles and future uses of the National Airspace. Attributes of a long-term future airspace system are provided, emerging operations technologies are described, and initial steps in research and development are recommended

Critical factors for enabling knowledge sharing between government agencies within South Africa

Globally, organisations have recognised the strategic importance of knowledge management (KM) and are increasingly focusing their efforts on practices to foster the creation, sharing and integration of knowledge. Whilst most research in Knowledge Management (KM) has focused on the private sector, there is a breadth of potential applications of KM theory and practice for government agencies to adopt in search of resolving pertinent problems. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that influence the effectiveness of knowledge management towards collaborative problem solving in government. What is missing is research-based evidence of the factors that influence the main factors for knowledge sharing across government agencies. Given this gap, the researcher addresses the research question: In government agencies mandated to resolve issues of crime, what are the key factors required which support and influence the collaborative sharing culture? Upon analysing the data, the researcher found the following key factors as being determinants on knowledge management: organisational culture, learning organisation, collaboration, subject matter experts and trust. The two factors – organisational culture and learning organisation were identified as the most significant factors which lay as the root or core for the ‘knowledge tree’. Once these roots are in place, the other factors will gain their significance on knowledge management. These findings serve to extend the findings of the existing literature within the government sector. This study is important because the findings provide government agencies with critically important information to guide their actions towards ensuring a knowledge sharing culture is embedded in government. Whilst the empirical findings do not focus on databases or information technology specifically, it is important to acknowledge the use of both technology and people. The main concern is with managing an organisation’s knowledge assets: creating, storing, protecting, disseminating and using mission-critical knowledge. When people need knowledge, is it the right knowledge and is it timely and easy to locate and access? Is this precious commodity updated as learning occurs and better ways of doing things are discovered? The awareness of the value of knowledge to a business, coupled with its leadership, acts as an integrator that improves cross- functional communication and cooperation. Shared knowledge not only makes for a more effective, efficient and agile organisation, but creates a common perspective and culture that produces a natural consistency of successful decisions and actions. The collaborative knowledge tree model proposed in this study uses the analogy of a tree when viewing South African government agencies as the branches of a collective tree (government). This ‘tree’ requires leaders and policy making to ‘dig deep’ into understanding the roots of the tree in order to ensure that the appropriate ‘seeds’ are planted such that the tree grows and is able to provide the necessary fruit required. Ultimately, as suggested by former President Thabo Mbeki (2012) in his address, the role of knowledge would thus be seen as a collaborative means towards the betterment of society

Virtual Team: Characteristics, Internal Group Dynamics And Effectiveness

Transformation of business enterprises and stronger business competition today has prompted the emergence of virtual teams. Thus, this study attempts to understand more about virtual team effectiveness and the influences from internal group dynamics, team characteristics and task complexity. Data collected through questionnaires from 152 teams have been analysed using SPSS version 11.0. There are six hypotheses that have been tested. Among these six, only two are supported. The findings showed that team characteristics do not impact internal group dynamics or team effectiveness; while internal group dynamics correlates positively with virtual team effectiveness. Among the dimensions, it is found that team member relations correlates positively to both team performance and team member satisfaction, while team leadership is found to be correlated positively to team member satisfaction

Impact of human resource management information systems on the quality of appraisal performance process

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.These days the recent development of information systems and their impact on human resource activities is one of the main hot debates in many large organizations. Many managers argue that adopting technology to incorporate the HR activities could help to improve the quality of management’s decision making process. Alternatively, there are big companies which are not adopting any specific type of technology in their HR activities. The purpose of this paper is to identify the impacts of HRIS on the quality of HR activities, particularly from the appraisal performance point of view. The concept of the impact of HRIS on HR activities was applied to the case of company X which is one of the leader chemical companies in UK. In that process, interviews were conducted and they were the main methods for collecting personnel feedback, opinions and experiences about their new HRIS. It could be seen that, although the result of the research showed improvement in the quality of the activities in HR department, the quality growth was not as much as expected. It was assumed that the reason behind this limited impact on some activities could be because the new system needs some more time to implement potential efficiency gains. It is too early to measure the impact of new system on part of HR activities such as employees’ satisfaction. Keywords: Human Resource Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Executive Information Systems, Strategic Information Systems, Information Systems, Human Resources

How Do Virtual Teams Work- A Social Relationship Model By SEM

Virtual teams have been brought the need for organizations to improve the performance of virtual teams. Among these key issues to be successful, social dimensions have been catching researchers and mangers’ attentions. Hence, this study derives a preliminary social relationship model from Powell et al’s (2004) virtual team framework and conduct an experiment to validate it by SEM. The results reveal: (1) Communication has a positive impact on relationship building; (2) Relationship building has a positive impact on cohesion; (3) Relationship building has a positive impact on trust; (4) cohesion and trust have positive impacts on performance

The impact of information technologies upon the organizational communication

This paper aims to bring a contribution to understanding the role of information technology tools in the organizational communication, starting from the framing of concepts like organizational communication and information technology approached by authors such as: Shannon, Weaver, Neilson, Pasternack & Viscio, Kearney etc. Then, the paper aims to go further into identifying certain explanatory dimensions of the information technology tools. This paper moves from the social interaction aspects to the virtual ones, once with the development of modern means of communication. In this aspect, the paper tries to shed light on how the use of new information technology tools, mainly the Intranet, Extranet and the Website, affects the ways in which organization’s employees interact inside the organization

Organization and coordination: An intra-and inter performance perspective

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Review of the Joint Capability Integration and Development System (JCIDS) and the National Security Space Acquisition Process (NSSAP)

Space systems are a critical enabler of the net-centric operation warfare (NCOW) needed to achieve victory in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The effective acquisition of affordable systems is vital to our National Security Strategy. Space systems play an important role throughout a wide spectrum of military and civil operations. Several challenging factors unique to space systems development are the high level of technological complexity, a broad joint user base, and the reliance on seamless interoperable systems to achieve superior capabilities for US warfighters. This research examines the interaction between the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) and the National Security Space Acquisition Process (NSSAP) through a qualitative case study and identifies ways to improve this interaction by answering investigative questions and providing recommendations to be tested in future research