Knowledge Sharing Mediates the Relationship Between Budget Participation and Innovative Work Behavior

This study researches the role of knowledge sharing as a mediator between budget participation and innovative work behaviour of budget preparers within Libyan public industrial companies. This research is modelled on organisational knowledge creation theory, where the theory of knowledge creation is employed to justify and explore the effect of budget participation on knowledge sharing, and then creation of new knowledge. Quantitative methods were applied to achieve the research purpose: a single questionnaire was developed and distributed to 480 personnel involved in budget preparation within Libyan public industrial companies, from which 210 completed questionnaires were analysed. The Structural Equation Modelling technique and SmartPLS software were employed to analyse the relevant data. The innovative behaviour in the workplace of the budget participants was affected by their participation in the budget setting process: an indirect relationship being established through knowledge sharing, where results showed that there is an indirect relationship via knowledge sharing between budget participation and innovative work behaviour. The study recommends exploiting the budgetary participation of staff as a means to enhance and develop knowledge sharing. Keywords: Knowledge Sharing; Budget Participation; Innovative Work Behavior; Budget Preparers; Libyan Industrial Companies

Social software and interactions in Web design: an in situ exploration of tools & methods to support designer-client communication

This paper outlines the scope, approach and current progress of a thesis which is investigating the role that Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) plays in supporting the design process within the web design industry. Specifically, the thesis investigates designer-client communication, and explores the issues with technologies to support this communication. This research is situated within the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Web design businesses use a variety of CMC tools to support communication with their clients; however they must rely on general purpose tools which the client has prior knowledge of. Social Software solutions which can better support these processes have yet to become adopted within the industry. The research question for this work is how can Social Software be better designed to support designer-client communication within web design businesses? A platform that facilitates the creation of Social Software will be designed, deployed and evaluated in situ to investigate the problems and opportunities for Social Software within this space. An iterative design process will be used to develop and evaluate the platform through the use of ethnographic action research and design thinking methods. The aim of the platform is to reduce the challenges of introducing new software into web design businesses, and evaluate the platform through participatory design studies of developing new tools which better support the design process. The results of the platform will be used to inform a design framework for Social Software designers wanting to develop tools to support communication in this context

Identifying the process of national knowledge creation and learning and evaluating its impact on gross domestic product, considering the mediating role of national intelligencee

Background and Objectives: The economic growth of a country depends on several factors, among which the role of knowledge is undeniable. Many studies have shown that countries' GDP is often affected by the country's knowledge infrastructure. A knowledge-based economy is an economy that is directly based on the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge, and investment in knowledge and knowledge-based industries is given special attention. In this economy, where a significant share of GDP is from knowledge-based and knowledge-creating activities, knowledge generates more production than traditional factors such as labor and capital, and the value of many software and biotechnology companies arises from non-physical capitals, i.e. their knowledge and scientific privileges. Accordingly, knowledge creation is an essential weapon in today's world and without a continuous process of knowledge creation, any society is doomed to destruction. Knowledge creation and learning is the creation of new knowledge, or the replacement and improvement of the existing knowledge through social relations and organizational partnerships. The creation and application of knowledge has a major role in increasing wealth in a knowledge-based economy. The problem is that knowledge creation and learning has not been investigated at the national level yet. Methods: By applying qualitative-quantitative methods, based on Delphi technique, the procedure of identifying and explaining the processes of national knowledge creation and learning has been discussed first. Then by using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, a significant t-value of more than 1.96, between the identified dimensions and the variable national knowledge creation and learning, was obtained that was acceptable. Findings: Additionally, the impact of the process of national knowledge creation and learning on GDP was measured through conducting a survey and using a questionnaire, while taking the mediating role of national intelligence into account by using Sobel test. It was found that by including the mediating variable of national intelligence, the standardized beta for the relationship between national knowledge creation and learning, and gross domestic product was reduced from 0.80 to 0.18, but it is significant. Conclusion: Therefore, the variable national intelligence plays the role of a partial mediator; in other words, while the impact of national knowledge creation and learning, as the main variable, is maintained, the mediating role of national intelligence also affects GDP. This research had some limitations. One of these limitations was the stereotyped thinking about the process of knowledge creation. In this study, only one dimension of knowledge management, namely ‘knowledge creation’ was used. While we can pay attention to all the processes of the knowledge management cycle in society, instead of just thinking about the creation of knowledge at the national level, in order to promote national performance. Based on this, it is suggested that other researchers consider other dimensions of the knowledge management cycle and go one step further. Researchers can also examine the existing challenges and potential barriers to the national knowledge creation process or the requirements for knowledge creation at the national level. Alternatively, researchers can study international knowledge creation processes by considering cultural differences and provide solutions to increase the likelihood of knowledge creation globally. It is suggested that future researchers make a comparative study of the national knowledge creation model with other models of measuring intellectual capital in the world and examine the strengths and weaknesses of each model and prioritize these models based on their applicability in similar countries. It is also suggested that researchers use fuzzy logic theory to make relative measurements of each of the constructs of the national knowledge creation process and conduct field and academic research in this regard. As another suggestion, researchers can conduct this research on a specific industry and compare its results with the results of this study.   ===================================================================================== COPYRIGHTS  ©2020 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.  ====================================================================================

Towards understanding the value-creation in agile projects

In recent years, iterative and incremental approaches for software development appeared as an alternative to the traditional, waterfall-style development. The reason for this is the large number of software projects in the past that failed to deliver useful products within budget, and struggled with changing requirements and scope creep. Meanwhile it is a common sense understanding that not all projects are predictable from the beginning. Market uncertainty and a fast changing business environment drives changes during the development of a software product.\ud One of the key characteristics of any agile approach is its explicit focus on Business Value. Although any software development method aims at creating a product and thus creating value, in agile software projects the value creation for the clients represents the essence and defines the focus of the process. Thus, the agile development process is a value creation process.\ud The agile methods allow for frequent decisions about the requirements that will be considered for implementation during the short development cycles called iterations. In practice this decision-making is implemented by the process of requirements prioritization and re-prioritization, performed at the beginning of each iteration.\ud This work is dedicated to exploring and understanding the process of value-creation for clients in agile projects, with a particular focus on the requirements prioritization and reprioritization during a project, as an agile-specific value creation practice.\ud We performed a number of research steps to explore some of the current agile practices that seem to contribute to the value creation, and thus to distil knowledge that the agile practitioners apply and that might help to improve the agile practice.\ud Further, we studied in detail the agile prioritization process and identified the criteria, used in the decision-making process, and relations between the project context and the instantiation of the process.\ud In particular, we researched the following topics:\ud • How is business value perceived and measured in agile projects?\ud • What practices contribute to value creation in agile projects in different contexts?\ud • What concepts play a role in making re-prioritization decisions about\ud requirements?\ud These questions represent the focus of our research activities. They lead and framed the formulation of our Research Questions and the research design.\ud The main contribution of our work to the research and practitioners’ communities\ud consists in the rich contextual description of the process of requirements prioritization in agile projects as well as a conceptual model of this process

Business Value Is not only Dollars - Results from Case Study Research on Agile Software Projects

Business value is a key concept in agile software development. This paper presents results of a case study on how business value and its creation is perceived in the context of agile projects. Our overall conclusion is that the project participants almost never use an explicit and structured approach to guide the value creation throughout the project. Still, the application of agile methods in the studied cases leads to satisfied clients. An interesting result of the study represents the fact that the agile process of many projects differs significantly from what is described in the agile practitioners’ books as best practices. The key implication for research and practice is that we have an incentive to pursue the study of value creation in agile projects and to complement it by providing guidelines for better client’s involvement, as well as by developing structured methods that will enhance the value-creation in a project

On the role of pre and post-processing in environmental data mining

The quality of discovered knowledge is highly depending on data quality. Unfortunately real data use to contain noise, uncertainty, errors, redundancies or even irrelevant information. The more complex is the reality to be analyzed, the higher the risk of getting low quality data. Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD) offers a global framework to prepare data in the right form to perform correct analyses. On the other hand, the quality of decisions taken upon KDD results, depend not only on the quality of the results themselves, but on the capacity of the system to communicate those results in an understandable form. Environmental systems are particularly complex and environmental users particularly require clarity in their results. In this paper some details about how this can be achieved are provided. The role of the pre and post processing in the whole process of Knowledge Discovery in environmental systems is discussed

A framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry

This paper presents a framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry. The aim of this approach is to strengthen the modularity and reuse of engineering design ontologies to support knowledge management initiatives within the aerospace industry. Successful development and effective utilisation of engineering ontologies strongly depends on the method/framework used to develop them. Ensuring modularity in ontology design is essential for engineering design activities due to the complexity of knowledge that is required to be brought together to support the product design decision-making process. The proposed approach adopts best practices from previous ontology development methods, but focuses on encouraging modular architectural ontology design. The framework is comprised of three phases namely: (1) Ontology design and development; (2) Ontology validation and (3) Implementation of ontology structure. A qualitative research methodology is employed which is composed of four phases. The first phase defines the capture of knowledge required for the framework development, followed by the ontology framework development, iterative refinement of engineering ontologies and ontology validation through case studies and experts’ opinion. The ontology-based framework is applied in the combustor and casing aerospace engineering domain. The modular ontologies developed as a result of applying the framework and are used in a case study to restructure and improve the accessibility of information on a product design information-sharing platform. Additionally, domain experts within the aerospace industry validated the strengths, benefits and limitations of the framework. Due to the modular nature of the developed ontologies, they were also employed to support other project initiatives within the case study company such as role-based computing (RBC), IT modernisation activity and knowledge management implementation across the sponsoring organisation. The major benefit of this approach is in the reduction of man-hours required for maintaining engineering design ontologies. Furthermore, this approach strengthens reuse of ontology knowledge and encourages modularity in the design and development of engineering ontologies