Accounting decoupled : A case study of accounting regime change in a Malaysian company

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A systematic consulting approach to knowledge management

Knowledge management is believed to be a fundamental practice to modern corporations, being a source of innovation, operational efficiency, and the foundation for creating and sustaining competitive advantages. Nevertheless, the right approach to managing knowledge is not obvious and it demands the correct definition of “knowledge” to be aligned with a company’s culture, practices, goals, and strategy. This research was conducted inside Unicre, a traditional Portuguese company in the financial industry. Having a consulting bias, the main goal was to solve the client’s pain, caused by knowledge vacuums or gaps, created when a key employee leaves the company taking with him years of experience that were not yet crystallized into the firm’s know-how. Qualitative data was collected from a series of interviews, field visits, and internal documents and analyzed with the use of coding methods to test the two hypotheses elaborated to explain the causes of the problem. The study argued that the knowledge gaps were created fundamentally because knowledge was ill-defined in the company, leading to systems that are not designed to effectively retain it. The data showed that the hypotheses partially explained the problem, as it was possible to identify other points of improvements key for Unicre’s success in managing knowledge. The author concludes with a series of recommendations aiming at impacting the company’s culture, initiatives, and infrastructure for knowledge management.A gestão do conhecimento é uma prática fundamental para as empresas modernas, sendo uma fonte de inovação, eficiência operacional, e a base para criar e sustentar vantagens competitivas. No entanto, um programa de gestão de conhecimento não é de organização trivial e exige que a definição correta de "conhecimento" esteja alinhada com a cultura, práticas, objetivos e estratégias de uma empresa. Esta investigação foi conduzida dentro da Unicre, uma empresa tradicional portuguesa do sector financeiro. Sendo um projeto de consultoria, o principal objetivo foi solucionar o desafio proposto cliente, sendo este o de evitar a formação de lacunas ou vazios de conhecimento, criados quando um funcionário-chave deixa a empresa e leva consigo anos de experiência que ainda não estavam cristalizados no know-how da companhia. Foram recolhidos dados qualitativos a partir de uma série de entrevistas, visitas de campo e documentos internos, que foram posteriormente analisados com o uso de métodos de codificação para testar as duas hipóteses elaboradas como prováveis causas do problema. O estudo argumentou que as lacunas de conhecimento foram criadas fundamentalmente porque o conhecimento estava mal definido na empresa, levando a sistemas que não são concebidos para o reter eficazmente. Os dados mostraram que as hipóteses explicavam parcialmente o problema, uma vez que era possível identificar outros pontos de melhoria chave para o sucesso da Unicre na gestão do conhecimento. O autor conclui com uma série de recomendações destinadas a ter impacto na cultura, nas iniciativas e na infraestrutura da empresa voltada à gestão do conhecimento

Online advertising: analysis of privacy threats and protection approaches

Online advertising, the pillar of the “free” content on the Web, has revolutionized the marketing business in recent years by creating a myriad of new opportunities for advertisers to reach potential customers. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure composed of a variety of intermediary entities and technologies whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded behind the scenes at an unprecedented rate. Despite the enormous value of online advertising, however, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prompt serious privacy concerns. This article surveys the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting technologies, and presents a thorough overview of the underlying privacy risks and the solutions that may mitigate them. We first analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising. In particular, we examine the main components of the advertising infrastructure in terms of tracking capabilities, data collection, aggregation level and privacy risk, and overview the tracking and data-sharing technologies employed by these components. Then, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and compare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and impact on the Web.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Large emergency-response exercises: qualitative characteristics - a survey

Exercises, drills, or simulations are widely used, by governments, agencies and commercial organizations, to simulate serious incidents and train staff how to respond to them. International cooperation has led to increasingly large-scale exercises, often involving hundreds or even thousands of participants in many locations. The difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’ exercises is more than one of size: (a) Large exercises are more ‘experiential’ and more likely to undermine any model of reality that single organizations may create; (b) they create a ‘play space’ in which organizations and individuals act out their own needs and identifications, and a ritual with strong social implications; (c) group-analytic psychotherapy suggests that the emotions aroused in a large group may be stronger and more difficult to control. Feelings are an unacknowledged major factor in the success or failure of exercises; (d) successful large exercises help improve the nature of trust between individuals and the organizations they represent, changing it from a situational trust to a personal trust; (e) it is more difficult to learn from large exercises or to apply the lessons identified; (f) however, large exercises can help develop organizations and individuals. Exercises (and simulation in general) need to be approached from a broader multidisciplinary direction if their full potential is to be realized

An Ontological Approach to Representing the Product Life Cycle

The ability to access and share data is key to optimizing and streamlining any industrial production process. Unfortunately, the manufacturing industry is stymied by a lack of interoperability among the systems by which data are produced and managed, and this is true both within and across organizations. In this paper, we describe our work to address this problem through the creation of a suite of modular ontologies representing the product life cycle and its successive phases, from design to end of life. We call this suite the Product Life Cycle (PLC) Ontologies. The suite extends proximately from The Common Core Ontologies (CCO) used widely in defense and intelligence circles, and ultimately from the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which serves as top level ontology for the CCO and for some 300 further ontologies. The PLC Ontologies were developed together, but they have been factored to cover particular domains such as design, manufacturing processes, and tools. We argue that these ontologies, when used together with standard public domain alignment and browsing tools created within the context of the Semantic Web, may offer a low-cost approach to solving increasingly costly problems of data management in the manufacturing industry