Knowledge Management Leadership In Australia: The Understanding Of Knowledge Management Roles & Responsibilities

Leadership is considered a vital success factor for any KM initiative. Top management leadership enables the effective promotion of knowledge creation and sharing as essential components of knowledge management strategy implementation through creating an appropriate organisational culture. Such culture does not automatically exist in any organisation, but requires nurturing through appropriate governance and specific leadership initiatives. This study examined the roles and responsibilities of top managers with respect to KM strategy development and implementation. It is based on a survey data collected from leading Australian companies in 2005

Coordinated neuronal ensembles in primary auditory cortical columns.

The synchronous activity of groups of neurons is increasingly thought to be important in cortical information processing and transmission. However, most studies of processing in the primary auditory cortex (AI) have viewed neurons as independent filters; little is known about how coordinated AI neuronal activity is expressed throughout cortical columns and how it might enhance the processing of auditory information. To address this, we recorded from populations of neurons in AI cortical columns of anesthetized rats and, using dimensionality reduction techniques, identified multiple coordinated neuronal ensembles (cNEs), which are groups of neurons with reliable synchronous activity. We show that cNEs reflect local network configurations with enhanced information encoding properties that cannot be accounted for by stimulus-driven synchronization alone. Furthermore, similar cNEs were identified in both spontaneous and evoked activity, indicating that columnar cNEs are stable functional constructs that may represent principal units of information processing in AI

Adoption and maintenance of environmental management systems: critical success factors

The implementation of various management systems and standards has become an important activity for organisations irrespective of their size, sector or nature of the business. Even with a history of implementing change across the organisation, managers continue to experience resistance and challenges when implementing and maintaining the systems/standards, whether they be in quality, occupational health and safety, environmental or any other area. Based on a major research project recently completed, this paper presents the critical success factors for successful implementation of an environmental management system. The project involved three phases of fieldwork: preliminary interviews, a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews. A brief summary of the findings from each of these phases of research is presented. Based on the findings, the paper discusses the critical success factors for the successful implementation and maintenance of EMS.<br /

Stakeholder involvement in the EMS adoption process

This paper summarises the findings of the qualitative part of a large study aimed at exploring the extent of involvement of organisational stakeholders (employees and suppliers) during the environmental management system (EMS) adoption process. Interviews with nine senior/middle managers from Australian manufacturing and service organisations revealed the growing awareness of the impact of their products and processes on the ecological and social environments. Moreover, implementation of an EMS or waste management system (WMS) is accepted as a learning curve by both the organisation and its stakeholders, including its employees. Organisations at the same time are also contemplating the need for certifying their existing EMS against international standards such as ISO 14001 based on the cost-benefits resulting from the certification.<br /

A framework for environmental management system adoption and maintenance : an Australian perspective

Purpose &ndash; The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for environmental management system (EMS) adoption which can be used by managers to enable them to achieve a faster, smoother, effective and sustainable EMS implementation. This is termed by the authors as &ldquo;successful&rdquo; EMS implementation.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; The framework presented is based on an extensive field study conducted in Australia that included a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews conducted with practitioners, the results of which have been reported in this and other journals.Findings &ndash; The framework presented covers three distinct phases, namely development, certification and maintenance and continuous improvement. Preliminary assessment of this framework by a group of Australian experts that included four senior managers, one academic and one consultant suggests that this framework is a useful tool for implementing an effective EMS.Practical implications &ndash; Each of the three phases of the framework provides a step-by-step approach and a sequential map towards a successful EMS implementation.Originality/value &ndash; The framework has been developed from extensive fieldwork and has been validated by a group of &ldquo;experts&rdquo; which comprised of four industry practitioners, one management academic, and one EMS consultant. The framework provides a detailed understanding of the steps involved in the implementation, certification, and maintenance of EMS. <br /

Integrated management system:the experiences of three Australian organisations

Purpose &ndash; Management systems and standards have become a key part of the organisation\u27s lifeline and a prerequisite for survival in the twenty-first century. Systems for quality environmental and occupational health and safety (OHS) now form the three main pillars of the organisation, the fourth one being financial accounting. In light of the increasing pressure and demands from different stakeholders, it is becoming necessary for organisations to adopt the different systems/standards. However, to achieve the benefits from the implementation and subsequently maintenance of these systems it is only a practical and logical step that the existing management systems/standards be integrated into a single system. Design/methodology/approach &ndash; This paper presents the experiences of three Australian-based organisations that have successfully undertaken the integration of their management systems/standards. Data for this paper were collected through in-depth interviews conducted with the managers responsible for quality, environment and OHS systems. Findings &ndash; The interviews revealed a number of quantifiable and unquantifiable benefits experienced by the companies from operating one integrated system, such as saving of dollars, better utilisation of resources and improved communication across the organisation, to name a few. However, for the benefits to be realized it is essential that organisations are aware of the challenges and obstacles accompanying integration of systems/standards. If these challenges are not addressed early in the process they can delay the completion of the integration process. Originality/value &ndash; Recommendations for other organisations contemplating integrating their management system include: obtaining commitment from the top management; having adequate resources to integrate the systems; having communication and training across the organisation in aspects of integration; and, last but not the least, having integrated audits. Implementation of these recommendations may vary from one organisation to another; however, it would result in lesser resistance for the organisations following them. <br /

Optimized Speaker Diarization System using Discrete Wavelet Transform and Pyknogram

The aim of this paper is to present an optimized speaker diarization system that efficiently detects speaker change points in multispeaker speech data. Speaker diarization is the process to detect speaker turns and group together segments uttered by the same speaker. It can be used in speaker recognition, audio information retrieval, audio transcription, audio clustering, indexing and captioning of TV shows and movies. In this proposed technique, the daubechies 40-wavelet transform is used to compress the audio stream in the ratio of 1:4; their features are extracted by enhanced spectrogram called pyknogram based on Teaser Kaiser Energy Operator (TKEO). This method relies on resonances (formants) and harmonic structure of speech which are enhanced by decomposing the spectral sub-bands into amplitude and frequency components. The weighted average of the instantaneous frequency components are used to derive a short-time estimate value for the dominant frequency in each subband over a fixed period of time 0.12msec. Sudden changes in the dominant frequency correspond to the speaker change point and are detected by using traditional delta Bayesian Information Criteria (?BIC). This technique do not uses voice activity detection process (VAD). For re-segmentation, Information Change Rate (ICR) is used. Finally, hierarchical clustering algorithm make groups of homogeneous segments and are plotted by Dendrogram function in Matlab. The results are evaluated by F-measure and diarization error rate. It shows that the proposed method gives fast and better results as compared to traditional method with Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) algorithms