Managing value creation in knowledge intensive business services organisations

Value creation is essential in the Knowledge Intensive Business Service (KIBS) industry, due to its problem-solving nature. KIBS organisations need to understand their internal value creation processes as well as the complexity in the environment in order to survive and thrive. This paper investigates how value creation is managed in KIBS organisation through a case study. It then goes on to adopt Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to propose an organisational design, namely the Value Integration Office (VIO). The VIO focuses on the 5 functions/systems defined by VSM in the meta-system and operation of an organisation in order to manage value creation. This design is implemented in a case study organisation with the aim to adopt a holistic view on value creation within the organisation as well as facilitate future planning function. The implementation and impact of the proposed organisational design are reported in this paper

Three dimensional norm-based knowledge management for knowledge intensive business service organizations: an organizational semiotics perspective

The utilization of knowledge enables knowledge intensive business service (KIBS) organizations, such as law firms, to perform and deliver value to their customers. Organizational semiotics views norms as knowledge that are developed through practical experience of human agents in organizations. Building on organizational semiotics and knowledge management, this paper proposes a three dimensional norm-based knowledge management (3DNKM) framework for legal sector in the UK. Abductive reasoning is adopted for guiding the research process in this paper. The three identified contextual dimensions of knowledge include customer, practice area and lawyer. For each dimension, there are informal, formal and technical norms establishing context-based knowledge. The proposed framework provides a way for KIBS organizations to manage the intertwined norms from the three dimensions and various levels

An Exploratory Study into Employee Attitudes towards Digitalisation of Library Services in Higher Education (3)

With the advent of technologies, library services in higher education face pressure to increase their level of digitalisation in order to meet changing user demands. While many researchers aim to understand what digitalisation means to library services from the user perspective, there is little attention paid to the employees of library services. Since employees are one of the key driving forces of digitalisation, there is a need to understand their attitudes towards digitalisation. This paper aims to explore employee attitudes towards digitalisation of library services via a case study with data collected from participant observation, focus groups and interviews. The finding suggests that the employee understanding of digitalisation is rather limited, which might have a negative impact on the benefit realisation of digitalisation. Furthermore, there are polarised views on factors of utilisation of digital applications between senior management and operational staff. Such polarised views could also have an impact on the actual use of digital applications. This exploratory study provides valuable insights into digitalisation of library services from employee perspective, which could serve as the foundation for further research

Mutual dependency grid for stakeholder mapping: a component-based approach to supply chain participant analysis

Stakeholder analysis plays a critical role in business analysis. However, the majority of the stakeholder identification and analysis methods focus on the activities and processes and ignore the artefacts being processed by human beings. By focusing on the outputs of the organisation, an artefact-centric view helps create a network of artefacts, and a component-based structure of the organisation and its supply chain participants. Since the relationship is based on the components, i.e. after the stakeholders are identified, the interdependency between stakeholders and the focal organisation can be measured. Each stakeholder is associated with two types of dependency, namely the stakeholder’s dependency on the focal organisation and the focal organisation’s dependency on the stakeholder. We identify three factors for each type of dependency and propose the equations that calculate the dependency indexes. Once both types of the dependency indexes are calculated, each stakeholder can be placed and categorised into one of the four groups, namely critical stakeholder, mutual benefits stakeholder, replaceable stakeholder, and easy care stakeholder. The mutual dependency grid and the dependency gap analysis, which further investigates the priority of each stakeholder by calculating the weighted dependency gap between the focal organisation and the stakeholder, subsequently help the focal organisation to better understand its stakeholders and manage its stakeholder relationships

A component-based method for stakeholder analysis

Stakeholders can facilitate or hinder an organisation’s performance significantly. The identification and management of the stakeholder is one of the key business activities for organisations. Although stakeholder identification is the first step of stakeholder analysis, there is little attention paid to the methodologies for stakeholder identification. This paper uses a system view point and proposes a component-based method for stakeholder identification and analysis, which focuses on the artefacts as linkage between different sub-systems of an organisation. Stakeholders, identified through components, include the processors who produce, use, communicate and control the component making process. The identified stakeholders can then be mapped into a stakeholder relationship map according to the components that are being used to identify the stakeholders. This method provides a novel approach to identify stakeholders through artefacts and define stakeholder relationship, through the a rtefacts they are involved in. Hence, it provides a comprehensive and better understanding of stakeholder management

An organisational semiotics perspective to co-design of technology enhanced learning

While Co-Design approaches have been used in designing technology enhanced learning (TEL) by different scholars, research is needed to understand the relationships between technologies, design and practice. This paper presents organisational semiotics (OS) as an approach for Co-Design of Technology Enhanced Learning. This perspective will provide an insight into the Co-Design of technology and learning in higher education