Best Practices for the Knowledge Society. Knowledge, Learning, Development and Technology for All

‘Learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge and instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather than communicating knowledge’ [1]. Can this process of learning be fun for the learner? Successful learning involves a mixture of work and fun. One of the recent web 2.0 services that can offer great possibilities for learning is Microblogging [2]. This kind of motivation can raise students’ natural curiosity and interest which promotes learning. Play can also promote excitement, enjoyment, and a relaxing atmosphere. As Vygotsky (1933) [3] advocates, play creates a zone of proximal development (ZDP) in children. According to Vygotsky, the ZDP is the distance between one’s actual developmental level and one’s potential developmental level when interacting with someone and/or something in the social environment [4]. Play can be highly influential in learning. What happens when play becomes informal learning supported by web 2.0 technologies? Practical ideas applied in an Italian foreign language classroom using microblogging to promote fun and informal learning showed that microblogging can enhance motivation, participation, collaboration and practice in basic language skills.

The development of Technology Enhanced Learning has been dominated by the education paradigm. However social software and new forms of knowledge development and collaborative meaning making are challenging such domination. Technology is increasingly being used to mediate the development of work process knowledge and these processes are leading to the evolution of rhizomatic forms of community based knowledge development. Technologies can support different forms of contextual knowledge development through Personal Learning Environments. The appropriation or shaping of technologies to develop Personal Learning Environments may be seen as an outcome of learning in itself. Mobile devices have the potential to support situated and context based learning, as exemplified in projects undertaken at London Metropolitan University. This work provides the basis for the development of a Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE).

Teacher professional development is no longer synonymous with acquiring new teaching techniques, it is rather about starting new processes as to engage with new forms of learning, reflected in the practice of teaching. With easy access to the panoply of online communications tools, new opportunities for further development have been enabled. Learning within a wider community has not only become a possibility, but rather a reality accessible to a larger number of individuals interested in pursuing their learning path both in a personalised and networked way. The web provides the space for learning, but the learning environment is decidedly dependent on the interrelationships that are established amongst individuals. The effectiveness of the web is reflected in the unconventional opportunities it offers for people to emerge as knowledge producers rather than information collectors. Hence, it is not the tools that most matter to develop a learning environment where more personalized learning opportunities and collective intelligence prospers as the result of personal and collaborative effort. Although web tools provide the space for interaction, it is the enhancement of a meaningful learning atmosphere, resulting in a joint enterprise to learn and excel in their practice, which will transform a space for learning into an effective, interactive learning environment. The paper will examine learning and training experiences in informal web environments as the basis for an open discussion about professional development in web 2.0 environments.

This paper shows the results of a pilot study based on a proposed framework for building Personal Learning Environments using Web 2.0 tools. A group of 33 students from a Business Administration program were introduced to Web 2.0 tools in the context of an Information Systems class, during the academic year 2008-2009, and reflected about this experience through essays and interviews. The responses show evidence of learning and acquiring skills, strengthening social interactions and improvement in the organization and management of content and learning resources.

Widget based mashups seem to be a proper approach to realise self-organisable Personal Learning Environments. In comparison to integrated and monolithic pieces of software developed for supporting certain workflows, widgets provide small sets of functionality. The results of one widget can hardly be used in other widgets for further processing. In order to overcome this gap and to provide an environment allowing easily developing PLEs with complex functionality, the based on the TenCompetence Widget Server [1], we developed a server that allows widgets to exchange data. This key functionality allows developers to create synergetic effects with other widgets without increasing the effort of developing widgets nor having to deal with web services or similar techniques. Looking for available data and events of other widgets, developing the own widget and uploading it to the server is an easy way publishing new widgets. With this approach, the knowledge worker is enabled to create a PLE with more sophisticated functionality by choosing the combination of widgets needed for the current task. This paper describes the Widget Server developed within the EU funded IP project Mature, which possibilities it provides and which consequences follow for widget developer.

Communities of Practice (CoP) are organic entities, which evolve as a result of the passion for the domain by its members. CoP present opportunities for social learning and supporting distance learning programs.

But, What Is Social Learning?

Simply, learning is the process of moving from not knowing to knowing. The ‘social’ aspect of the learning relies upon human interaction. Therefore, social learning is constructed from conversations and participation within a CoP. It is about ‘how’ members learn, rather than the content or ‘what’ they learn. This is in contrast to the Cartesian vision of learning, which proposes, “I think, therefore I am”. Social Learning puts forward the alternative “We participate, therefore we are” (Seely Brown and Alder, 2008).

How Do CoP Support Social Learning?

CoP support social learning through an apprenticeship model. Members take on simple tasks under the guidance of the community, they then progress to more demanding tasks as confidence, skills and knowledge improve. The CoP supports the apprentice by interacting regularly, sharing tales and experiences. Social Learning within a community is ‘learning about a subject’ as well as ‘learning to be a full participant’. The shared passion and the interaction engages the learner and enables them to acquire deep knowledge about a subject and the ability to participate in the community through productive enquiry and social interaction.

A number of parameters that support the LMSs capabilities towards content personalization are presented and substantiated. These parameters constitute critical criteria for an exhaustive investigation of the personalization capabilities of the most popular open source LMSs. Results are comparatively shown and commented upon, thus highlighting a course of conduct for the implementation of new personalization methodologies for these LMSs, aligned at their existing infrastructure, to maintain support of the numerous educational institutions entrusting major part of their curricula to them. Meanwhile, new capabilities arise as drawn from a more efficient description of the existing resources –especially when organized into widely available repositories– that lead to qualitatively advanced learner-oriented courses which would ideally meet the challenge of combining personification of demand and personalization of thematic content at once.

Innovativeness is a key factor regarding the survival and progress of a company in modern business environments. The question is how to facilitate innovativeness in organizations. This article studies the impact of the organizational learning process on innovativeness. We understand innovativeness as a combination of (1) innovative culture and (2) technological and process innovation. Organizational learning is a consecutive process of (1) information acquisition, (2) information distribution, (3) information interpretation, and (4) behavioral and cognitive changes. New knowledge obtained through organizational learning improves innovativeness. As a methodological framework, we use the partial least square (PLS) approach to structural equation modeling on data from 107 Spanish companies. The results show that organizational learning has a strong positive direct impact on process, product, and service innovations. In addition, the impact of organizational learning on innovation is also indirect, via innovative culture.

This paper provides an explanation of the development of NCITs in their impact on the education sector under the name "Educatronics", as an essential step for the world today, but concludes with a critic to the purely "technical" approach to propose that

educatronics

become a paradigm to integrate educational training on a larger scale, to provide a highly educational, but not dehumanized as claimed by the educational competency model, but with "human face".

Today students have grown up using devices like computers, mobile phones, and video consoles for almost any activity; from studies and work to entertainment or communication. Motivating them with traditional teaching methods such as lectures and written materials becomes more difficult daily. That is why digital games are becoming more and more considered to have a promising role in education process. We decided to conduct a study among university students. Purpose of that study was to try to find some empirical evidence to support the claim that educational games can be used as an effective form of teaching. We also invested an effort to measure effects of different teaching approaches with the respect of individual differences in cognitive styles. Initial results provide a good argument for use of educational games in teaching. In addition, we reported some influence of cognitive style on effectiveness of using educational games.

Children’s use of the Internet has significantly risen in the last decade. Nevertheless, children spend a lot of time online which makes them susceptible to various threats (such as inappropriate material, offensive language, etc). Parents are the last frontier to this menace but they also need to be educated and trained in order to protect their children. Goneis.gr is an initiative launched by the Greek government that aims to educate parents on safer Internet and the use of parental control software. Parents are also entitled to distance learning courses covering basic computer skills. This paper presents the results of two separate surveys that took place in the last few months (December 2008-January 2009). The first survey targeted the parents that have completed the programme and the second one the educational providers that participate in the programme and offer the training to the beneficiaries.

The national education systems of the European Union Member States operate in a rather unique framework which sees EU level monitoring and creation of benchmarks in the framework of the Lisbon Agenda interact with national priorities and social characteristics. This paper examines the use of benchmarking in education and training and the presence of different performance levels of groups of countries, using Sapir’s European social models classification. There is, in fact, evidence for consistent trends of similar performance within groups and clear distinction of performance levels between groups of countries. This gives indication for the existence of strong structural differences and implies that one-size-fits-all policies do not necessarily respond to the specific characteristics and needs of different countries.

The participatory culture of Web 2.0 and the implicit empowerment of the learners have not been yet associated with participatory design projects that involve learners in the design and development of the new mediating tools. In this paper, we examine students’ projections of Web 2.0 in higher education. Ninety seven undergraduate students participated in 20 design sessions exploiting two needs’ elicitation techniques with the aim of envisioning of a course website that meets their learning particularities, that incorporates and exploits their new technological habits and which can be harmoniously situated in the daily routine of a modern, active student. 583 needs were produced and their abstract categorization is presented. Students proved that they had refined views about the elements that can render successful the next wave of e-learning applications and provided directions that can help designers and researchers in developing more informed designs. Students are the main agents of educational change and, hence, they deserve a more active and contributive role in the knowledge society.

Tagging allows people to effectively organize web resources such as images, bookmarks or blog articles. Things are found easier by browsing tag clouds relying on the tags that have been assigned before. The success is by large determined by the quality and relevance of tags assigned to content – and so it is dependent on people who do the tagging. We investigate mental processes that underlie tagging. In order to improve quality of tagging, we provide guidelines for users of tagging systems and in addition we suggest features that an “intelligent” tagging tool should bear in order to facilitate the tagging process.

Despite the promising perspective of the usage of ICT in education, contrasting opinions state that education has been barely influenced. In this paper we present a critical confrontation of aspects relevant to the usage of ICT in the classroom and categorize main difficulties that arise when ICT is applied in education.

The article suggests that people involved in quality development need a specific competence, called quality literacy, in order to successfully improve learning processes. Quality literacy is viewed as a set of competencies that are needed for professional quality development. Quality literacy emphasizes the importance of professionalism as a necessary component for quality development, in addition to structural quality management models. Quality development is a co-production between learners and their learning environment. This means that the educational process can only be influenced and optimized through participation and not steered externally. Quality strategies cannot, therefore, guarantee a high quality of learning processes but rather aim at professionalisation of the educational process. This article suggests participation and negotiation between educational participants (clients and providers) as a main condition for quality development.

Together members of a community of practice (CoP) share their expertise and mutual understanding about a common domain to develop greater knowledge and build best practices. Due to the informal character of learning within a CoP, most of the knowledge is mainly tacit and needs to be reified and capitalized. The aim of this paper is to model the CoP to include the community memory in order to manage its knowledge. A CoP is considered as a learning organization where members are interacting, producing, exchanging and adapting resources and knowledge to meet their needs. The CoP memory is based on a framework with several ontologies including knowledge, domain and task ontology. The application of the proposed framework is done through a CoP of e-learning.

In this paper is presented an empirical study and its results. The empirical study was designed through a pilot training program which was conducted in order to learn if Greek educators can learn to use and even adopt the use of web 2.0 tools and services in the educational process and in which extend, where the type of learning is either distant learning, blended learning or the learning takes place in the traditional classroom.

In general, it is not always easy to estimate stock prices exactly and get profits. Until today, many researchers have attacked to this subject, but could not report the successful estimation methods even if various approaches or many heuristics were applied in our knowledge-oriented society. This is because the fluctuation of stock prices is inherently characterized as random walk. In this paper, we address a short-term-specific up/down fluctuation estimation method of stock prices. Our approach is first to select 16 brand companies in Japan Stock Market as the fundamental stock features, and then to define analytically 8 stock attributes as input parameters for our 3-level neural network. We used 32,000 samples of 2,000 days from 16 brands: the first 1,000 days samples were used as learning data for our neural network; and the last 1,000 days samples were as test data. Our experiments showed that the up/down fluctuation estimation method in the short-term from the end value of today to the start value of tomorrow functions effectively.

This paper outlines the findings of research where the central idea is to define the term Knowledge Society (KS) in Malaysian context. The research focuses on three important dimensions, namely knowledge, ICT and human capital. This study adopts a modified Delphi technique to seek the important dimensions that can contribute to the development of Malaysian’s KS. The Delphi technique involved ten experts in a five-round iterative and controlled feedback procedure to obtain consensus on the important dimensions and to verify the proposed definition of KS. The finding shows that all three dimensions proposed initially scored high and moderate consensus. Round One (R1) proposed an initial definition of KS and required comments and inputs from the panel. These inputs were then used to develop items for a R2 questionnaire. In R2, 56 out of 73 items scored high consensus and in R3, 63 out of 90 items scored high. R4 was conducted to re-rate the new items, in which 8 out of 17 items scored high. Other items scored moderate consensus and no item scored low or no consensus in all rounds. The final round (R5) was employed to verify the final definition of KS. Findings and discovery of this study are significant to the definition of KS and the development of a framework in the Malaysian context.

The main objective of this paper is to provide greater understanding of the nature of secrecy in firms. It presents an effort to develop some links between management of the secrecy and its relationship with culture. Using measures from Hofstede’s work, we have linked some dimensions of national culture with CIS 3 UE survey database. The results show that some attributes of the culture as Masculinity and Uncertainty Avoidance have impact on the tendency of the firms for not to patent and maintain secrecy of their innovations.

Paper illustrates the ways of knowledge sharing in transition companies in two main topics: the methods of knowledge management of local managers in joint ventures with foreign partners from free market countries and the development of leadership behavior and decision making styles in privatized companies in the Czech Republic. Lack of previous experience is the main reason for the adoption of different ways of managerial education. Several systems like the tandem, distant learning, mixed, foreign and hired managerial systems are analyzed, and the role of both partners, local and foreign managers, is specified. The analysis of leadership behavior and decision-making styles specifying five levels of participation. Czech managers consider it to be appropriate to use a more autocratic style than a participative one. Only in a few cases, mostly in joint ventures, can we see some elements of the partnership style.

Knowledge-based enterprises are typically conducting a large number of research and development projects simultaneously. This is a particularly challenging task in complex and diverse project landscapes. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) can be a viable framework for knowledge and innovation management in such landscapes. A standardized process with defined functions such as project data repository, project assessment, selection, reporting, and portfolio reevaluation can serve as a starting point. In this work we discuss the benefits a multidimensional evaluation framework can provide for knowledge-based enterprises. Furthermore, we describe a knowledge and learning strategy and process in the context of PPM and evaluate their practical applicability at different stages of the PPM process.

Social network sites (SNS) have become increasingly popular in the past few years benefiting from the rapid growth of Web 2.0 applications. However, research on the adoption and usage of SNS is limited. In this study, we attempt to understand users’ continuance intention to use SNS and investigate the role of gender. A research model was developed and tested with 213 respondents from an online survey. The results confirm that users’ continuance intention to use SNS is strongly determined by satisfaction. The effect of disconfirmation of maintaining offline contacts on satisfaction is more important for women, while the effect of disconfirmation of entertainment is more salient for men. Implications of this study for both researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The importance of what have been termed the “soft skills” for the professional development of IT professionals is beyond any doubt. Taking account of this circumstance, the objective of the current research may be phrased as two separate questions. In the first place, determining the importance which IT related degree students place on these types of competencies for their professional future. In the second place, the importance which the development of the mentioned competencies has been given during their studies. The realization of an empirical study has fulfilled the two objectives described. The results demonstrate, on the one side, the moderate relevance which students assign to interpersonal competencies, especially emotional competencies, in contrast to the international curricular recommendations and studies concerning labor markets. On the other hand, the results indicate the scarce emphasis which lecturers have placed on the development of such competencies.

The knowledge management or KM discipline conjures a host of understanding and impact upon the global business community albeit commercially or socially. Regardless of the different approach to KM, it has inarguably brought about changes in viewing the knowledge capabilities and capacities of organizations. Peter Drucker (1998) argued that knowledge has become the key economic resource and the only source of competitive advantage. Hence organizational learning is an integral part of KM initiatives and has been widely practiced in many large organizations and across nations such as Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Thus, this paper explores the KM initiatives of government link companies (GLCs) in Malaysia via synergizing knowledge strategy and capabilities in order to achieve competitive advantage.

In the Knowledge Society, the enterprise increasingly develops its activities in a planetary space. The hierarchical Enterprise locked up on its local borders is transformed into an Extended Enterprise without borders, opened and adaptable. In this context, the actors are confronted with new situations that increase their initiatives and responsibilities, whatever their roles and their hierarchical positions are. For their missions, through the Enterprise’s Information and Knowledge System, beyond relevant information, they must access to knowledge and individual and collective skills widely distributed in the planetary space of their organization. In such context, the challenge is to well identify and locate “crucial knowledge” that is a set of knowledge, which is essential for the enterprise. This article presents GAMETH

®

, a specific approach that fits with the “Locating Core KM Process” that constitutes one of the operating elements of the Model for General Knowledge Management within the Enterprise (MGKME).

As the era of knowledge-based economy is emerging, the importance of knowledge governance is gradually increasing. The question of how the governance mechanisms influence on the knowledge transactions is becoming increasingly relevant. However, the theoretical approaches have yet to solve outstanding issues, such as how the the micro-level governance mechanisms influence the knowledge processes or what kind of organizational hazard could decrease the benefits form the knowledge processes. Furthermore, the deployment of empirical studies to address the issues mentioned is arguably needed. This paper proposes a knowledge governance framework to assist effectively in the implementation of governance mechanisms for knowledge management processes. Additionally, it shows how this may be implented in a knowledge-intensive firm and proposes specific structures and governance mechanisms.

Our goal in this paper is to understand, in the light of intuition and emotion, the problem-finding and value judgments by organisational members that are part of organisational knowledge creation. In doing so, we emphasise the importance of embodied knowledge of organisations as an explanatory concept. We propose ways of approaching intuition and sense of value as these are posited as objects of research. Approaches from the first, second, and third-person viewpoints result in a deeper grasp of embodied knowledge of organisations. Important in organisational knowledge creation is embodied knowledge of organisations, which has a bearing on problem-finding before any problem-solving or decision making takes place, and on value judgments about the importance of problems that have been found. This article proposes the concept of embodied knowledge, and, by introducing it, gives a profound understanding of that facet of organisational knowledge creation characterised by tacit knowledge held by organisational individuals.

In current times, we are seeing the emergence of a new paradigm to describe, understand, and analyze the expanding “knowledge domain”. This overarching framework – called knowledge governance – draws from and builds upon knowledge management and may be seen as a kind of meta-layer of knowledge management. The emerging knowledge governance approach deals with issues that lie at the intersection of organization and knowledge processes. Knowledge governance has two main interpretation levels in the literature: the company- (micro-) and the national (macro-) level. We propose a three-layer model instead of the previous two-layer version, adding a layer of “global” knowledge governance. Analyzing and separating the main issues in this way, we can re-formulate the focus of knowledge governance research and practice in all layers.

With the rise of knowledge economy, the importance of Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) has gradually increased as well as their overall impact on economy. However, in comparison with the manufacturing sectors, KIBS sector remains poorly studied. Especially little prior research has been done about the description and assessment of service value dimensions from a business customer’s perspective. This paper, on the basis of a literature review, identifies and describes eight different value dimensions. These dimensions represent the building blocks of a conceptual model proposed for assessing the value created by KIBS for business customers. Moreover, the paper describes an application of the model in a real case.

This paper describes an interactive medical knowledge assistant that can help a doctor or a patient in making important health related decisions. The system is Web based and consists of several modules, including a medical knowledge base, a doctor interface module, patient interface module and a the main module of the medical knowledge assistant. The medical assistant is designed to help interpret the fuzzy data using rough sets approach. The patient interface includes sub-system for real time monitoring of patients’ health parameters and sending them to the main module of the medical knowledge assistant.

The elaboration of a knowledge management plan should take into account the evolution of the firm’ strategy: it is the so-called “strategic alignment”. However, existing approaches focus essentially on operational actors’ point of view: what about the executive level which defines the firm’ strategy? We propose and illustrate, in this article, an approach and cartographic methods to elaborate knowledge management actions aligned with the strategy of the firm. We explore Multicriteria Decision-Analysis field to refine the robustness of our approach.

Knowledge is a relational good. The flow of interactions among the individuals of a group provide the necessary opportunities to share the existing knowledge and use it to further accumulate the (human) capital, which is the main productive input for the development of any knowledge economy. In this sense, the opportunities of social interaction are per se a resource and a dimension of knowledge. The analysis of individual civil participation in different kinds of civil formal organizations across Europe further confirms the existence of different European social models and hints to a possible positive parallelism between the effectiveness of economic policies and social policies aimed at fostering social participation.

Since the early 21

st

Century, building a Knowledge Society represents an aspiration not only for the developed countries, but for the developing ones too. There is an increasing concern worldwide for rendering this process manageable towards a sustainable, equitable and ethically sound societal system. As proper management, including at the societal level, requires both wisdom and measurement, the operationalisation of the Knowledge Society concept encompasses a qualitative side, related to vision-building, and a quantitative one, pertaining to designing and using dedicated metrics. The endeavour of enabling policy-makers mapping, steering and monitoring the sustainable development of the Knowledge Society at national level, in a world increasingly based on creativity, learning and open communication, led researchers to devising a wide range of composite indexes. However, as such indexes are generated through weighting and aggregation, their usefulness is limited to retrospectively assessing and comparing levels and states already attained; therefore, to better serve policy-making purposes, composite indexes should be complemented by other instruments. Complexification, inspired by the systemic paradigm, allows obtaining "rich pictures" of the Knowledge Society; to this end, a multi-dimensional scorecard of the Knowledge Society development is hereby suggested, that seeks a more contextual orientation towards sustainability. It is assumed that, in the case of the Knowledge Society, the sustainability condition goes well beyond the "greening" desideratum and should be of a higher order, relying upon the conversion of natural and productive life-cycles into virtuous circles of self-sustainability.

UML class diagrams are typically used for representing a static knowledge about objects, their properties and relationships. In this paper we will demonstrate how inference capabilities can be added to static UML graphs resulting in knowledge diagrams. Knowledge diagrams can be built to gain a deeper understanding of a subject area, to prepare better presentations about the subject, to guide knowledge discovery, or to support inference. In this paper we introduce knowledge diagrams that allow for a controlled incompleteness and inconsistency.

If we are serious about “a better life for everyone” in a knowledge society, the most obvious and most probably the ultimate condition to achieve this would be to ensure genuine quality of knowledge against the reign of ignorance in whatever format it may emerge and to involve everybody in a situation of collective intelligence for the achievement of this dream. Not the mere acceptance of knowledge, but the certainty that we are talking of “the right kind of knowledge” is at issue.

Serious reflection is required about true knowledge in its dynamic complexity and the obstacles in the way of achieving it of which ignorance is its biggest enemy. It is indicated to what extent an alternative territory of thought may be the answer since this will enable humans to develop an insight into the threats of ignorance and the sources thereof, to contemplate a genuine knowledge of knowledge, to engage in collective intelligence activities that will help to overcome the threats and will contribute to the building of an authentic knowledge society for the benefit of all.

Developments in information and communication technologies have raised the issue of how a kind of intergenerational digital divide can take place between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”. This can in turn have important consequences for the organization of educative systems. In this paper we present the result of a research performed during the course of 2008 to study how university students in Italy make use of digital technologies. The methodology was based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches. A survey research was done, on a sample of 1186 students of the University of Milan-Bicocca, based on a questionnaire administrated through the Intranet of the University. A series of focus groups and in depth interviews with students, parents, and new media experts was furthermore performed. The results are consistent with the presence of a strong intergenerational divide. The implications of the results for the future organization of educative systems are discussed in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that Information Technologies (ITs) play in product innovation processes, both as an element that strengthens marketing processes making possible consumer integration within the innovation framework, as well as the development of the organizational learning process. There are two main uses of ITs in marketing processes. First, they increase the likelihood and efficiency of communication and cooperative relationships between different agents, both inside and outside the organization. Second, they manage market data correctly, prioritizing its acquisition, storage and dissemination throughout the company, thereby developing market intelligence that can be used in the decision-making process.

Worldwide job market for database developers (DBDs) is continually increasing in last several years. In some companies, DBDs are organized as a special team (DBDs team) to support other projects and roles. As a new role, the DBDs team is facing a major problem that there are not any management guidelines for them. The team manager does not know which kinds of tasks should be assigned to this team and what practices should be used during DBDs work. Therefore in this paper we have developed a set of management guidelines, which includes 8 fundamental tasks and 17 practices from software development process, by using two methodologies Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and agile software development in particular Scrum in order to improve the DBDs team work. Moreover the management guidelines developed here has been complemented with practices from authors’ experience in this area and has been evaluated in the case of a software company. The management guidelines for DBD teams presented in this paper could be very usefully for other companies too that are using a DBDs team and could contribute towards an increase of the efficiency of these teams in their work on software development projects.

Enterprise resource planning systems can grant crucial strategic, operational and information-based benefits to adopting firms when implemented successfully. However, a failed implementation can often result in financial losses rather than profits. Until now, the research on the failures and successes were focused on implementations in large manufacturing and service organizations firms located in western countries, particularly in USA. Nevertheless, IT has gained intense diffusion to developing countries through declining hardware costs and increasing benefits that merits attention as much as developed countries. The aim of this study is to examine the implications of knowledge transfer in a developing country, Turkey, as a paradigm in the knowledge society with a focus on the implementation activities that foster successful installations. We suggest that absorptive capacity is an important characteristic of a firm that explains the success level of such a knowledge transfer.

In Turkey, e-state transformation has gained speed since 2002 with the reforms of public administration. In this frame, an important part of the targets determined on the activity plan of information society strategy has been realized. However, there are difficulties in structuring of electronic records management system, which is within the e-state components. Considering the OECD indicators, deficiencies in applications which will provide information and service sharing between citizen and institution and inter institutions attract attention. It can be possible that the institutions open their records and services to public on a national portal in the frame of the standards and the laws forming the background of e-record management. Furthermore, there is a need for a national policy which should watch how the adaptation to the mentioned standards and laws realizes and should guide the institutions in this way. This study aims at exposing the principles of national records management and directing the forming of a policy that will give speed and function to the integrated state structuring in the public.

The trends in the automotive industry changed radically from the beginning of the 80s. Increasing competition, new systems and developments compelled the companies to re-evaluate and re-design their investments and processes, by extending their networks to other parts of the world in order to gain more market. This trend could be observed first in the Western-European countries and later in Eastern-Europe. With entering new areas the companies had to face with several difficulties coming inter alia from the decisions of supplier network and information system implementation. In our study we analyze the strategic decisions of major carmaker companies entering the Eastern-European market. Our research includes two case studies of the Hungarian automotive sector.

Enhanced communication between citizens and decision makers furthering participation in public decision making is essential to ease today’s democratic deficit. However, it is difficult to sort out the most important public inputs from a large number of comments and questions. We propose an online solution to the selection problem by utilizing the general publicity of the internet. In the envisioned practice, decision makers are obliged either to answer citizens’ questions or initiatives or to publish the letter received on a publicly accessible web page. The list of unaddressed questions would mean a motivation to consider public inputs without putting unnecessary burdens on decision makers – due to the reliance on the public, their workload would converge to the societal optimum. The proposed method is analyzed in the course of the existing Hungarian e-practices. The idea is found valuable as a restriction for representatives and a relief for some other officials.

This project presents a new way of sightseeing, by adapting itself to new times and new technologies. It has been created a system able to guide the tourist at all times during a visit to a city by means of a PDA with GPS technology; it shows the most interesting points (both in text and multimedia contents), the most important routes, a street directory, a calendar events, etc. As additional support, the system has an internal web page that helps to manage in an easy way the touristic contents. Moreover, it is used a Wi-Fi wireless technology to update the PDA contents automatically. The system has a server that allows to use the web page and update the PDA, hiding the access to the database to other kind of services not allowed by the system. Therefore, the most noteworthy aspects of this project are the use of a Wi-Fi wireless technology and a GPS positioning technology.

This paper presents the results achieved in terms of e-business capabilities developed in an International Master framed within an Euro-Medi-terranean cooperation. In particular, an e-Business Design Laboratory is here described which has been set up for designing and implementing innovative solutions to bring digital and organizational innovation in traditional and new industries. The most significant highlights of the last two editions of the Master are also reported in terms of the human, social and structural capital being generated.

E-cognocracy [1], [2], [3] is a cognitive democracy oriented to the extraction and sharing of knowledte related with the scientific resolution of public decision making problems related with the governance of society. This model of democracy takes advantage of the potential of the knowledge society by means of the incorporation of the knowledge and the preferences of the actors involved in the decision making process. This is carried out by using different rounds to incorporate the preferences and a collaborative tool for the discussion stage. The technological security of the voting process has been studied in previous papers of our research group [8], [9], [10], [11]. Now we cope with the security of the discussion stage, taking into account either registered and non registered individuals.

The process by which business and IT are brought inline with each other to enhance the performance of business and to achieve business goals is called strategic alignment. Some models have been developed for the assessment of strategic alignment but an evaluation and comparison of capabilities of the models has not been studied due to the absence of a structured evaluation criteria.. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the strategic alignment models, collected through a comprehensive survey. For this purpose, we develop a strategic alignment evaluation framework which is a composition of a number of criteria. We further use this framework for the evaluation of six main alignment models. These models present concrete ways to evaluate strategic business IT-alignment.

Book is indeed a unique commodity. The book publishing industry internationally is deeply influenced by the changes resulting from the increasing competition and the rapid introduction of novel information technologies and the Internet. In that framework, new departments, activities, roles and responsibilities are indeed emerging. This paper discusses issues for the organization of book publishing companies and provides an overview of the Greek publishing industry. Thereafter, the results of a survey concerning the structural organization of the publishing companies in Greece are presented. The study has been conducted during the second quarter of 2007 through a specially designed semi-structured questionnaire. In the study participated 123 representatives of Greek publishing houses, of all sizes and categories, from a total of 239 publishing houses that took part at the Pan-Hellenic Book Exhibition organized by the Athens Book Publishers Association.

Visual Analytics require the use of large datasets and most of the time visualizations use their own data structures definition or make use of simple standards such as XML, CVS, or text files. Our proposal presents a middleware framework that focuses on providing a way to manage those data structures, allowing to access heterogeneous data sources. The framework allows defining data structures for different visualizations using the same dataset. It dynamically generates a visual interface that allows users to define data structures according to the specific visualization requirements. It also provides a repository to store data structures to reuse them in other visualizations or by means of inheritance, composition and associations. We have implemented a first prototype, which is discussed in the results presented on this paper.

The purpose of this research is to identify the impact of business process improvement in the area of e-marketing in the hotel industry. The research identifies the barriers which block organizational change effort. A sample of thirty hotels in the city of Athens was used.This paper presents a SWOT analysis of the hotel sector, identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that firms faced in the process of change. The results show that the majority of firms use, to a small extent, the e-marketing concept to improve their communication strategy and reach market segments.

The present research investigates the extent to which Greek hotels had developed the electronic customer relationship marketing (E-CRM). The study verifies the practices that frequently appear in relationship marketing process within online operations or whether their Internet presence mainly depends on the basic actions of “supplying information” and “reservations”. Also, it investigates the effects of e-CRM system on customer loyalty and satisfaction as well as the impact of relationship marketing practices to customer retention and acquisition. They have understood the importance of using electronic channels instead of traditional ones to implement their marketing strategies. Thus, e-crm system has assisted hotel business to manage more effectively their reservations and serve their customers as fast and as effective as possible. They did not seem to apply many of the relationship marketing strategies to emphasize customer retention and continual satisfaction because of difficulties in staff training.

Music is a complex domain with some interesting specificities that makes it difficult to be modeled. If different types of music are considered, then the difficulties are even bigger. This paper presents some of the characteristics that makes music such a hard domain to model and proposes an ontology for representing musical phonographic records. This ontology will provide a global representation that can be used to support systems interoperability and data integration, which provides disseminating music worldwide, contributing to culture in the knowledge society.

Despite of all the efforts devoted to eGovernment solutions, a number of flaws can be identified in current approaches. Projects in the domain usually fail at addressing the citizen in the actual channels the citizen, the final user, is actually operating. This feature is required to engage the citizen in eGovernment services. The goal of this paper is to provide a solution that can delivery operations/interactions with the citizen in his/her preferred channels. This involves an effort on modeling a solid back office support and on developing proper interfaces for the number of possible environments. The paper addresses this situation and suggests both an modeling tool and a design for the supporting architecture.

Nowadays, software organizations have needed to develop excellent and reliable products. This scenario has helped to increase the relevance of quality assurance activities, especially the testing discipline. However, sometimes the time and resources are limited and not all tests can be executed, demanding organizations to decide what use cases should be tested, to guarantee the predictability of the project’s time and budget.The multiple criteria methodologies support decisions, considering many factors, not only professional experience. This paper presents a multiple criteria model to support the decision of selecting the use cases that should be tested.

Dementias are syndromes described by a decline in memory and other neuropsychological changes especially occurring in the elderly and increasing exponentially in function of age. Due to this fact and the therapeutical limitations in the most advanced stage of the disease, diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is extremely important and it can provide better life conditions to patients and their families. This work presents a hybrid model, combining Influence Diagrams and the Multicriteria Method, for aiding to discover, from a battery of tests, which are the most attractive questions, in relation to the stages of CDR (Clinical Dementia Rating) in decision making for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. This disease is the most common dementia. Influence Diagram is implemented using GeNie tool. Next, the judgment matrixes are constructed to obtain cardinal value scales which are implemented through MACBETH Multicriteria Methodology. The modeling and evaluation processes were carried out through a battery of standardized assessments for the evaluation of cases with Alzheimer’s disease developed by Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s disease (CERAD).

In the last few years, Alzheimer’s disease has been the most frequent cause of dementia and it is responsible, alone or in association with other diseases, for 50% of the cases in western countries. Dementias are syndromes characterized by a decline in memory and other neuropsychological changes, especially occurring in elderly people and increasing exponentially along the aging process. The main focus of this work is to develop a multicriteria model for aiding in decision making on the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease by using the Aranau Tool, structured on the Verbal Decision Analysis. In this work, the modeling and evaluation processes were conducted with the aid of a medical expert, bibliographic sources and questionnaires. The questionnaires taken into account were based mainly on patients’ neuroimaging tests, and we analyzed wheter or not there were problems in the patients’ brain that could be relevant to the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

This article studies the expediency of using neural networks technology and the development of back-propagation networks (BPN) models for modeling automated evaluation of the answers and progress of deaf students’ that possess basic knowledge of the English language and computer skills, within a virtual e-learning environment. The performance of the developed neural models is evaluated with the correlation factor between the neural networks’ response values and the real value data as well as the percentage measurement of the error between the neural networks’ estimate values and the real value data during its training process and afterwards with unknown data that weren’t used in the training process.

Artificial Intelligence applications in educational field are getting more and more popular during the last decade (1999-2009) and that is why much relevant research has been conducted. In this paper, we present the most interesting attempts to apply artificial intelligence methods such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic programming and hybrid approaches such as neuro – fuzzy systems and genetic programming neural networks (GPNN) in student modeling. This latest research trend is a part of every Intelligent Tutoring System and aims at generating and updating a student model in order to modify learning content to fit individual needs or to provide reliable assessment and feedback to student’s answers. In this paper, we make a brief presentation of methods used to point out their qualities and then we attempt a navigation to the most representative studies sought in the decade of our interest after classifying them according to the principal aim they attempted to serve.

EU counties have a historically unique opportunity to enable their creative industries to promote the knowledge societies, applying new business models to their media content and networks markets, that are digital dividend (DD) aware. This new extra-media gatekeeping factor could shape new alliances and co operations among the member states and the global media markets, as well.

Learning technology, through e-learning, allows adults to adapt learning to their own time, place and pace. On the other hand, the adults’ specific characteristics as learners and the requirements for their effective learning must be integrated in the design and the development of any learning environment addressed to them. Adults in an online environment have also to deal with new barriers related to access to the courses, the sense of isolation and the sense of immediacy with educator and other learners. This paper is dealing with the way through which an online environment can overcome these barriers and can integrate adults’ characteristics and requirements for effective learning. The use of the appropriate communication tools by designers, developers and educators seem to provide the answers as these tools promote immediacy and interaction, both considered very important factors in online educational environments and affect the nature and the quality of communication and learning.