Search results

The selection of an appropriate style for a knowledge management initiative for the company is recognized as a dilemma for most managers who have an interest in the knowledge asset and its applications. Innovation is an important part of organizational performance and a company’s innovative capacity may be dependent upon its ability to take advantage of its knowledge assets. It is therefore critical that there is compatibility between the firm’s knowledge management approach and the style that executive managers adopt for managing their knowledge assets in order to achieve the required optimum performance in their organization. In this paper the role of the knowledge management styles on organizational performance will be examined and understood through a conceptual model based on a k‐space framework.

This study aims to describe the development and approach of a theory-informed social marketing intervention that aimed to promote respite for carers of people with dementia. Despite a high need for respite, carers of people with dementia are often low users of available respite services. The reasons for this are complex, including knowledge, attitudinal, behavioural and systemic barriers. In the context of an aging population, effective strategies to support respite use by carers of people with dementia are needed.

Via formative research, the authors gained an in-depth understanding of a hard-to-reach and vulnerable group (carers of people with dementia). The resulting intervention informed, persuaded and supported carers to rethink the use of respite addressing specific barriers to service use. The intervention was evaluated using a naturalistic effects model.

Carers of people with dementia who were exposed to community-level campaign activities and also self-selected to take part in tailored coaching showed improvements to their respite knowledge, attitudes and self-efficacy. Intention to use respite and levels of personal gain from caring also increased. In contrast, carers only exposed to informational activities experienced negative changes to their respite beliefs and their sense of role captivity.

Social marketing can be used to support carer respite knowledge, attitudes and service-use behaviours in carers of people with dementia. The case study highlights an untapped role for social marketers to work in partnership with health professionals to support improvements in aged care services.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known social marketing intervention promoting the use of respite to carers of people with dementia. Findings demonstrate that tailored support services are most effective in helping carers navigate and use respite services.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to present patient-level utilisation patterns of hospital-based mental health services funded by private health insurers; and second, to examine the implications of the findings for planning and delivering private mental health services in Australia.

Analysing private health insurance claims data, this study compares differences in demographic and hospital utilisation characteristics of 3,209 patients from 13 private health insurance funds with claims for mental health-related hospitalisations and 233,701 patients with claims for other types of hospitalisations for the period May 2014 to April 2016. Average number of overnight admissions, length of stay and per patient insurer costs are presented for each group, along with overnight admissions vs same-day visits and repeat services within a 28-day period following hospitalisation. Challenges in analysing and interpreting insurance claims data to better understand private mental health service utilisation are discussed.

Patients with claims for mental health-related hospitalisations are more likely to be female (62.0 per cent compared to 55.8 per cent), and are significantly younger than patients with claims for other types of hospitalisations (32.6 per cent of patients aged 55 years and over compared to 57.1 per cent). Patients with claims for mental health-related hospitalisations have significantly higher levels of service utilisation than the group with claims for other types of hospitalisations with a mean length of stay per overnight admission of 15.0 days (SD=14.1), a mean of 1.3 overnight admissions annually (SD=1.2) and mean hospital costs paid by the insurer of $13,192 per patient (SD=13,457) compared to 4.6 days (SD=7.3), 0.8 admissions (SD=0.6) and $2,065 per patient (SD=4,346), respectively, for patients with claims for other types of hospitalisations. More than half of patients with claims for mental health-related hospitalisations only claim for overnight admissions. However, the findings are difficult to interpret due to the limited information collected in insurance claims data.

This study shows the challenges of understanding utilisation patterns with one data source. Analysing insurance claims reveals information on mental health-related hospitalisations but information on community-based care is lacking due to the regulated role of the private health insurance sector in Australia. For mental health conditions, and other chronic health conditions, multiple data sources need to be integrated to build a comprehensive picture of health service use as care tends to be provided in multiple settings by different medical and allied health professionals.

This study contributes in two areas: patient-level trends in hospital-based mental health service utilisation claimed on private health insurance in Australia have not been previously reported. Additionally, as the amount of data routinely collected in health care settings increases, the study findings demonstrate that it is important to assess the quality of these data sources for understanding service utilisation.

The balanced scorecard is a formal management technique that is built on the premise that measurement is a prerequisite to strategic management. A broad range of business goals can be incorporated in the scorecard and realistic performance targets can be aligned with business strategies. Electronic commerce is rapidly becoming concerned with the many different ways organisations do business and is therefore an area of strategic concern to organisations. A case study of the implementation of the balanced scorecard in a public utility will be analysed to suggest how the basic concepts and philosophy of the balanced scorecard can be retained in its adaptation to the strategic management of electronic commerce.

Solutions to complex environmental problems rely on the innovative knowledge and expertise of many professions whose members accept their responsibilities towards the environment. The study described here canvases information systems (IS) professionals for their perspectives, knowledge and expertise within the domains of Green IT and Green IS.

Following a review of the Green IT and IS literature, two topics were identified for a Q‐study conducted among IS professionals: topic 1 focussed on which technologies, systems and applications offer the greatest opportunity in solving environmental problems, and topic 2 on what sets of issues affect these green opportunities. Activity Theory was used to interpret the factors emerging from the Q‐study.

Three categories of activities were identified in topic 1 involving ICT support for “teleworking and teleconferencing”, “monitoring, optimising, and modelling” and “influencing human understanding and behaviour”. The topic 2 responses were quite varied.

A Q‐study is both subjective and exploratory, not seeking consensus but rather the breadth of opinion on a topic. The findings of topic 1 indicate three directions for future research and topic 2 identified many issues to consider in pursuing Green outcomes.

The three topic 1 categories of activities identify practical “green” applications of ICT.

The varied issues identified from topic 2 reveal the interconnection of environmental projects with economic and social issues.

Following this study of IS professional the authors call on other professions to apply the expertise of their respective fields to the environmental cause.

Wiki technologies, which are popular in social settings, are beginning to contribute to more flexible and participatory approaches to the exploitation of knowledge in corporate settings. Through the lens of activity theory, this paper aims to investigate contentious challenges to organizational activities that may be associated with the introduction of corporate wikis, in particular the potential democratization of knowledge work.

From a study of several cases of corporate wiki adoption, this paper presents and interprets two representative cases sampled to provide more generalized results. Qualitative data were collected through semi‐structured interviews and observation. The analysis followed a systematic process of data reduction, display, and rich interpretation using the concepts of activity theory.

This research provides new understandings of the undervalued activities of knowledge workers, their challenges as wiki users and resulting implications for organizational transformation and improved organizational performance.

There is potential bias and limited scope as the choice of cases was determined through organizations known to the researchers and involved some action research. However, the authors justify this approach for a dynamic, emergent topic worthy of immediate investigation and direct applicability of findings to corporate practice.

This paper addresses the implications of new Web 2.0 technologies for the democratization of knowledge management in the workplace.

The novelty of this work lies in using activity theory to explore reasons why some organizations are more successful than others in implementing wikis. This work contributes to research on how social and technological interventions may lead to improved exploitation of knowledge as a corporate resource.

The purpose of this paper is to present research into the area of internet support for professional‐public communication through a deeper understanding of the role that a web site can provide in meeting the information needs of critically ill patients in intensive care units (ICUs). The communication between clinicians and members of the patient's family in the stressful ICU is modelled to give an integrated view of the situation and thereby allow for the incorporation of the views of all stakeholders on how the internet can meet this communication need.

The paper takes a broad, holistic, systemic approach that integrates the latest information and communications technology tools and processes with rich qualitative data from all stakeholder groups. The data are interpreted through the use of system dynamic modelling to visually conceptualise information flows and communication between clinicians and family members of patients.

The paper conceptualises, visualises and simulates the communication that takes place in complex stressful settings, such as, in ICUs thereby increasing the understanding of web‐support for professional‐public communication in the complex area of healthcare.

The broad approach of the paper has sacrificed, detailed and in depth analysis of all aspects of this issue which would require a much more extensive study.

The results have been of practical value to those developing a particular ICU web site and thus could inform others.

In addition to the findings, this paper is innovative in the way systems dynamics is used to model information flows. The results demonstrate the value of this technique for visualising and manipulating entire systems of this kind.

In today’s aging world online communication is often viewed as a means to enhance social connectivity, and therefore well-being, of older adults. However, previous research on the influence of online communication on social connectivity largely disregards older adults, yields conflicting results and fails to assess the – debatable − causal direction of relationship. The purpose of this paper is to overcome these issues by developing four hypotheses related to who uses what, how, with whom.

The authors use a panel data study to test the hypotheses, including 302 older adults. Response rates are between 62 and 75 percent.

The authors find, first, that older adults differentiate between social connectivity with other village members, i.e., village connectivity, and connectivity with friends. Second, the impact of online communication varies among these two types of social connectivity. Where e-mail use has a negative impact on village connectivity, it does not affect connectivity with friends. Facebook use on the other hand has a negative impact on connectivity with friends, but not on village connectivity. The negative effects were not found among those older adults that were already well-connected on forehand, indicating a buffer effect.

Policy makers’ implementing online communication tools to strengthen social connectivity of older adults, may want to carefully select tools based on the type of connectivity they aim to enhance. Impact needs to be monitored.

The authors contribute by analyzing how characteristics of online communication tools, i.e., information richness and privacy protection, as well as social connectivity, i.e., geographical proximity and emotional closeness jointly shape older adults’ social connectivity.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conference-based online social network (OSN) for academics’ knowledge sharing and collaboration around and beyond a conference, while exploring the entanglement of the social and technical aspects of the system.

Following an exploratory study, an OSN prototype was developed and implemented in ECIS 2014. The usage of the OSN platform was monitored and in-depth interviews were conducted with seven of its active users.

Academic researchers have positive attitudes toward using conference-based OSN. However, there is a gap between academics’ perceptions and their actual behavior. Several barriers for engagement were identified, leading to technical and social recommendations, including the following needs: integrating the OSN platform with other conference information systems; addressing privacy concerns; allowing on-going collaboration; increasing OSN vitality; using the wisdom of the crowd; and promotion and its timing.

The case study highlighted existing benefits, and identified potential future benefits from implementing a conference-based OSN. Future research is required to generalize the findings and evaluate the proposed strategies for enhancing user engagement.

This study revealed the set of considerations that should be taken upon launching a new academic OSN, which are beyond the technical issues per se.

The paper presents the expected benefits from, and existing barriers to using a conference-based OSN, and suggests recommendations for encouraging academics to engage in such OSN, in order to enhance long-term social interactions, knowledge sharing and collaboration among conference participants.

This is a first study to examine a conference-based OSN.