Athanasios Mazarakis

Knowledge maturing activities and practices fostering organisational learning: results of an empirical study

Knowledge work is performed in all occupations and across all industries. The level of similarity of knowledge work allows for designing supporting tools that can be widely used. In this paper an activity-based perspective towards knowledge work is taken. Based on findings from a previous ethnographically-informed study, we identified valuable activities to be supported in order to increase knowledge maturing inside companies. The goal of this paper is to contribute to which knowledge maturing activities are deemed important, so that they can be supported by IT services. Quantitative and qualitative data have been collected in 126 organisations of different size, sector and knowledge intensity. Important feedback and issues emerged and need to be managed in order to support success in the knowledge maturing activities that allow improvement of organisational learning through the dissemination and application of the most appropriate knowledge.

Organizational Learning from the Perspective of Knowledge Maturing Activities

The level of similarity of knowledge work across occupations and industries allows for the design of supportive information and communication technology (ICT) that can be widely used. In a previous ethnographically informed study, we identified activities that can be supported to increase knowledge maturing, conceptualized as goal-oriented learning on a collective level. The aim of this paper is to investigate the current state of support and success of these knowledge maturing activities and to contrast them with their perceived importance, to identify those which have the highest potential for being supported by ICT. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through telephone interviews with representatives from 126 organizations throughout Europe in a sample stratified according to size, sector, and knowledge-intensity. The activities that appear to be most promising are “reflecting on and refining work practices and processes,” “finding people with particular knowledge or expertise,” as well as “assessing, verifying, and rating information.” Rich empirical material about how these activities are performed and also the issues that emerged and need to be managed were collected. Three clusters of organizations were identified: best performing organizations, people- and awareness-oriented organizations, and hesitant formalists. It was found that a balanced knowledge strategy that leaned toward personalization outperformed a codification strategy.

Technological and organizational arrangements sparking effects on individual, community and organizational learning

Organizations increasingly recognize the potentials and needs of supporting and guiding the substantial individual and collaborative learning efforts made in the work place. Many interventions have been made into leveraging resources for organizational learning, ultimately aimed at improving effectiveness, innovation and productivity of knowledge work in organizations. However, information is scarce on the effects of such interventions. This paper presents the results of a multiple-case study consisting of seven cases investigating measures organizations have taken in order to spark effects considered beneficial in leveraging resources for organizational learning. We collected a number of reasons why organizations deem themselves as outperforming others in leveraging individual, collaborative and organizational learning, measures that are perceived as successful as well as richly described relationships between those levers and seven selected effects that these measures have caused.

Steering Through Incentives in Large-Scale Lean Software Development

The application of lean principles and agile project management techniques in the domain of large-scale software product development has gained tremendous momentum over the last decade. This results in empowerment of individuals which leads to increased flexibility but at the same time sacrifices managerial control through traditional steering practices. Hence, the design of adequate incentive schemes in order to align local optimization and opportunistic behavior with the overall strategy of the company is a crucial activity from a business perspective.

Process redesign for liquidity planning in practice: an empirical assessment

The financial crisis has kept the world busy since 2007. The resulting difficulties in accessing liquidity and low interest rates on deposits strengthened the importance of proper liquidity planning. These challenges are even greater for globally spread enterprises in which currency-specific liquidity planning implies decentralized processes. These have to be coordinated within the local partitions such that proper and consistent overall financial planning is eventually ensured. Although extensive research has been conducted in the field of process redesign, most models lack applicability, either because of strict process restrictions or because they are too complex and, hence, hard to realize and communicate. To close this gap and to demonstrate the potential of business process redesign in practice, we (i) analyze the requirements of the financial planning domain to identify an appropriate redesign framework, and (ii) evaluate the impact of an industrially implemented process redesign with respect to process runtime and quality.

Feedback mechanisms and their impact on motivation to contribute to wikis in higher education

The success of Wikis depends very strongly on the user participation and the willingness to edit. In this paper we examine within an experiment which influence different kinds of feedback have on the motivation to edit a Wiki page. The results indicate a positive impact of feedback on the willingness to participate in the Wiki for any of the used feedback mechanisms.

Feedback in social semantic applications

This article examines the role of feedback mechanisms in social semantic web applications. It introduces different social semantic applications and the function that system feedback can play in these, although only a small portion of possible roles of feedback in such applications is addressed by the state of the art. The authors present an approach with four concrete feedback mechanisms and an experiment on the use of explicit feedback to foster user contribution and motivation. Finally, the article details the large number of open research questions in this area.

Like diamonds in the sky: how feedback can boost the amount of available data for learning analytics

This paper examines the role of feedback in the area of learning analytics. It introduces three different types of feedbacks, which enhance the motivation to play a learning game significantly longer than without feedback. A field experiment with 55 subjects has been conducted and evaluated to support these assumptions. Finally, the paper details the large number of open research questions in this area.

Revisions of the Split-Attention Effect

For the learning process with multimedia contents the split-attention effect postulates that learning results are better the higher the spatial proximity of text and picture elements is. This article shows that by the use of an artificially generated relationship between texts and pictures which are far away (according to the new principles of grouping by Palmer[1]), it is possible to attain learning results which are at least equal. The negative impact of the spatial distance between text and picture elements can therefore be avoided in a different way. So an online survey has been conducted and the data of 869 subjects have been evaluated regarding to their retention and transfer performance.