Frantisek Sudzina

Personal Knowledge Management: The role of Web 2.0 tools for managing knowledge at individual and organisational levels

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss new approaches for managing personal knowledge in the Web 2.0 era. The paper questions whether Web 2.0 technologies (social software) are a real panacea for the challenges associated with the management of knowledge. Can Web 2.0 reconcile the conflicting interests of managing organisational knowledge with personal objectives? Does Web 2.0 enable a more effective way of sharing and managing knowledge at the personal level?Design/methodology/approach – Theoretically deductive with illustrative examples.Findings – Web 2.0 plays a multifaceted role for communicating, collaborating, sharing and managing knowledge. Web 2.0 enables a new model of personal knowledge management (PKM) that includes formal and informal communication, collaboration and social networking tools. This new PKM model facilitates interaction, collaboration and knowledge exchanges on the web and in organisations.Practical implications – Based on these findings, professionals and scholars wil...

ERP systems and open source: an initial review and some implications for SMEs

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to further build up the knowledge about reasons for small and mid‐sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents and analyses findings in articles about proprietary ERPs and open source ERPs. In addition, a limited investigation of the distribution channel SourceForge for open source is made.Findings – The cost perspective seems to receive a high attention regarding adoption of open source ERPs. This can be questioned and the main conclusion is that costs seem to have a secondary role in adoption or non adoption of open source ERPs.Research limitations/implications – The paper is mainly a conceptual paper written from a literature review. The ambition is to search support for the findings by doing more research in the area.Practical implications – The findings presented are of interest both for developers of proprietary ERPs as well as SMEs since it is shown that there are defi...

Contrasting ERP Absorption Between Transition and Developed Economies From Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

This article investigates Enterprise Resource Planning absorption in transition and developed economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Using absorptive capacity theory and data envelopment analysis, we view organizational transformation in Enterprise Resource Planning absorption as an economic production process. Despite converging Enterprise Resource Planning saturation levels, the data identifies gaps in absorption levels and performance. Organizations in transition face greater challenges, engage more in phased Enterprise Resource Planning absorptions, and expect higher levels of external support.

Identification of expressed and conserved human noncoding RNAs

The past decade has shown mammalian genomes to be pervasively transcribed and identified thousands of noncoding (nc) transcripts. It is currently unclear to what extent these transcripts are of functional importance, as experimental functional evidence exists for only a small fraction. Here, we characterize the expression and evolutionary conservation properties of 12,115 known and novel nc transcripts, including structural RNAs, long nc RNAs (lncRNAs), antisense RNAs, EvoFold predictions, ultraconserved elements, and expressed nc regions. Expression levels are evaluated across 12 human tissues using a custom-designed microarray, supplemented with RNAseq. Conservation levels are evaluated at both the base level and at the syntenic level. We combine these measures with epigenetic mark annotations to identify subsets of novel nc transcripts that show characteristics similar to known functional ncRNAs. Few novel nc transcripts show both high expression and conservation levels. However, overall, we observe a positive correlation between expression and both conservation and epigenetic annotations, suggesting that a subset of the expressed transcripts are under purifying selection and likely functional. The identified subsets of expressed and conserved novel nc transcripts may form the basis for further functional characterization.

Which firms use measures?: Internal and external factors shaping the adoption of performance measurement systems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline the anatomy of firms which adopt comprehensive performance measurement (PM) systems in order to gain an understanding of how internal (organisational capabilities) and external (perceived environmental uncertainties) factors shape performance measurement practices.Design/methodology/approach – This paper hypothesises that firms dominated by organic capabilities and operating in unpredictable markets are more likely to adopt comprehensive PM systems. The statistical test of these hypotheses is based on a 2008 survey of 299 Danish firms.Findings – This paper concludes that a limited number of internal and external factors have a significant influence on the adoption of PM systems. There is no consistent pattern, however, between the different sub‐categories of organisational capabilities/perceived environmental uncertainties and PM adoption.Originality/value – Much has been said about how changes in the environment and business structure require firms to dev...

Which firms use measures

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline the anatomy of firms which adopt comprehensive performance measurement (PM) systems in order to gain an understanding of how internal (organisational capabilities) and external (perceived environmental uncertainties) factors shape performance measurement practices.Design/methodology/approach – This paper hypothesises that firms dominated by organic capabilities and operating in unpredictable markets are more likely to adopt comprehensive PM systems. The statistical test of these hypotheses is based on a 2008 survey of 299 Danish firms.Findings – This paper concludes that a limited number of internal and external factors have a significant influence on the adoption of PM systems. There is no consistent pattern, however, between the different sub‐categories of organisational capabilities/perceived environmental uncertainties and PM adoption.Originality/value – Much has been said about how changes in the environment and business structure require firms to dev...

Living Requirements Space: An open access tool for enterprise resource planning systems requirements gathering

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss a new tool for requirements gathering in the Web 2.0 era. It seeks to investigate the features that this kind of tool should have in order to be as widely applicable and useful as possible. Further, it aims to explore the extent to which business requirements for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be collected and discussed collaboratively in a worldwide community of business process experts.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a combination of empirical research, hermeneutics and design research.Findings – The proposed Living Requirements Space (LRS) platform has the potential of becoming an international forum for collecting and discussing business requirements for ERP systems.Practical implications – The LRS platform will allow ERP developers, ERP systems implementers, and academics to better understand the evolution of business requirements for ERP systems. It will create a knowledge base of ERP business requirements, that is, a repository that gu...

Choosing Open Source ERP Systems: What Reasons Are There For Doing So?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems attract a high attention and open source software does it as well. The question is then if, and if so, when do open source ERP systems take off. The paper describes the status of open source ERP systems. Based on literature review of ERP system selection criteria based on Web of Science articles, it discusses reported reasons for choosing open source or proprietary ERP systems. Last but not least, the article presents some conclusions that could act as input for future research. The paper aims at building up a foundation for the basic question: What are the reasons for an organization to adopt open source ERP systems.

The Living Requirements Space: Towards the Collaborative Development of Requirements for Future ERP Systems

Companies worldwide are faced with an increasingly volatile business environment. This leads to frequent changes in business requirements. The research described in this paper looks at the software development process for the supporting ERP System, standard software, which is generally available through specialised ERP software vendors. We argue that the cycle from gathering requirements to actually implementing them in the software has to be shortened and made more efficient. We propose the Living Requirements Space (LRS), a Web platform for the distributed gathering, storing and discussion of business requirements. Knowledge about business processes is often distributed among different experts. While most existing tools for requirements management are localized and often limited to a particular project or organization there is an increasing need for distributed heterogeneous collaboration. The proposed solution combines aspects from social software as well as from traditional business requirements modelling.

Student satisfaction and loyalty in Denmark: Application of EPSI methodology

Monitoring and managing customers’ satisfaction are key features to benefit from today’s competitive environment. In higher education context, only a few studies are available on satisfaction and loyalty of the main customers who are the students, which signifies the need to investigate the field more thoroughly. The aim of this research is to measure the strength of determinants of students’ satisfaction and the importance of antecedents in students’ satisfaction and loyalty in Denmark. Our research model is the modification of European Performance Satisfaction Index (EPSI), which takes the university’s image direct effects on students’ expectations into account from students’ perspective. The structural equation model of student satisfaction and loyalty has been evaluated using partial least square path modelling. Our findings confirm that the EPSI framework is applicable on student satisfaction and loyalty among Danish universities. We show that all the relationships among variables of the research model are significant except the relationship between quality of software and students’ loyalty. Results further verify the significance of antecedents in students’ satisfaction and loyalty at Danish universities; the university image and student satisfaction are the antecedents of student loyalty with a significant direct effect, while perceived value, quality of hardware, quality of software, expectations, and university image are antecedents of student satisfaction. Eventually, our findings may be of an inspiration to maintain and improve students’ experiences during their study at the university. Dedicating resources to identified important factors from students’ perception enable universities to attract more students, make them highly satisfied and loyal.