Laura Maruster

Sustainable information systems: A knowledge perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a re‐orientation of the way the concept of sustainability is dealt with in relation to information systems, positioning human behaviour and the processing of knowledge at the centre of the concept.Design/methodology/approach – The concept of sustainability of knowledge (SoK), which refers to processes that govern knowledge, is employed to define sustainable information systems (SIS). Following this definition, knowledge aspects are employed to tackle the notion of sustainability. The sustainability approach presented in this paper is then translated into requirements needed for designing a SIS.Findings – Three knowledge aspects are found to be relevant for the design of SIS: adaptability, offloading and knowledge evaluation. The service oriented‐based architecture (SOA) seems to be appropriate to support the proposed approach.Research limitations/implications – The conceptual approach proposed need to be evaluated by case studies to be performed in differe...

A Process Mining Approach to Redesign Business Processes - A Case Study in Gas Industry

Nowadays organizations have to adjust their business processes along with the changing environment, in order to maintain a competitive advantage. Often, a change in a part of the system which is to support the business process implies a change of the whole system, which causes complex redesign activities. In this paper we present a case study involving the process redesign of a Dutch company belonging to gas industry. In order to identify appropriate redesign interventions, process mining and simulation techniques are used. This paper presents a process mining approach used in this case study, which consists of three steps: (i) data preparation, (ii) process mining and performance analysis, and (iii) simulation of the current and redesigned process models.

From data to knowledge: a method for modeling hospital logistic processes

When modeling or redesigning a process, the knowledge-management perspective is seldomly used. Using the knowledge categorization developed by van Heusden and Jorna, we propose a knowledge-management perspective to provide a strategy for modeling and redesigning a business process. As an illustration of our approach, we use hospital data of multidisciplinary patients. This specific group of patients requires the involvement of different specialisms for their medical treatment that leads to more efforts regarding the coordination of care for these patients. In order to increase the care efficiency, knowledge that supports the reorganization of care for multidisciplinary patients should be provided. We use the above-mentioned knowledge-management perspective for creating new multidisciplinary units, in which different specialisms coordinate the treatment of specific groups of patients.

Textractor: A framework for extracting relevant domain concepts from irregular corporate textual datasets

Various information extraction (IE) systems for corporate usage exist. However, none of them target the product development and/or customer service domain, despite significant application potentials and benefits. This domain also poses new scientific challenges, such as the lack of external knowledge resources, and irregularities like ungrammatical constructs in textual data, which compromise successful information extraction. To address these issues, we describe the development of Textractor; an application for accurately extracting relevant concepts from irregular textual narratives in datasets of product development and/or customer service organizations. The extracted information can subsequently be fed to a host of business intelligence activities. We present novel algorithms, combining both statistical and linguistic approaches, for the accurate discovery of relevant domain concepts from highly irregular/ungrammatical texts. Evaluations on real-life corporate data revealed that Textractor extracts domain concepts, realized as single or multi-word terms in ungrammatical texts, with high precision.

Strong convergence of the Mann iteration for α-demicontractive mappings

The paper deals with strong convergence properties of the Mann iteration. A new class of demicontractive mappings (called alpha-demicontractive) is introduced for which the strong convergence of the computed sequence is assured. The paper presents also an overview of relevant contributions of the last two decades, concerning strong convergence for Mann-type iteration of demicontractive mappings

Extracting meronymy relationships from domain-specific, textual corporate databases

Various techniques for learning meronymy relationships from open-domain corpora exist. However, extracting meronymy relationships from domain-specific, textual corporate databases has been overlooked, despite numerous application opportunities particularly in domains like product development and/or customer service. These domains also pose new scientific challenges, such as the absence of elaborate knowledge resources, compromising the performance of supervised meronymy-learning algorithms. Furthermore, the domain-specific terminology of corporate texts makes it difficult to select appropriate seeds for minimally-supervised meronymy-learning algorithms. To address these issues, we develop and present a principled approach to extract accurate meronymy relationships from textual databases of product development and/or customer service organizations by leveraging on reliable meronymy lexico-syntactic patterns harvested from an open-domain corpus. Evaluations on real-life corporate databases indicate that our technique extracts precise meronymy relationships that provide valuable operational insights on causes of product failures and customer dissatisfaction. Our results also reveal that the types of some of the domain-specific meronymy relationships, extracted from the corporate data, cannot be conclusively and unambiguously classified under wellknown taxonomies of relationships.

Knowledge claim evaluation : a fundamental issue for knowledge management

Purpose – This paper aims to present a classification of approaches toward knowledge claim evaluation (KCE), which is the process of evaluating and testing knowledge claims in organizations, and to position KCE as a fundamental research issue for KM.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from a range of KM theories in the academic literature and reviews the role of KCE. Concepts and principles from epistemology provide the basis for the analysis and classification of KCE approaches. The papers particular focus is on KCE in innovation. Furthermore, practical examples illustrate the working of KCE.Findings – KCE is a neglected process in KM theories. The conceptual underpinnings of KCE in KM theories are insufficient and empirical studies are lacking. The paper identifies three approaches towards KCE from the literature. The proposed classification shows that KCE can be dealt with in various ways, and that an understanding concerning the practical workings, the contextual factors and effects of KCE ...

Improving Product Quality and Reliability with Customer Experience Data

Advance technology development and wide use of the World Wide Web have made it possible for new product development organizations to access multi-sources of data-related customer complaints. However, the number of customer plaints of highly innovative consumer electronic products is still increasing; that is, product quality and reliability is at risk. This article aims to understand why existing solutions from literature as well as from industry to deal with these increasingly complex multiple data sources are not able to manage product quality and reliability. Three case studies in industry are discussed. On the basis of the case study results, this article also identifies a new research agenda that is needed to improve product quality and reliability under this circumstance. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The evaluation of knowledge claims in an innovation project : A case study

Understanding how an organization determines what knowledge is valid leads to new insights about how firms cope with innovation. Although the evaluation of knowledge is a relevant topic in the field of knowledge management, the existing literature does not provide substantial contributions. Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) theory of justification is the only established approach. This study adopts an empirical approach for improving the understanding of knowledge claim evaluation by presenting a conceptual framework based on Toulmin’s (1958) argumentation theory. We apply the framework in a small-scale study at the headquarters of a large building technology multinational. Based on the results, we reflect upon Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) justification theory. Our findings indicate that the justification theory explains actual knowledge claim evaluation only partially. The unexplained parts, for which we explore alternative meanings, enlighten why innovations fail or succeed from the viewpoint of knowledge claim evaluation.

Sense making of (Social) sustainability: A behavioral and knowledge approach

Although sustainability is often discussed solely in ecological terms, it cannot be disconnected from the way humans behave in their social environment. This article presents a theoretical approach toward sustainability that takes a human behavior and knowledge view on sustainability as a starting point. This approach requires that human behavior should change, individually and collectively, in order to achieve sustainability. Knowledge is identified as the driving force behind human behavior and its effect on the ecological and social environment. In connecting knowledge with sustainability, two concepts are introduced: knowledge of sustainability (KoS), which refers to the sustainability content of knowledge, and sustainability of knowledge (SoK), which denotes the dynamics of the continuing process of knowledge creation and application. To apply SoK and KoS, we argue that a cognitive interpretation of human behavior should be formulated within a knowledge management approach that incorporates the stages of knowledge creation, integration, and application and that ensures the critical evaluation of created knowledge. In order to show that our new approach is practical, we use existing research from the Dutch starch potato industry to reformulate possibilities for the enhancement of sustainability in terms of KoS and SoK. In addition, the research led to the development of a mechanism for evaluating knowledge. Group interaction, information technology, and decision support systems are used to realize knowledge integration. The combination of conceptual design and domain of application is common in the engineering sciences, where a design methodology is used to make the steps from conceptual design to functional design and technical implementation. A conceptual design may show ways to improve existing practices, which in turn might result in superior practices. Of course, it is necessary to empirically test the interventions in reality. For AGROBIOKON that has not been done, yet.