Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine.

Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to assess how telecommunications companies in Nigeria leverage intellectual capital as a strategic resource for creating competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approach – A previously published research instrument was administered and survey data were collected from 320 managers in 29 telecommunications companies.Findings – Hypotheses related to the relationship of human, structural and customer capital and its influence on business performance were tested. Results show that Nigerian telecommunications companies have mostly emphasized the use of customer capital, exemplified by market research and customer relationship management to boost their business performance.Practical implications – The over‐emphasis on customer capital to the detriment of other intellectual capital components is found to be undermining the productivity of Nigerian telecommunications companies.Originality/value – This is the first published study of intellectual capital development in Nigeria.

Managing intellectual capital in Nigerian telecommunications companies

Die nachhaltige Nutzung von Biogas leistet einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Reduktion von Treibhausgasemissionen. Im Gegensatz zur dezentralen Energieumwandlung in Blockheizkraftwerken eroffnet die Einspeisung von Biogas in bestehende Gasnetze effizientere Einsatzmoglichkeiten. Voraussetzung fur die Einspeisung ist die Aufbereitung von Biogas auf Erdgasqualitat. Es werden die wichtigsten Aufbereitungsverfahren sowie deren Vor- und Nachteile besprochen. Wahrend chemische Absorptionsverfahren eine hohe Produktgasreinheit gewahrleisten, zeichnet sich die Druckwechseladsorption durch geringe Gesamtkosten aus. Zur Ermittlung des optimalen Aufbereitungsverfahrens ist eine detaillierte Standortanalyse unter Berucksichtigung technischer und wirtschaftlicher Randbedingungen durchzufuhren.

Vergleich verschiedener Aufbereitungsverfahren von Biogas zur Einspeisung in das Erdgasnetz

– IT projects carry high risk of failure due to the existence of great obstacles during the planning, application and development phase. The projects' risks are multi-dimensional, and they must be assessed by multi-attribute decision-making methods. The purpose of this article is to provide analytic tools to evaluate the learning organization's IT project risks under incomplete and vague information. It was also aimed to place the risk in a proper category and predict the level of it in advance to develop strategies to counteract the high-risk factors. , – In this study, three mutual approaches were used to analyze the organizations IT applications. These are enterprise analysis for determination of information requirements of organization, payback method for IT project financial analysis and risk assessment using fuzzy sets and systems. The developed fuzzy model is an expert system which can predict the category of risk for IT projects in learning organizations. , – This study revealed that the greatest obstacles to IT project success were the lack of organizational learning, resistance to change, etc. User involvement limitation was found to be also one of the common reasons of IT project failure. The information sharing policy was determined to increase productivity of employees in offices and to decide the creators and the users of knowledge. Learning is a continuous process for organizational transformation. Individual and organizational learning were searched to minimize the level of risks factors and learning culture. IT project risks were categorized properly using fuzzy sets and systems to reduce or even eliminate high risks. , – The paper is original and gives the first such work for industry.

IT project risk assessment of learning organizations by fuzzy set and systems

Organisational culture is increasingly recognised as a major facilitator or barrier to leverage intellectual assets. Early works have shown that there are various technologies that support knowledge management (KM). This research presents an empirical study designed to explore and investigate the sophisticated relationships between organisational culture and the adoption of KM technologies. According to empirical studies, organisational culture could be decomposed into five dimensions: rational, group, development, hierarchical and ethical culture. On the other hand, the application of KM technologies can be categorised into five major categories: creation, storage/retrieval, transfer, application and platform technology. A random sample of 1000 largest companies in Taiwan was chosen as target organisations for this study. Among them, 121 completed survey responses were received, which yielding an effective response rate of 12.1%. The result of the correlation analysis indicates that storage/retrieval and platform technologies have positive relationships with all the cultures, while creation technologies are positively correlated with ethical, group and development cultures; and application technologies with development and hierarchical cultures. However, in general, organisational culture and KM technologies are weakly correlated. Moreover, though the majority of corporations started to recognise the value and importance of KM, there are only a few technologies such as database, email, intranet and Internet that were highly adopted and frequently used in KM activities. There exists a huge gap between recognising the importance of KM and enthusiastically adopting KM technologies. This study contributes to the understanding of how organisational culture affects and interacts with KM technologies and in what ways. It also demonstrates the current status of KM technology adoption in Taiwan's large corporations.

Adoption of Knowledge Management Technologies and Organisational Culture: An Exploratory Study

This paper reports a laboratory experiment result that investigated the relative effects of different combinations of interface features used in an Internet based multimedia program for breast cancer education. This study selected three interface features and evaluated their effects on usability. A complete 2 by 3 factorial experiment was conducted to study those three interface features: hyperlink, multimedia control panel, and video transcription. Results indicated that lack of hyperlink and its associated hypertext has significant negative effects on user satisfaction. It also indicated video transcription has negative effects on user satisfaction. This research contributes to the optimization of web interfaces and better understanding of interface design for Web based multimedia information systems.

User's Perception of Conventional Web Multimedia User Interfaces: An Exploratory Experiment

The most traditional approach to network optimization focuses on bringing new or improved capabilities to targeted functional areas of network operations. The goal is to boost the unit's efficiency and effectiveness. There are three different approaches proposed to help in designing adaptive multimedia systems for heterogeneous devices: server-side adaptation, proxy-based adaptation, and adaptation paths. Though there are a variety of approaches being proposed, evaluating content adaptation approaches using simulation is still lacking. This paper reports a simulation effort to compare the differences of performance among those three kinds of content adaptation approaches. A 2 by 5 factorial design was implemented to test the effects of five influential factors within the network. The result indicates that the service based approach is not only capable of adapting varied network environments but also have outperformed the other two. This could be used as a key reference for the optimization of content adaptation network.

Eric Y. Cheng

Papers

Adoption of Knowledge Management Technologies and Organisational Culture: An Exploratory Study

User's Perception of Conventional Web Multimedia User Interfaces: An Exploratory Experiment

Simulations of distributed service-based content adaptation for network optimization