Many researchers have searched for evidence of organizational improvements from the huge sums invested in ICT. Unfortunately, evidence for such a pay back is spotty at best (e.g., Brynjolfsson, 1994; Meyer and Gupta, 1994; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1998). On the other hand, at the individual level, computing and communication technologies are increasingly merging into work in ways that make it impossible to separate the two (Gasser, 1986; Zuboff, 1988; Bridges, 1995).

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A number of assumptions in the past have been made about how business process improvement and re-engineering, and organisational learning should take place in organisations. Although a number of these assumptions have been framed on theoretical models, few have been based on the empirical analysis of the nature of actual business processes. This paper tries to fill this gap with an analysis of data, information and knowledge exchanges in 22 business processes from three organisations. This analysis points to a number of characteristics that appear to be contradictory with some current organisational practices, and that can be helpful to inform future developments in the fields of business process improvement, re-engineering and organisational learning. Two relevant characteristics are a much higher proportion of data over material exchanges in business processes, and a higher proportion of knowledge exchanges in improvement over core and support processes.

Recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have provided a substantial push towards the codification of organisational knowledge and practices. It is argued that codification, and the subsequent delegation of organisational memory to software, entails fundamental structural transformations to knowledge and routines as these are reconfigured and replicated in the form of new computer-embedded representations. The paper demonstrates that the process of embedding knowledge and routines in software holds fundamental implications for the ability of heterogeneous organisational groups, functions and communities to coordinate their efforts and share knowledge across function-, discipline- and taskspecific boundaries.

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This paper reports on a case study which was the first stage in exploring whether Computer Mediated Communications technologies (CMCs) can support distributed international Communities of Practice. The aim of the case study was to explore the possible existence of Communities of Practice in an international organisation, to identify such groups and to ascertain the media used.

The market-focused learning organization continues to attract attention in the marketing literature. Two central and interrelated aspects of collective learning are organizational culture and memory. The relationship between culture and performance has been demonstrated both theoretically and empirically. This study investigates the influence of culture and organizational memory development on perceptions of managers ’ decision-making context. Findings suggest that both organizational culture and memory influence marketing managers ’ perceptions of decision-making context. Specifically, managers in externally focused cultures tend to perceive a relatively higher proportion of strategic problems than managers in internally focused cultures, and managers in organic process cultures tend to perceive a relatively higher proportion of unstructured problems than managers in mechanistic cultures. The implications for managerial practice are discussed and avenues for future research outlined. Marketing managers are required to make decisions under difficult circumstances. There are few proscriptions or universal marketing laws to guide them, and a variety of

Agent technology has been applied to design new services simplifying product and merchant brokering in several consumer industries. The term "shopbots" is generally used to characterize these services. It is proposed that shopbots will reduce consumer search costs and make consumer buying behavior more rational. Based upon a decision making model, we propose twelve hypotheses of the effects of using shopbots on consumer buying behavior. The hypotheses are tested in an experimental study of consumers choosing a financial service provider. We find strong support for the hypotheses of change in information search behavior, but only partial support for the hypothesis of change in choice behavior. Further, we find no evidence of differences at the problem recognition and judgment stages of the buying process between consumers using shopbots and other consumers. KEYWORDS AND PHRASES: Software agents, shopbots, product brokering, consumer buying behavior, Internet marketing. 1.

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