Employees are motivated intrinsically as well as extrinsically. Intrinsic motivation is crucial when tacit knowledge in and between teams must be transferred. Organizational forms enable different kinds of motivation and have different capacities to generate and transfer tacit knowledge. Since knowledge generation and transfer are essential for a firm s sustainable competitive advantage, we ask specifically what kinds of motivation are needed to generate and transfer tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicit knowledge.

Abstract. Understanding how to implement SPI successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, there has been no systematic attempt to synthesize and organize the prescriptions offered. The research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper provides a synthesis of prescriptions for successful quality management and process improvement found from an extensive review of the quality management, organizational learning, and software process improvement literature. The literature review was confirmed by empirical studies among both researchers and practitioners. The main result is an instrument for measuring the key factors of success in SPI based on data collected from 120 software organizations. The measures were found to have satisfactory psychometric properties. Hence, managers can use the instrument to guide SPI activities in their respective organizations and researchers can use it to build models to relate the facilitating factors to both learning processes and SPI outcomes.

Abstract—Understanding how to implement software process improvement (SPI) successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, the research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper extends and integrates models from prior research by performing an empirical investigation of the key factors for success in SPI. A quantitative survey of 120 software organizations was designed to test the conceptual model and hypotheses of the study. The results indicate that success depends critically on six organizational factors, which explained more than 50 percent of the variance in the outcome variable. The main contribution of the paper is to increase the understanding of the influence of organizational issues by empirically showing that they are at least as important as technology for succeeding with SPI and, thus, to provide researchers and practitioners with important new insights regarding the critical factors of success in SPI.

Editor’s Introduction pp. 004- 005

Knowledge and technology are celebrated as the twin sources of competitive advantage in modern economies. To make knowledge and technology available to deliberate organizational action (to turn such sources into resources, as it were) is a current task for every manager – from the corporate top to the project level. But what are these resources that managers attempt to manage? And how are they made manageable? We will ponder these questions below in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of knowledge management in modern organizations. For a start, let us clarify our use of the central concepts, knowledge, technology and management. In some sense technology and knowledge must be conceptually very similar. It is probably uncontroversial to claim that technology is a form of knowledge. Recall that ‘logos ’ in Greek philosophy was “the divine reason implicit in and governing the cosmos. ” 1 Presently, as a suffix (-logy) it denotes knowledge about a specific domain of cosmos – which is, in the case of technology, “tekhne ” – the art and craft of producing something. We may think of technology as the body of knowledge that underlie the systematic application of tools and skills “according to a pragmatic instrumental rationality”. 2 It is probably slightly more controversial to posit that knowledge is a form of technology, since this may suggest that knowledge is crafted and produced – by managers or researchers, as the case may be. We don’t mean to stir a paradigmatic war and merely observe that at least some part of the reality that organizations need to know about in order to perform well, must first be made knowable. The preferences of the market, or the resourcefulness of the context, are not immediately observable goads for organizational decision-making – and to the extent that they do in fact serve as premises for 1

The responsibility of public managers includes designing processes that effectively operationalize policy mandates and contextual goals. The field of public administration has a long tradition of research and commentary on how to fulfill this responsibility. The classical administrative theorists fashioned a doctrine of organizational design that set forth such principles as unity of command and scalar chain. This doctrinal approach was roundly criticized by Herbert Simon (1946) nearly 60 years ago. Simon instead proposed that public managers engage in administrative analysis. This cognitive procedure included describing the functioning of particular organizations in terms of information processing and decision-making. It also included diagnosis, or identifying factors limiting organizational performance, analogous to specifying the binding constraints on the output of a physical system. He encouraged learning from experience by experimenting with structures and procedures intended to relax the constraints. He later admitted that administrative experimentation, in the literal sense, was rarely feasible (Simon 1976). Other scholars, such as James March (1999), have vigorously

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The Manchester Metropolitan University Business School is one of the largest business schools in the UK comprising more than 150 academic staff organised into nine thematic subject groups. The Working Paper Series brings together research in progress from across the Business School for publication to a wider audience and to facilitate discussion. Working Papers are subject to peer review process.

In recent years the evolution of information and communication technologies has expand further the possibility for the establishment of effective e-learning solutions. In this era of enormous transformation in education a number of key questions are arising. The effectiveness of learning systems, the justification of web based learning processes, the learners satisfaction and the analysis of the educational product are only a few of the most critical dimensions for the design and the implementation of an e-learning course. Our paper discusses the value dimension of e-learning and tries to formulate a synthetic approach for the evaluation of any e-learning system. Three key concepts seem to be the cornerstones of our analysis: Knowledge Management Capabilities, Integration and E-learning Pedagogy. 2.

In this paper the suppliers ’ contributions to their customers ’ processes are analysed from the perspective of the supplier. The study is based on case studies of six suppliers connected to three lift truck companies. The case studies reveal that co-operation is not fully developed. The reasons for this are analysed and some conditions for supporting mutual learning are discussed.