Corporate Expertise Research Articles

Avoiding the presumptive policy errors of intergovernmental environmental planning programmes: a case analysis of urban stormwater management planning

This social research aims to identify and examine the implementation presumptions of intergovernmental environmental planning programmes and how to improve their effectiveness in future practice. It contrasts and explains the organisational dynamics and implementation responses of municipalities that succeeded and failed in realising the objective of such a programme. The research involved a qualitative multiple-case comparison between four high- and four low-performing municipalities implementing a stormwater programme within metropolitan Sydney, Australia. These two organisational types substantially differed in corporate expertise, environmental leadership, extended relational activity, and overall disposition to learning and ownership of local environmental issues. The paper identified five presumptions underpinning the programme design which privileged the high-performing organisations, but did little to garner commitment and develop capacity among the low-performing group. These implementation insights not only provide guideposts for intergovernmental programme design, but also reveal how policy design can undermine policy intent if empathy to local organisational dynamics is lacking.

Reuse in Software Development Organizations in Latvia

Reuse in Software Development Organizations in Latvia The paper presents the results of a survey, which aims to investigate the field of software reuse in software development organizations in Latvia. The topic has a particular significance since reuse may provide some economic benefits by reducing software development and operating costs, and by efficient utilization of development knowledge and corporate expertise. The objective of the study is to identify the key factors to be considered by the companies interested in establishing a software reuse program, thus improving time-to-market, costs and quality of software products by ingraining reuse into the entire software development process. Twenty factors organized into four categories were considered important within the framework of the survey. The results were obtained through the questionnaire involving software organizations in Latvia, whose responses were analyzed and used to relate the characteristics of organizations with their reuse experience. As a result, the influence of the selected factors on the success of the reuse is evaluated using four different levels (strong, weak, none, no data). Additionally, the paper includes review of related researches and comparison of the results. In conclusion, the author provides suggestions for the improvement of the reuse in Latvian software development organizations on the basis of the survey.

RICHARD E. HOLL. From the Boardroom to the War Room: America's Corporate Liberals and FDR's Preparedness Program. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2005. Pp. x, 191. $75.00

Just before World War II began, the U.S. spent barely a billion dollars a year on its military. In the year after Pearl Harbor, however, it allocated $3 billion for airplanes alone. Two years on, U.S. military spending reached seventy times prewar levels. How this military-industrial transformation began is the chief concern of this thesis-derived monograph. Richard E. Holl emphasizes the 1939–1941 period of partial and voluntaristic mobilization before Pearl Harbor, which sought to build a secure foundation for later “emergency state” elaborations. Key to all these efforts was corporate expertise. The U.S. military was unready for modern war in 1939. The American state was also unready, lacking the “administrative resources of information, analysis, and expertise” that high technology global conflict required (p. 50). Political leaders faced stark choices. They could seek permanent state programs run by civil servants, let the marketplace rule, or create temporary cooperative wartime agencies filled with businesspeople which avoided permanent expansions of government authority.

From submarines to suburbs: selling a better America, 1939-1959

During World War II, U.S. businesses devised marketing strategies that encouraged consumers to believe their country's wartime experience would launch a America. Advertisements and promotional articles celebrated the immense industrial output that corporations achieved during the war. These commercial messages positioned wartime technologies and corporate expertise as the means to streamline America and invent a socially hygienic future free from poverty, slums, drudgery, filth, and-for some businessmen-the New Deal administration. From Submarines to Suburbs surveys the development, strategy, and effect of these campaigns over a span of twenty pivotal years. Cynthia Lee Henthorn takes a close look at how pre-fabricated suburban houses, high-tech kitchens, and miracle products developed from war-related industries were promoted as the hygienic solutions for establishing this America, one led by the captains of free enterprise. As Henthorn demonstrates, wartime advertising and marketing strategies tying consumer prosperity to war were easily adapted in the Cold War era, when a symbiotic relationship between military standing and standards of living intensified in a culture dependent on defense spending. Were the efforts to engineer a America successful? Using documentary evidence in the form of numerous advertisements, From Submarines to Suburbs stands as a significant contribution to understanding how today's better America evolved.

Improving After-the-Fact Tracing and Mapping: Supporting Software Quality Predictions

The software engineering industry undertakes many activities that require generating and using mappings. Companies develop knowledge bases to capture corporate expertise and possibly proprietary information. Software developers build traceability matrices to demonstrate that their designs satisfy the requirements. Proposal managers map customers' statements of work to individual sections of companies' proposals to prove compliance. Systems engineers authoring interface specifications record design rationales as they make relevant decisions. We developed an approach to tracing and mapping that aims to use fully automated information retrieval techniques, and we implemented our approach in a tool called RETRO (requirements tracing on target).

Corporate Social Responsibility Practices, Corporate Identity, and Purchase Intention:A Dual-Process Model

The relationships among corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, corporate identity, and purchase intention were evaluated for 4 corporations: Microsoft, Nike, Philip Morris, and Wendy's. Discretionary CSR practices and moral/ethical CSR practices emerged as significant predictors of the corporate social values dimension of identity. Relational CSR practices, however, contributed mainly to the expertise dimension of corporate identity. Also, familiarity with CSR practices of a corporation had a significant effect on corporate identity, which in turn affected purchase intention. For 2 of the 4 companies, Nike and Wendy's, both corporate expertise and corporate social values were significant predictors of purchase intention. For Microsoft, only the expertise dimension was predictive of purchase intention, whereas for Philip Morris, only the corporate social values dimension was a significant predictor of purchase intention. The results are interpreted within a dual-process model of corporate identity.

The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System: Tools and experiences

The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System™ from IBM uses several leading-edge technologies to systematically create associations between corporate expertise and information resources, personalize and organize knowledge for individuals and communities, and provide a place for teams to work, make decisions, and act. It also creates a searchable index, computes document values, and provides a search-and-browse user interface. This paper describes the technology behind the knowledge management components of the product and describes the experience of the United States Joint Forces Command, one of the product's earliest adopters. The Joint Forces Command combined a new knowledge management methodology with the software tools, and the Lotus team gained valuable deployment experience in the process.

High Technology and Common Sense

THE MORE I work with all types of high technology, the more I depend on common sense. People keep getting me to help them with their technology problems, but I rarely use any high-tech know-how, and I frequently rely on good old-fashioned horse sense. Axioms handed down to me as a child keep popping into my head, and I seem to be depending on them more every day: You can't see the forest for the trees. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. We all have our jobs to do. You're not finished until the paperwork is done. When most people find themselves in the middle of a complicated situation, they tend to get lost deep in the forest. (Axiom: You can't see the forest for the trees.) When I am asked to work in such situations, I try to get as far back from the problem as possible. Recently, I was asked to help a school district get a complicated distributed wide-area network made up of more than 60 Microsoft NT servers to function well. After several days of study, I found that, by and large, the network functioned properly and that most mission- critical files were backed up somewhere. But I am not sure anyone knew where! Certainly no one had a list of just where the back-up files were located. (Axiom: You're not finished until the paperwork is done.) mission-critical hardware was backed up, too, but the mission- critical person wasn't. entire operation depended on a single person who had become ill. This little oversight ended up costing the district a sinful amount of money. you have to hire someone new tomorrow to keep your network going, good luck! I hope you have deep pockets. I used to have an axiom of my own: If you can't teach somebody to run it, don't install it. I have since modified it to be If you can't teach two people to run it, don't install it. you depend on a system, back up both the hardware and the people who run the hardware. Another recent example of being lost in a forest concerns the vice president of a high-tech start-up company. He asked me to help the company develop an infrastructure that would allow the company to function virtually. That is, the company would have engineering and corporate expertise locally and in other parts of the world. When I spoke with him, he told me he was interested in equipping all members of the company with Palm Pilots so they could keep notes of meetings and other things and not be burdened with paper. He didn't have a workable IT (information technology) plan, and I am not sure what the corporate secretaries were doing, but I guess it wasn't taking or transcribing notes! I suggested purchasing a tape recorder and developing an IT plan. (Axiom: We all have our jobs to do.) Just a few months ago, I got an interesting e-mail from a physician who was a medical school professor. doc said that his med school would soon be installing a computerized automated medical chart system. plan was that the doctors in training would sit at computer terminals located throughout the hospital and enter the information they needed to add to a patient's medical chart. As it happens, I have a neighbor who runs a home medical transcription business. Local doctors carry pocket tape recorders with them as they make their rounds and dictate information as they walk from room to room. At the end of the day, the doctors hand their tapes to someone at the hospital who digitizes the audio and e-mails the resulting computer files to my neighbor. My neighbor, who can type 120 words a minute, simply puts on her headphones, plays the digital audio file, and adds the new information to the appropriate chart. After explaining how well this system works, I asked the professor/doctor how many of his docs could type 120 words a minute. I think he was a little taken aback. (Axiom: We all have our jobs to do. This leads me to a another axiom of mine: The first law of intelligent computing is to get someone else to do your computing if you can. …

Valuing corporate knowledge and intangible assets: some general principles

This paper provides a general set of principles, organized into a usable framework, for the valuation of intangible assets as well as corporate knowledge, in the act of transferring, sharing, selling, or licensing it from one company to another. It provides benchmarks for valuation to both seller and acquirer, to licensor and licensee, and to both partners in a corporate alliance. Part I of the paper classifies the nature and attributes of different kinds of corporate knowledge. Part II focuses on the valuation framework. Intangible assets, whether registered intellectual property such as brands, patents, copyrights, or whether they be ‘knowhow’, or general corporate expertise, are increasingly separable from their organizational context, and can be sold or shared with another firm—for compensation. As such activity increases—as part of a general trend towards outsourcing and modularization of business functions, aided by codification of previously tacit or intuitive knowledge—placing a money value on a ‘knowledge package’ is a crucial managerial function. Many of the principles presented in this paper can also be used when the same firm makes its own investments in other markets, by transferring corporate knowledge to its own subsidiary. The various benchmarks and criteria found in the literature are here, for the first time, presented in a comprehensive valuation framework, eminently usable by managers and negotiators. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Valuing corporate knowledge and intangible assets: some general principles

This paper provides a general set of principles, organized into a usable framework, for the valuation of intangible assets as well as corporate knowledge, in the act of transferring, sharing, selling, or licensing it from one company to another. It provides benchmarks for valuation to both seller and acquirer, to licensor and licensee, and to both partners in a corporate alliance. Part I of the paper classifies the nature and attributes of different kinds of corporate knowledge. Part II focuses on the valuation framework. Intangible assets, whether registered intellectual property such as brands, patents, copyrights, or whether they be ‘knowhow’, or general corporate expertise, are increasingly separable from their organizational context, and can be sold or shared with another firm—for compensation. As such activity increases—as part of a general trend towards outsourcing and modularization of business functions, aided by codification of previously tacit or intuitive knowledge—placing a money value on a ‘knowledge package’ is a crucial managerial function. Many of the principles presented in this paper can also be used when the same firm makes its own investments in other markets, by transferring corporate knowledge to its own subsidiary. The various benchmarks and criteria found in the literature are here, for the first time, presented in a comprehensive valuation framework, eminently usable by managers and negotiators. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Building of a Corporate Memory for Traffic-Accident Analysis

This article presents an experiment of expertise capitalization in road traffic-accident analysis. We study the integration of models of expertise from different members of an organization into a coherent corporate expertise model. We present our elicitation protocol and the generic models and tools we exploited for knowledge modeling in this context of multiple experts. We compare the knowledge models obtained for seven experts in accidentology and their representation through conceptual graphs. Finally, we discuss the results of our experiment from a knowledge capitalization viewpoint.

Social expressions/greeting card industry: anatomy of an international marketing strategy

Contends that adapting consumer products to foreign market tastes is one of the more difficult challenges facing international marketers; the stakes are high, with even minor cultural mistakes resulting in lost sales and corporate embarrassment. Chronicles how one company in the global greeting card industry developed its international marketing strategy. Uses a Delphi panel of company managers to identify key factors in the product adaptation process. Draws on corporate expertise to pinpoint key similarities and differences between the US home market and prospective foreign markets. Concludes that where there were major similarities, prospects were deemed good for global standardized strategies. Where there was great diversity among key indicators, a multinational country‐by‐country approach was followed.

Corporate Knowledge‐Based Systems:

Knowledge‐based systems are beginning to provide executives with powerful systems which serve to automate corporate expertise. This is the first of two articles exploring KBS and their corporate implications.