Intranet Technology Research Articles

Enabling role of an intranet to augment e‐coaching

PurposeThis paper has the aim of exploring whether virtual coaching in an organisation may be facilitated and enabled by intranet technology for the creative dialogue of e‐coaching.Design/methodology/approachA review of the e‐coaching, the enabling role of technology, and intranet technology and intranets literature is undertaken. It is then argued that by adopting an autopoietic view of an intranet, virtual coaching may be facilitated and enabled by intranet technologies for the creative dialogue of e‐coaching in an organisation.FindingsRather than intranet technology and intranets being simply an add‐on to established processes in an organisation, technology and coaching are synthesised into something new and exciting in the e‐coaching domain.Research limitations/implicationsThe six implications for organisations suggested in the paper are not inclusive, but may provide an avenue for research in the evolving e‐coaching domain. A research entry point may be the development and validation of a theoretical framework for e‐coaching.Practical implicationsIn order that e‐coaching may be seen as a development partnership, six implications for organisations are suggested.Originality/valueE‐coaching can be seen as a developmental partnership in which much learning can take place using e‐mail but will be augmented by the enabling role of an intranet.

The Connecting School and the Intranet Librarian

A growing number of Scottish education authorities are providing intranet technology to schools. This article is based on grounded research investigating the role of the school librarian within an intranet environment. The evidence suggests that despite a lack of expectation by school library services and authority intranet officers, school librarians are taking on roles of intranet building, management, and content creation. It appears that far from distancing librarians from traditional areas of interest, their involvement in the intranet has promoted their relationship with whole-school resourcing and literacy support. Despite evidence that recent graduates are more likely to take on roles with the intranet, it is shown that a key factor is the attitude of the librarian and linking of the intranet to resource provision.

HemoBase: A Multidisciplinary Registration Systeem in Hemato-Oncology.

HemoBase is a patient oriented prospective hemato-oncology database using three central concepts:Report periods;Integrated Diagnosis;Multidisciplinary discussion of patient data.The disease history of a patient is divided in report periods. Each containing an integrated diagnosis, a treatment plan and a therapy evaluation. The integrated diagnosis is composed of an overall diagnosis, the topography of the primary tumor and the prognostic factors. A new integrated diagnosis or new treatment strategy leads to a next report period. Relevant clinical and diagnostic data and conclusions leading to the integrated diagnosis are registered according to the (mandatory) international guidelines and coding systems (anamnesis, physical examination, clinical chemistry, blood and bonemarrow cytology, flowcytometry, histology, genetic analysis (i.e karyotyping, PCR, FISH), imaging studies (i.e. CT including perpendicular diameter calculation, MRI, PET). Microscopic or other images may be imported. Furthermore, it is possible to record general medication and make follow up notes during patient visits or hospital stay. HemoBase contains algorithms to determine prognostic factors and a diagnostic multiple myeloma algorithm. HemoBase registers chemo-, radio-, surgical- or transplantation therapy, including (inter)national trials and registration of toxicity and infections. Dose regimens and dose reduction are calculated automatically. Therapy evaluation includes response evaluation and registration of cause of death. Plenary discussion of patients is facilitated by providing on screen the list of patients to be discussed with a direct link to individual data. Essential items of patient status are shown in a nutshell on a visual time axis. Using the query module one can evaluate patient data for quality, research and management purposes, i.e. patient outcome for diagnosis X with therapy Y, or more complicated queries. The housekeeping part of the system contains a personal task list and an internal mail module. Using the management module fields, forms and thesauri may be configured by the user according to the latest standards, i.e. a new therapeutic trial, a new translocation, a new WHO diagnosis etc. Access to Hemobase and to the separate datasets is linked to hospital function (account name) and password protected.HemoBase an application based on internet technology, currently implemented in the Dutch language and running on a central server. For access to the application Internet Explorer 6.0 is minimally required. At present, HemoBase is being used for a year in 6 different hospitals and laboratory locations in one region of the Netherlands (pop. 600.000) connected by secure intranet technology. This will be increased gradually and a HemoBase board will be developed for agreement and monitoring of registration protocols.

Thickening the Frame: Cross-Theoretical Accounts of Contexts Inside and Around Technology

Starting from the social construction of technology approach and proposing a literature review of the concept of technological frame, the distinction or continuity between contexts inside and around technology is analyzed as constitutive of a thicker frame. A multilayered articulation of the technological frame is proposed. Organizational history, identity, interorganizational relations, along with discursive practices and communicational routines are seen as the components of the intranet technological frame. Discursive practices, therefore, mediate between macro components belonging to the organizational dimension and micro components concerning the practice of specific organizational communities or workgroups and the inscribed patterns of use through which technology is temporarily stabilized into specific artifacts. The analysis of the frame as set of practices and contexts is carried out by referring to sociotechnical literature and findings of a completed Ph.D. dissertation about intranet technology.

Evaluating the role and effectiveness of an intranet in facilitating knowledge management: a case study at Surrey County Council

The research study discussed here examined the role and effectiveness of intranet technology in the process of creating and managing knowledge for the Social Services Department of Surrey County Council, which is one of the largest local authorities in the UK. Based on an analysis of the literature in the field, we devised an intranet evaluation model (IEM) using both technical (hard) and human (soft) factors. It made use of an epistemological framework to elicit user mental models from across an organisation via a survey. The model was able to identify gaps, mismatches and failings in the knowledge management efforts. These were summarised in an easily understandable diagrammatic form, using knowledge evaluation maps; these showed the gap between the current and desired intranet roles for the different user groups within the council. The paper concludes by demonstrating how factors, such as the different mental models of the user groups can determine the effectiveness (or otherwise) of an intranet in managing organisational knowledge. It also contains recommendations of services that need attention in the council operations and suggests how the IEM could be used as a consulting tool for organisations seeking to evaluate their own knowledge management work on a continuous basis.

Implementation of a group decision support system utilizing collective memory

Collective memory has been characterized as a socially articulated and maintained reality of the past—one form being organizational memory. The collective memory concept can also be specialized to a group level and used to support work groups engaged in repetitive decision-making activities. The advantages of capturing collective memory are many, including simplification of the process, codification of decision strategies, carryover of knowledge when group composition changes, etc. While there has been substantial research in group decision-making, the explicit use of collective memory to support repetitive decision-making has received less attention. This paper describes the development and implementation of a collective memory based environment for support of a multi-attribute, iterative decision process. The environment utilized hypermedia, groupware, and Intranet technologies. Results of its use are encouraging.

Achieving business process change in the public sector: revolution or evolution?

This paper explores the relationship between intranet technology and business process change (BPC) using case studies conducted in two Irish public sector hospitals. The management method used in the two case studies was diametrically opposed – one chose an evolutionary implementation, while the other commenced from a revolutionary strategic perspective. Given the unique characteristics of public sector organisations, this paper proposes that evolutionary based development is better positioned to achieve BPC using intranet technology. This is due to the fact that cultural acceptance of the technology is a critical success factor in public sector organisations due to their individual departmental structures.

Managing Internet and Intranet Technologies in Organizations: Challenges and Opportunities

Managing Internet and Intranet Technologies in Organizations: Challenges and Opportunities

Managing Internet and Intranet Technologies in Organizations: Challenges & Opportunities

Managing Internet and Intranet Technologies in Organizations: Challenges & Opportunities

Representations and Uses of the Intranet: A Comparative Case Study

The article focuses on Intranet technology as the result of overlapping negotiations among social actors inside organizations. Such negotiations are aimed at establishing and embedding specific relations and representations of work, communication, and learning into the technological artifact. Two case studies are presented to analyze practices and processes of implementation and use of the Intranet. The fieldwork, carried out in two companies in Italy and the United Kingdom, shows how specific contexts and organizational histories can affect such processes. Despite the “optimistic” imagery associated with Intranet technology and the high expectations about its communicative and economic efficiency, the article points out many constraints in the process of implementation and use. Company history and culture, skills and work groups, and use of other technologies and media are relevant factors to account for the current use of the two systems and their low degree of integration into everyday working and communicative practices.

Knowledge management, HRM and the innovation process

This paper aims to explore Castells’ proposition that the innovation process is being progressively intensified by developments in technological and organizational forms – that knowledge is being applied to the generation of knowledge. The paper focuses on the emergence and implementation of knowledge management (KM), and its particular application in Ebank. A global approach to KM focussing on intranet technology proved unsuccessful. In explaining this outcome, the paper focuses on the constraints posed by the social embeddedness of knowledge as having a crucial effect. In this case, such embeddedness seemed to be linked to the lack of extensive intra‐organizational networks and the disparate identities developed by the different business units of the firm. These findings highlight several implications for KM's role in the innovation process.

Knowledge creation and the web: factors indicating why some intranets succeed where others fail

AbstractIn today's highly dynamic business environment, organizational creativity is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage. Although the unpredictability of creativity makes it difficult to plan for, it may still be possible to facilitate knowledge creation given that we understand what affects it. In this paper, seven enabling factors of organizational creativity are identified and discussed. These factors are then compared to the specific characteristics of intranet technology in order to find out when and how this environment may stimulate creativity. The conclusion is that intranets are most likely to contribute by providing a variety of information in dynamic and unpredictable environments. However, standard management literature instead unanimously prescribes organizational convergence as the default strategy for the modern manager. Our analysis suggests that this control approach not only conflicts with some of the creativity‐enabling factors but also clashes with the fundamental principles underpinning the web. The organizational implication of the conclusion presented in this paper is that only in organizations where management has embraced an updated attitude towards information management, can the corporate intranet truly contribute to knowledge creation and creativity. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Taxonomy of Intranet Implementation Strategies

The mid-1990s marked the widespread adoption of intranets by organizations to facilitate communication between geographically dispersed organizational units. Since then the knowledge barriers to adoption have been lowered by the emergence of advanced development tools and later the availability of ready-made “intranet-in-a-box” packages as well as an elevation of the general awareness and knowledge of Internet/intranet technologies among users. Based on an explorative study of intranet implementations in nine Danish and two South African organizations, this article presents a taxonomy of four archetypes of intranet implementation processes. The dimensions of the framework are sourcing (in-house vs. outsourced implementation) and technology (development tools or packaged intranet products). Using the taxonomy, we classify the strategic choices of the case organizations and make recommendations for organizations using or producing intranet technology products.

Key Roles in Intranet Implementation: The Conquest and the Aftermath

Intranet technology has been rapidly adopted by many organizations. From being a largely unknown technology prior to the mid-1990s, numerous organizations today have implemented or are currently implementing intranets. The intranet implementation processes of three large organizations in two countries were studied over a period of 5 years. In particular, the paper investigates the role players who spearheaded the intranet implementations in these organizations. Five interrelated roles during the intranet implementation process are identified: the technology champion, organizational sponsor, intranet coordinator, intranet developer and content provider. In the light of the nature of intranet technology, each respective role is analysed in terms of its significance, key challenges and interrelationships during the implementation process. The paper further examines the dynamics of these roles in the aftermath of implementation as the technology becomes embedded in routine organizational activity.

A set of frameworks to aid the project manager in conceptualizing and implementing knowledge management initiatives

Over the years, researchers and practitioners have been concerned about the “collection” of information and knowledge. Now with Web-based and Intranet technologies, we have the “connectivity” to allow information and knowledge sharing to take place. In recent years, the term “knowledge management” has been proposed, and numerous individuals and organizations are trying to put more “science” behind the “art” of knowledge management. To help in this direction, this paper addresses some useful frameworks to help project managers and others in conceptualizing and implementing knowledge management initiatives. A generic knowledge management implementation framework is proposed. This paper should provide the building blocks necessary to further understand and develop knowledge management initiatives.

Design and implementation of a common drug information database for a university hospital.

Providing high quality problem-oriented drug information relies on the ability to easily collect appropriate background information on clinical cases, to access relevant information from published sources by defined search strategies and to store and retrieve previously answered questions. To do this efficiently, an easy-to-use, flexible and reliable drug information database is necessary. We designed and implemented an Intranet-based drug information database for a major university hospital in Germany. The overall design and the technical details of its design are discussed. We developed a generic, XML-based data model for pharmaceutical inquiries including a MeSH-oriented system of 99 pharmaceutical qualifiers to enable efficient indexing of questions and the searching of indexed questions. The system provides query statistics and various search algorithms. The software implementation takes into account recent FDA recommendations for software used in clinical trials; internal review for quality control is supported. The database currently consists of 4224 records after 3.5 years of operation. Each inquiry consists of 50 items, 18 of 50 are categorized; 135 text elements support data entry. Our evaluation is focused on technical feasibility, user acceptance and query patterns. The intensive use and widespread acceptance of the database indicates a need for a computerized drug information system and suggests that Intranet technology can perform this task.

Complexity of biomedical data models in cardiology: the Intranet-based AF registry

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia and is associated with major complications. Ongoing research is focused on new pacing devices for alternative treatment of this disease. The objective of an AF registry is to store prospectively all relevant data covering clinical information, quality of life and device parameters and by this means provide a platform for long-term follow-up. For statistical analysis, categorical and numerical items are required, thus a high-granular data structure must be defined and implemented in the clinical setting. Facing the limits of formalization, we developed an XML-based documentation scheme consisting of 619 items in eight tables and implemented it with state-of-the-art Intranet technology. At present detailed information on 88 patients is recorded. The pacing device generates per patient and follow-up visit a file consisting of approximately 400–500 parameters provided on a floppy disk, which are transferred by means of a specific interface into the database. Success factors for integration of a complex research database into the routine workflow of a busy university hospital are interfaces between data sources to enable non-redundant data entry, intensive fine tuning by iterative software engineering and benefit for the clinical users in form of clinical reports and patient-specific summaries. Data quality must be assured by plausibility checks. To get an overview of this complex dataset we developed a dedicated visualization tool. Due to the high number of items a large patient collective must be recruited for statistical evaluation. Interinstitutional cooperation is required for a consensus on common minimal documentation schemes to enable pooling of data.

Multimedia Distributed Learning Environments: Evolution towards Intelligent Communications

In this paper we describe the realization of a Multimedia Distributed Learning System developed by means of the Java language in a Intranet environment. In particular, we focus our discussion on the definition of the existing scenario, on the requirements specification and on the description of our overall system, by providing also first experimental results. We decided to add to our system a Software Agents based Intelligent Communication Support to manage both high level and low level communication needs coming from the nature of the application. Such communication needs could reasonably be considered as shared by a large family of distributed applications based on Intranet technologies. We present the main characteristics of our agents and describe how to use them to better achieve defined goals in terms of flexibility and scalability and to add network-awareness capabilities to the application.

The E-world, information and competitive advantage: what works?

The Author’s theme of company competitiveness and the role played by information and communications technologies (ICT) in its maximization is continued with a review of corporate uses of Internet and intranet technology. Internet technology is used for accessing all the information on the Web, the invisible Web, electronic mail (email), instant messaging, newsgroups, chat rooms, online message boards, communities of practice, virtual communities, intranets, extranets, portals, vortals, industrynets and auctions. The Internet has had a profound effect on organizations and business activity by overcoming geographic boundaries and making information more easily available and in larger quantities to a wider potential customer base. The importance of acknowledging the inability of the Internet alone to create a competitive advantage is stressed, along with need to seek to create such advantages by using the Internet to do things differently, through innovation or by inventive pricing. The things that Internet technology enables organizations to do which they could not do easily before include: broadcasting information internally and externally; making information much more easily available; messaging; increasing speed of delivery; direct customer contact; selling; buying; ordering; educating; exchanging information and views; monitoring competitors and the marketplace; graphics/pictures; improving customer service and value; analyzing customer needs; reaching new markets; and improving choice.

Power system protection and control utilising intranet technology

In view of the sweeping changes that have taken place in the electricity supply industry it is now, more than ever before, of vital importance that senior managers have easy access to processed data and information. This must provide them with knowledge of power systems and their constituent components. The implementation of Intranet technologies in protection and control systems will enable free and flexible acquisition of power system information at the appropriate location.