This volume presents state-of-the-art models, algorithms, and applications of quantitative methods in management and economics. The papers are clustered into four parts, focusing on optimization issues, applications of Operations Research in production and service management, applications of Operations Research in logistics, and interdisciplinary approaches.

Knowledge management presents a new way of understanding organizations and companies, and is especially suited to sophisticated and highly technical firms and operations such as those in the construction industry.

This new book draws on hard data from three separate research programs in Sweden and shows how the concept of knowledge can make sense in the construction industry, an industry which can be viewed in essence as being engaged in the material transformation of "nature into buildings." In particular it explores and examines three different businesses: a medium sized construction firm; Wing rdh Architecture, Sweden s most prestigious architecture firm; and BESAB, a specialist concrete injection firm working on underground construction. An emerging theme is the situational and context-bound nature of knowledge in the construction industry, thus showing "knowledge" to be a remarkably heterogeneous concept.

A range of readers should find the book useful, from students and construction managers through to researchers.

Communities of Practice are accessible to both experts and new members of a particular community with diverse academic and cultural backgrounds as well as varying social expectations and experiences. Despite the tremendous opportunities for collective learning and knowledge sharing that Communities of Practice offer, not enough is known about these communities in emerging economies and their potential to facilitate cooperation between experts from around the world. Organizational Knowledge Facilitation through Communities of Practice and Emerging Markets seeks to fill the knowledge gap surrounding Communities of Practice and their role within developing nations. Focusing on critical topics related to different types of knowledge communities and the ways in which such communities generate innovation, this research-based publication is an ideal reference source for academics, business professionals, researchers, entrepreneurs, and those currently studying at the graduate level.

Rapid application of new technologies and highly leveraged innovation processes are key for the success of companies and organizations in dynamic markets. Based on the experiences of one of the industry's most modern innovation centers this book provides an insight into the tools and methods used to align customer requirements, competitive challenges and technological development. Both, scientists and practitioners, will benefit from the lessons learned and presented in this volume.

This book reports the elements required for implementing Just in Time (JIT) technique in companies. The main reasons for low implementation processes and the main benefits from the successful implementation of them are highlighted in this book. Structural equation models are presented to help identify the essential elements in JIT.

The Leader's Guide to Resilience is your essential toolkit to build authentic strength within your business, so you can thrive in a changing and challenging world. Resilience is the core of growth and regrowth. It is what contributes most to the advancement of your organisation and your role as leader. Your personal resilience, and that of your teams, organisation and broader community network, must be actively nurtured to give you the tools to face anything that comes your way. This book will give you clear, effective and adaptable methods to initiate your first steps in building resilience, as well as advanced practical ways to refine, develop and future-proof your progress once on the path. Whatever life throws at you, resilience will help you bounce back. 2021 Firebird Book Award Winner - Business, Leadership and Motivation

Leaders and Managers want quick answers, quick ways to reach solutions, ways and means to access knowledge that won't eat into their precious time and quick ideas that deliver a big result. The Little Book of Big Decision Models cuts through all the noise and gives managers access to the very best decision-making models that they need to to keep things moving forward. Every model is quick and easy to read and delivers the essential information and know-how quickly, efficiently and memorably.

This thesis reports on an innovative production-scheduling model for virtual computer-integrated manufacturing (VCIM) systems. It also describes a robust genetic algorithm for production scheduling in VCIM systems. The model, which is the most comprehensive of its kind to date, is not only capable of supporting collaborative shipment scheduling and handling multiple product orders simultaneously, but also helps cope with multiple objective functions under uncertainties. In turn, the genetic algorithm, characterised by an innovative algorithm structure, chromosome encoding, crossover and mutation, is capable of searching for optimal/suboptimal solutions to the complex optimisation problem in the VCIM production- scheduling model described. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified in a comprehensive case study.

A critical reviews on state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms and enterprise governance in China, including the challenge, quandary and outlook Combines both theorectical and empirical discussions on China's SOE mixed-ownership reform The Chinese version is a prize winning title, giving insights into China's enterprise reform and development

This book investigates organizational learning from a variety of information processing perspectives. Continuous change and complexity in regulatory, social and economic environments are increasingly forcing organizations and their employees to acquire the necessary job-specific knowledge at the right time and in the right format. Though many regulatory documents are now available in digital form, their complexity and diversity make identifying the relevant elements for a particular context a challenging task. In such scenarios, business processes tend to be important sources of knowledge, containing rich but in many cases embedded, hidden knowledge. This book discusses the possible connection between business process models and corporate knowledge assets; knowledge extraction approaches based on organizational processes; developing and maintaining corporate knowledge bases; and semantic business process management and its relation to organizational learning approaches. The individual chapters reveal the different elements of a knowledge management solution designed to extract, organize and preserve the knowledge embedded in business processes so as to: enrich organizational knowledge bases in a systematic and controlled way, support employees in acquiring job role-specific knowledge, promote organizational learning, and steer human capital investment. All of these topics are analyzed on the basis of real-world cases from the domains of insurance, food safety, innovation, and funding.

This book offers a straight-forward guide to the fundamental work of governing bodies and the people who serve on them. The aim is of the book is to help every member serving on a governing body understand and improve their contribution to the entity and governing body they serve. The book is rooted in research, including five years' work by the author as a Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.

With a view to helping managers ask the right questions, Data Protection and the Cloud explains how you can effectively manage the risks associated with the Cloud and meet regulatory requirements. This book discusses: The controller-processor relationship and what you should pay attention to; How to mitigate security risks in the Cloud to comply with Article 32 of the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation); How to comply with Chapter V of the GDPR when transferring data to third countries; and The implications of the NIS Directive (Directive on security of network and information systems) for Cloud providers. One of the most dramatic recent developments in computing has been the rapid adoption of Cloud applications. According to the 2018 Bitglass Cloud Adoption Report, more than 81% of organisations have now adopted the Cloud in some form, compared with only 24% in 2014. And there are no signs that this is slowing down. The GDPR was enforced on 25 May 2018, superseding the 1995 Data Protection Directive and all local implementations. Bringing data protection into the 21st century, the Regulation expands the rights of individuals, but also introduces new, stricter requirements for organisations. This pocket guide discusses the GDPR requirements relating to Cloud sourcing and the risks involved. Buy today and learn how to meet your data protection obligations when using Cloud services.

This tutorial introduces readers to several variants of routing problems with profits. In these routing problems each node has a certain profit, and not all nodes need to be visited. Since the orienteering problem (OP) is by far the most frequently studied problem in this category of routing problems, the book mainly focuses on the OP. In turn, other problems are presented as variants of the OP, focusing on the similarities and differences. The goal of the OP is to determine a subset of nodes to visit and in which order, so that the total collected profit is maximized and a given time budget is not exceeded.The book provides a comprehensive review of variants of the OP, such as the team OP, the team OP with time windows, the profitable tour problem, and the prize-collecting travelling salesperson problem. In addition, it presents mathematical models and techniques for solving these OP variants and discusses their complexity. Several simple examples and benchmark instances, together with their best-known results, are also included. Finally, the book reviews the latest applications of these problems in the fields of logistics, tourism and others.

IT Performance Management addresses the way organizations should balance the demand and the supply of information technology, optimizing the cost and maximizing the business value of IT.
In this book several aspects of IT performance management are described. The way this management is executed and the techniques, which should be used, depend on the maturity of the relationship between the IT function and the lines of business of an organization. The foundation of the authors' approach is based on the flow of money and related management objectives. However, performance management is primarily based on perceptions. Therefore, this book introduces the IT value perception model. This model describes four separate levels of perception for the business value of IT. If the demand and the supply of IT do not share the same perception level, the balance is lost, which will lead to friction and inefficiency within an organization.
This book is not about what is good or what is bad, but rather is about the 'what', the 'why' and to a limited extent the 'how' of managing the performance of IT. Therefore, the book finishes with a 'back-to-business' section in which a self-assessment checklist, a potential growth path and ten next steps are provided. This enables the reader to start applying this book in his every day working environment immediately.
IT Performance Management:
* Provides an overview of best practices and available thinking on the subject of IT cost and value
* Describes the subject of IT cost and value related to management issues on IT strategy, portfolio management, service management, architecture and sourcing
* Addresses differing degrees of maturitybetween IT and the business, illustrated by case studies
Practical and easy to integrate into day to day decision making immediately
Deals with multiple perceptions on the role of the IT organisation in the business
Discusses the topics currently on the CIO's agenda

As entrepreneurs seek to gain an advantage against their competitors, understanding how to share information throughout their organization will be vital in their success. Accordingly, it is critical for researchers, managers, and consultants to strengthen their own systems to facilitate knowledge management and implement strategies that will launch them into the future. Global Practices in Knowledge Management for Societal and Organizational Development is an integral reference volume featuring leading academic research on the management and creation of knowledge and organizational development theories and models. Including coverage on a variety of related perspectives and subjects, such as infrastructure and services for knowledge organizations, ethics and the impact on knowledge management, and the future of knowledge workers, this book is an ideal reference source for organizational development specialists, consultants, policy makers, researchers, and graduate business students looking for advanced research on cultural aspects of knowledge management and creativity, innovation, and technology in learning communities.

This book takes an in-depth look at consumer behavior in the context of multichannel commerce and explores how the convergence of physical and electronic channels influences consumer decision-making in a multichannel environment. In this regard, it goes far beyond explaining choices between online and offline sales channels, instead providing insights into how the interplay between different channel types is valued by different consumer types and for different products. The book extends previous conceptualizations of multichannel commerce to reflect and incorporate recent technological advances. The results provide valuable guidelines on how, why and when multichannel integration services can be exploited by classical retailers, helping them to compete with their purely online competitors on the internet.

Whilst there are many books on knowledge management there are few aimed directly at HR practitioners and the critical role that they can play in building a knowledge-centric culture. This practical book draws on the author's own experience, as well as that of leading-edge Human Resource and Knowledge Management practitioners (including Linda Holbeche, Elizabeth Lank, and David Snowden), each of whom recognise that building a knowledge-centric culture cannot be achieved through technology alone. It covers areas such as: Defining the key ingredients of a knowledge-centric culture The changing structures, roles and responsibilities needed to create a knowledge-centric culture HR's unique contribution to building a knowledge-centric culture, together with practical steps for getting started on the KM journey and for keeping the momentum going Tools and techniques for: opening up a dialogue about why knowledge management is crucial for business and personal success; knowledge mapping; encouraging and facilitating knowledge sharing, as well as ways of identifying key knowledge players How to help your organisation reframe its assumptions about learning in the knowledge economy How to ensure that your HR practices are knowledge aligned Contents Defining the characteristics of a knowledge-creating culture; The strategic context for HR's involvement in the knowledge management arena; Planning the cultural shift; Communicating the cultural shift; Knowledge and business process mapping; Understanding the motivation for learning; New approaches to learning; Interweaving people, processes and technology to create and support a knowledge creating culture; Retaining knowledge; Conclusions; References. Readership: Human resource professionals; learning and development practitioners; internal consultants and practitioners working within an organizational development role; Undergraduate and graduate students. Outline the strategic

In recent decades an extensive array of changes and innovations have taken place in and across work organizations and networks of organizations and workers, facilitated by new technologies and technological forms. This has initiated an interest in technological change as one of the conditions for organizational action and researchers have begun to draw inspiration from a wider spectrum of conceptual issues, perspectives and theoretical traditions.
This book is interested in the level of praxis and how this might be understood and theorized. It brings together a comprehensive collection of empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed research projects from studies of organizational practice which explore a number of technological changes in a variety of contexts. These are informed by contemporary debates within and across theoretical approaches including the sociology of technology, work and organizations, actor network theory, technology as text and metaphor, processual and political perspectives, social and business network-based approaches to the analysis of technology and innovation, and the social construction and shaping of technology.
This book will be essential reading for researchers and advanced students within the field of technology, work and organizations and also organization studies and management studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203380541