Innovation Example: The Windfall Fund

What is The Windfall Fund?

The Windfall Fund is a nonprofit organization which takes small donations today and invests those donations over a long period of time. When the investments mature they are worth a huge sum of money and can be used to assure help is available in the future. The Fund works because many people want to contribute and make a difference but are unable to do so financially. With the Fund pocket change can be donated and that will make a difference someday.

Building up the organization.

Talk to people in the know:

• Professors
• Lawyers
  
• Businessmen/women
  
• Other nonprofits

Get the name out there:

• Competitions
• Grants
  
• Website
  

Raise funds:

• Competitions (Carolina Challenge, USC Student Innovator Showcase)
  
• Grants
  

Measure feasibility:

• Expert opinion
  
• General public opinion
  
• Break down strategy for creation.

Will it innovate?

5 Points of Innovation (from class)

1. Relative Advantage
2. Compatibility
3. Complexity
4. Trialability
5. Observability

Concluding Post

Overall I feel like I learned a great deal from the course. I had not considered all the different facets of an organization that we learned about. I am sure that once I am a part of a professional organization the things I learned in this class will help me out.

Specifically I felt I now understand the importance of the individual in the organization. Without a bunch of individuals working towards the same goal there would not be an organization. So, to make the organization effective, those individuals need to be working together effectively. This can mean they share information well, they communicate well, or more tacitly just work together well.

Also I thought the material about organizations coming up with a knowledge strategy was very interesting. If an organization wants to grow and stay effective they need to make sure they are up-to-date with current information which relates to their organization. This can be done by coming up with a plan and putting it into action. The organization cannot be lazy or completely satisfied with their current status. This class has definitely taught that successful organizations change in the right ways to stay effective.

Lastly I enjoyed what we learned about innovation. I will be giving my in class presentation on innovation.

Week 16: Personal Information Management

Personal information management (PIM) is very important in the organization because it is individuals that make up the organization. If each employee can efficiently find information which applies to projects to projects he/she is working on then the organization as a whole should be able to work better as a whole. Often organizations can only go as fast as their slowest member and if focus is placed on PIM then even the slowest member should be able to get things done at a reasonable pace.

PIM within a business can be a tricky thing because the information that each individual member has can have a large effect on others in the organization or just the organization as a whole. For example, it may be the vice president's personal information that he has a dental appointment at 3:00 pm and will be leaving early. This can have repercussions throughout the organization if a weekly meeting which is headed by the VP normally takes place during his dental appointment. So if the VP updates his calendar with his appointment it is important for the rest of the business to know the VP will not be present at the meeting. Clearly if the VP is the heads the meeting he should probably tell people the meeting time will need to be changed. However, what if the VP forgets to tell somebody? If the company has access to the VP's information then it would be less of a problem. Each organization needs to have a discussion about where the line is drawn between strictly personal information and personal information which has a direct effect on the organization.

The publishing of personal information is being more prevalent than ever. By publishing I really mean to let all of the public have access to it. With the growing popularity of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook a complete stranger has the opportunity to learn a great deal of personal information about an individual. The paper by Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield discusses Facebook. Specifically the researchers were looking for a connection between completed fields in a profile and number of friends. The hope was to determine if what it is that motivates connections between friends.

Through the study of 30,773 profiles the researchers conclude that users will have more friends if their profiles consist of information which referred to across many profiles. This means information like favorite movies or favorite tv shows is more highly associated with number of friends than expressing opinions such as filling out the About Me section. This tells us that Facebook users are interested in connections which they can directly relate to. Knowing this about Facebook is useful because it gives us insight into how people want to connect online which we can further apply to other online networks. A large company which is designing and online network for its employees could keep this kind of research in mind to make it a success.

Week 14 & Week 15: Knowledge Strategy and Organizational Effectiveness

In order for an organization to expand their knowledge and increase the amount of information which is at their disposal they must have a knowledge strategy. From the notes a knowledge strategy is built around a firm's intellectual resources and capabilities. They must figure out what knowledge is strategic and why it is strategic. To figure what knowledge they need the organization must undergo some introspection and figure out what they know about themselves, especially what they know how to do well, and then they must look outward and figure out what they know of the competition. Once the organization has an outline of their current knowledge situation a potential knowledge strategy could be developed.

Organizations want a knowledge strategy because it will guide how they go about information seeking. They do not want to bark up the wrong tree. Technology can be a great help to organizations which are trying to develop a knowledge strategy because technology provides excellent means to filter and organize information. For instance, if a small farming company wanted to expand their business from foods to biofuel they could easily find all kinds of resources online which would help them do this. Not only could they find it but with the correct knowledge management tools they could wield the knowledge to do what they wanted. This could be doing something as simple as emailing potential clients to buying new equipment which would help create the biofuel.

A knowledge strategy can be seen as a precursor to organizational effectiveness. If the organization has a well thought out knowledge strategy then it is likely the organization has a good chance of success at whatever they are trying to accomplish. A company's effectiveness can be measured by looking at the company's stated goals are comparing those goals to what the company actually accomplishes. Also some comparison could go on between companies in a similar field. For example, automakers are constantly ranking themselves against each other. In the article just linked a representative from General Motors had this to say about its Silverado sales beating those of rival Ford's F-series, "We have the best truck. In this business, the best product and the best brand wins." He feels really good about his organization's effectiveness in comparison to a rival.

Part of the reason the Silverado overtook the F-series in sales this past February was because the Silverado had just undergone a redesign. Ford on the other hand has not planned out a redesign of the F-series for a few years. GM took advantage of this knowledge and developed a strategy which resulted in their new truck coming out before Ford's thereby grabbing up valuable market share. That is a great example of an organization implementing a knowledge strategy and it working out because the original strategy was well thought out and took into account all those things which were discussed at the beginning of this entry: know what the organization does well, know what your competitors are doing, figure out what you need to do to be the best.

Week 12 & Week 13: Innovation and the Organization

In order for organizations to stay relevant they need to innovate or at least keep up with the latest innovations. I remember this old burger joint that I used to go to as a kid. It was called Arnold's and had easily been around for 40 years, probably making its start during the 50's or 60's as the place to go get a shake and burger. I only went there a few times but I remember thinking at the time that it seemed sort of dingy and the slow, deliberate way in which things were done was a big difference from what I was used to getting at McDonald's, which was right across the street. Eventually Arnold's shut down and they paved over everything and put up an Eckerds. The point is Arnold's was a business that was put into a position where it either had to change or it would go out of business.

I learned in INLS 382 all about something called the System Development Life Cycle. It is a circular cycle (imagine that!) which goes like this: Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Maintenance. We learned that the major of the SDLC is spent in maintenance where the system has to be modified and streamlined to work for all possible situations it may be needed for. The same idea can be applied to an organization. Once the foundations for an organization are laid what is left is to maintain those foundations and make sure the organization stays relevant.

Relevance can come with the help of new technology. I think the term new technology can be misleading. Even if an organization adopts a piece of technology which has been around for 10 years, that technology will still be new to the organization. Just because a company buys a supercomputer does not mean they are going to lead the way with supercomputing in their industry. A huge part of innovation and technology is the implementation of technology.

My favorite example of innovation has got to be the minivan. Every year it seems like some new great thing is present in minivans that were not present the year before. I think it is very possible they have an idea of the perfect minivan and roll out one feature per year to keep the consumer interested, either way the minivan market is always changing and each company plays off the ideas of other. I think the biggest breakthrough for minivans was the addition of a large sliding door on the driver's side. It seems so apparent to do that now. It is very convenient. That is a thing about innovations, sometimes they are extremely simple and easy to adopt.

Week 11: Leaders and Pizza

Great Leaders

The main characteristic I have always found to be had by the great leaders I have had the chance to work with is their ability to communicate effectively. They communicated well in both giving directions and listening. There is the old saying to lead by example but I have found that when somebody is explicit in what needs to be done it is more effective. The best is when a leader is explicit about what must be done and they practice what they preach. Taking a look at the list I linked to of Time's 100 Greatest Leaders reveals tons of great orators.

Communication is so important for a leader because that is how those being led know what is going on. A good leader will speak confidently and clearly so those he/she is speaking to will be instilled with a sense of "sureness." By sureness I mean they are confident in what needs to be done and understand that if they complete what is required the task or whatever they are working on will be a success. People look to leaders to be given a path to pursue. A good leader will listen to those people and pick out a path that is suitable for them. For example, I am very interested in new technology and ways in which it can be used by a common person. My boss at my current job realized at some point in our conversations and placed me on the technology team at work. Basically we are supposed to do exactly what I like doing, figure out ways to use technology. It was a good job by my boss because he put me into a position where I wanted to excel.

There are times when a leader needs to ask his followers to do something they may not be familiar with and are hesitant to take up with task. If the leader is effective he/she will have gained the respect of his followers and will have authority over them to make them at least willing to pursue the new avenues.

Pizza

The pizza store activity was a good opportunity for us students to put into place some of the things we had been learning about organizations, especially organizational culture. My group focused on making our pizza place, Pizzasaurus, seem like a cool place to go purely based on the type of atmosphere we were creating. Our organization wanted to instill in the customer a feeling of pride in going to our restaurant for pizza. In a business where pizza places are dime a dozen we knew we had to create something different that would stand out from the rest. Therefore when it came to designing Pizzasaurus we took good ideas from other companies like having dipping sauce for our pizza (Dino Sauce) and made them in our own.

Week 6 & Week 7 & Week 8: Organizational Culture

The success of an organization is greatly impacted by its organizational culture. Whether the organization excels because its culture is strict or loose it is important that members of the organization are able to identify with the organizational culture. Organizations should keep this in mind when they take on new people because it is important that new employees understand why an organization acts in a certain way and the reasons as to why they are expected to act in a certain way. For example, I had a friend that started to work as a server for a restaurant in Raleigh. She is what I would deem a "nice girl" and it turned out that the place she became employed was sort of a rough place. After several situations in her first week she decided her personality and the culture at the restaurant she was working at did not match and she quit. In the end she wasted her time and the restaurant wasted its time training somebody that left before she could really help them out. This situation could have been avoided had the organization been better at explaining its way of doing things and its expectations.

The role of organizational culture can be a powerful one that attracts both money and talent. Take Google for example. This article outlines some major players that have moved from one of Google's chief competitors, Microsoft, to work at Google. Perhaps they were drawn in by the Googleplex and the fact that Google employees can bring their dogs to work. Or it could have been the three free gourmet meals served to employees every day. Whatever it is Google has figured out a way to make its culture work to its advantage over its competitors.

Once an employee is part of an organization, the culture of that organization is related by storytelling and mentoring. The paper by Swap goes into great detail discussing these methods. An employee's mentor can have a profound effect on how that employee will start his/her career. An effective mentor will explain to the employee what is expected of them and how the organization functions, get the employee the crucial embedded skills. Having a mentor gives the employee a chance to learn the ropes quickly and correctly. I was hired to my first job when I was 15 years old. I worked at a pizza place and the job lessons I learned there will be present with me for the rest of my life. I had a great trainer and the owners of the store were passionate about what they did and that transferred to me. Old employees that had moved on to college or other bigger and better things would stop by all the time and would relate old stories, instilling a since of pride in me about my work. Eventually the store was sold and the new owners brought in a different culture, hiring different types of people that did not share the same values the old employees had. Quickly all the old employees left to different jobs and the store was changed forever. Until the classes we had on organizational culture I never realized the effect the change in culture had on my old job. It will be something to keep in mind for the future when I get a real job and am trying to be successful.

A note on the Information Case I turned in relating to Organizational Culture. A copy of it can be found here. You asked a question in my paper about how college basketball has played a role in the development of the NBA/WNBA. In regard to the Charlotte Bobcats the college basketball scene has definitely played a big role in its formation. Since its creation in 2004 the Bobcats have had a history of drafting players that had success in the NBA. Their first pick ever was for Emeka Okafor, a standout from the University of Connecticut. The next two years the Bobcats drafted a total of three former UNC players drawing on the states affinity for the Tar Heels. They also drafted another college standout in Adam Morrison. It seems likely that the Bobcats were trying to take advantage of the national prominence of college players to build up their own fan base. This is smart because they were taking a piece of success from one organization and trying to translate that success to their organization. A recent move by the NBA changed the draft rules to allow only players which have had a year of college or are 19 years old. This move allows really great players who would have made the direct leap to the NBA to build up their reputation in college. By the time they get the NBA they are already well known and fans are excited to see them play.

Week 4 & Week 5: Organizational use of information

These two weeks of class were great because I learned a lot about what it takes for an organization to be successful in its information use. Whether the company does not have much information and is looking for more or if the company is suffering from information overload there are tactics which companies need to keep in mind. If they need information then they need to get good information which means finding good sources. Choo discussed Matsushita going to a master baker to figure out why the automatic bread maker they had created was not doing a good job. Matsushita was a smart company and went to somebody that had the information they needed. In this case they needed some tacit knowledge, previous to getting that tacit knowledge they probably did not even know that is what they were after. The point is if an organization thinks it through and goes to somebody with answers then they have a great chance of being successful.

Choo discusses eliminating equivocality when it comes to making decisions. Equivocality is a result of not knowing which information to act on and in what way that information should be acted on. An organization needs to have a plan in place which makes decisions based on the information they have. If the organization does not have enough information to make a good decision then they need to go get more information.

Week 3: Ethics and its importance in organizations

Organization ethics, especially in business, is very important. A company's ethics, or more often a reflection of their ethics, is one of the most public things about a company. This generalization is better applied to smaller companies than giant incorporations. People like to shop locally or at smaller stores because there is more lucidity in how that particular company does business. For instance a small pizza store I worked for in high school had its reputation ruined by a former employee who told his church the owners sold him drugs. The ethics of the store's owners were put into question and the public responded.

The class content from this week mostly talked about things which were in the Grover paper "Lying, deceit, and subterfuge: A model of dishonesty in the workplace". One thing I particularly liked from the lecture was the way in which organizations often lie. These were:

• Omission
  
• Implication
  
• Exaggeration
  
• Loopholes
  

Of those four I think omission is probably what organizations struggle with the most. There are many situations when not telling the entire story or leaving out certain facts is easy to do. The person who is "lying" may realize they are leaving out some unsatisfactory details but at the same time may think they are unimportant to the overall picture and would only detract from what has been done correctly. It could be argued either way to leave out details such as these or to go ahead and include everything. For example, a couple that is getting married may not actually want to know everything about the other person and his/her past. Sometimes things are better left unsaid. But that brings us to the original question of if it is better to leave something unsaid or undocumented, is really ethically bad? I think this paragraph, or at least how I have it in my head right now, is a great example of an ethical dilemma.

In the case when organizations do lie, they lie for special reasons. It is not often that a company will lie just for the sake of lying or to lie maliciously. Grover analyzes the reasons for deceit in his paper. I was most struck with the idea of role conflicts leading to lying. Basically Grover says when a person is placed outside of their role or possibly asked to do two different things they cope with the situation by lying about it. Organizations can learn from this analysis and should try to keep people comfortable in their roles.

A real quick example of a true model of dishonesty in the workplace…the Enron scandal. Enron executives actively lied about their company's finances in order to raise the stock price so that they could sell at a higher price. Enron also actively destroyed records so that their accountants would now know the financial trouble the company was in. It has been documented that Enron did all sorts of financial maneuvering in its time. This maneuvering helped the executives become rich but did so at the expense of the company and regular employees of the company.

Our discussion of ethics and especially that of Bok's Principle of Veracity rekindled my interest in ethics. I find ethics extremely important and pride myself in having good ethics. However, after ours reading and discussion of ethics I realized I need to make sure I reevaluate my ethics to ensure I am doing the right thing. Organizations should do the same thing and challenge themselves to make the right decisions.

Week 2: Information Handling, Organizational Structure and Power

While the first Buckland paper was useful and inspired much thought, this paper "Information Handling, Organizational Structure and Power" seems to be more applicable to real life situations. Buckland's thesis sentence of this paper is, "Improved information handling can be expected to centralize power."

I have been involved with many organizations throughout my life. My position in most of these organizations has been very near the bottom of the decision making tree, and I never thought about all the organization that was required above me to make things run smoothly. Recently, while looking for jobs and through a few different interviews, I have been exposed to the reality that successful organizations have a strict, well defined structure for decision making and information sharing. I interviewed at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and in both the phone and in-person interview the company's structure was outlined to me. I took their focus on structure to be evidence of the importance of that structure in the organization. The importance BCBSNC, as well as other companies, places on organization give Buckland's paper importance.

Nearly all of his points in this paper are well argued and articulated, notably his discussion on delegation of decision making. He says that decision making with be more spread out in an organization if it has poor communication methods. Poor communication could be a result of poor technology which prohibits communication which would have normally taken place or perhaps if interpersonal communication is poor. Either way it makes it very difficult or in some cases impossible for a centralized power to make all the decisions.

This paper was written in 1987 and Buckland makes the point that technical improvement in communication should lead to reduced delegation. I wonder what he would say about the Blackberry phenomenon. Blackberrys and similar devices allow people within organizations to instantly be aware of recent developments and give them the opportunity to reply to these developments instantly. However, in large companies it is not like the only person to have access to this technology is the CEO or other board members. In many cases, everyone in the company has access to all of this knowledge. Since everyone is capable of receiving the new information, each is able to respond to it within their own role. In this way, delegation is preserved and strengthened. New technology may make it easier for important decisions to be made by those with authority but it also makes it easier for lower level decision to be made by lower level people.

One other point of this paper I found very interesting was Buckland's assertion that, "Independence is an aspect of power." He made this point in reference to officers in the military being made redundant because of technological advances. I agree with this point entirely. However, in his example the organization as a whole suffered after the redundant officers removed the technology which made them redundant. To me that is wasting resources. If there a way to save time and money the organization should go for it and its members need to keep up. As things become more automated it will be interesting to see how organizations deal with redundant members.

Finally this comes straight from Buckland's paper. These are his assertions from his research into this subject. I am including them because they are very good assertions.

1. The centralization of decision-making is directly related to the effectiveness of information handling;
   
2. The greater the difficulties of information handling, the more layers of hierarchy;
   
3. More generally, the delegation of decision-making is inversely related to the effectiveness of information handling;
   
4. Technical improvement in information handling will tend to result in centralization of power; and as corollaries:
   
5. The effective centralization of power is indicative of effective information handling; and, therefore,
   
6. More effective centralization can be viewed as a measure of technical improvement in information systems.

Week 1: Information as Thing

Unsurprisingly Buckland's "Information as Thing" was the first paper I had ever read concerning the theoretical or even what I might consider the philosophical side of information. I was shocked to see that this paper was written initially in 1989, well before computers were used as they are today. Thinking about that now it seems it is a mistake to categorize information science solely in the realm of technology and computers. It seems that information and its manipulation, by whatever means, are fundamental to organizations past, present, and future. Buckland's paper is nice because gives a good base to start thinking information and how could be used, should be used, and how it is used.

Buckland outlines three principal uses of the word "information":

1. Information-as-process
   
2. Information-as-knowledge
   
3. Information-as-thing
   

Information-as-process: Process here refers to the process of change that occurs when somebody learns something new or what they already know is changed. For example, if you read this article about UNC basketball then you would have new information via "information-as-process".

Information-as-knowledge: This is harder to define because Buckland is talking about intangibles. This type of information can reduce uncertainty or increase uncertainty, depending on the person perceives it.

Information-as-thing: This is the real contribution that Buckland makes, defining information as physical objects. He says anything that somebody finds informative could be considered information. By that definition Amazon could be one of the largest providers of information.

Interestingly, Buckland finds a way to tie all these definitions together. For example a simple fact could be considered information-as-process because it changes what somebody knows, it is information-as-knowledge because it could change something that person believes, and this change in belief could cause the person who first read the fact to create something which then provides information to anyone who reads it or somehow learns from it.

Buckland breaks down information between tangible and intangible objects and entities and processes. Figure 1 is from his paper.

This breakdown of information which incorporates his three elements of information (four if information processing is included) is a very useful base to then define what kind of information is out there.

Something I found interesting was his assertion about intangible human knowledge which technically could be some tiny tangible thing in someone's brain. He says that academic tests possibly measure the physical amount of what somebody knows but since it is indirect it is not the same as counting out whatever tangible bits are actually in a person's brain. This analogy made me think of Google and its many vast networks of computers. On each of their harddrives are bits of information that could be physically taken out and read. However, that is not how Google works, all of the machines work together to offer information, sort of like a brain functioning to give a human information. So could the Google network be considered information-as-knowledge and the results they push out information-as-thing?

One downfall of Buckland is they way in which he writes. Though this paper seems to outline fairly basic definitions and ideas Buckland writes in a complicated way.

Course Outline

This outline is a weekly breakdown of overall themes and readings. Each reading has a link when available.

Week 1: Introduction to the course, requirements and expectations.

Reading: Buckland, Michael (1991). Information as Thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 42 (No. 5): 351-360.

Available from: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/10049442/PDFSTART

Week 2: Defining organizations and organizational effectiveness.

Reading: Buckland, Michael (1989). Information handling, organizational structure, and power. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 40 (No. 5): 329-333.

Available from: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/114273495/PDFSTART

Week 3: Ethical behavior, trust, and lying.

Reading: Grover, Steven L. (1993). "Lying, deceit, and subterfuge: A model of dishonesty in the workplace." Organization Science, Vol. 4 (No. 3): 478-495.

Available from: http://www.jstor.org/view/10477039/di013149/01p00094/0

Software Engineering Code of Ethics: http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm#full

Week 4: Organizational theories of learning, processes and models.

Reading: Choo, Chapter 1, pages 1-25, "The Knowing Organization: A Holistic View of How Organizations Use Information".

Week 5: A general model of information use.

Reading: Choo, C.W. (1991). Towards an information model of organizations. Canadian Journal of Information Science, Vol. 16 (no. 3): 32-62

Available from: http://choo.fis.utoronto.ca/FIS/ResPub/CJIS.html

Assignment 1: Ethics

Week 6: What is organizational culture?

Reading: Park, Heejun, Ribiere, Vincent, and Schulte, Jr., William D. (2004). Critical attributes of organizational culture that promote knowledge management technology implementation success. Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 8, no. 3: 106-117.

Available from: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Pdf/2300080308.pdf

Week 7: Organizational identity, diversity, organizational boundaries and communities of practice.

Reading: Communities of Practice: http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/

Reading: Milliken, Frances J. and Martins, Luis L. Martins (1996). Searching for common threads: Understanding the multiple effects of diversity in organizational groups. Academy of Management Review, 21 (2): 402-433.

Available from: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=4&hid=8&sid=15be57d6-1643-4526-b057-06f1980ec2cb%40sessionmgr8

Week 8: Organizational memory.

Reading: Swap, Walter, Leonard, Dorothy, Shields, Mimi, and Abrams, Lisa (2001). Using mentoring and storytelling to transfer knowledge in the workplace. Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 18, no. 1: 95-114.

Available from: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=4&hid=22&sid=2bc2811b-37c3-45c7-b7ca-3634562284a2%40sessionmgr2

Week 9

Midterm

Week 10

No class

Week 11: The role of organizational structure and leadership in organizational behavior and mid-term review.

Blackboard post: What makes a good leader?

In class group assignment: Personality and Pizza

Reading: CNN Article: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/Careers/02/25/personality.tests/index.html

Assignment 2: Organizational Culture

Week 12: Technology, knowledge creation, and decision-making in organizations and the implicit knowledge in tools.

Reading: Bhatt, G.D. (2001). "Knowledge management in organizations: examining the interaction between technologies, techniques, and people." Journal of Knowledge Management, 5 (1): 68-75.

Available from: http://docserver.ingentaconnect.com/deliver/connect/mcb/13673270/v5n1/s6.pdf?expires=1197063642&id=41147911&titleid=1119&accname=University+of+North+Carolina&checksum=C17DCD67A47F78AA26AAFFC8FE0FF90F

Week 13: Organizational innovation and change.

Reading: Sheehan, Jerry (2006). Understanding service sector innovation. Communications of the ACM, 49 (7): 43-47.

Available from: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1140000/1139946/p42-sheehan.pdf?key1=1139946&key2=1855607911&coll=GUIDE&dl=ACM&CFID=8954205&CFTOKEN=79469979

Assignment 3: Information Quality

Week 14: Organizational success and failure and the role of information and information use: the public view.

Reading: Brown, Mary Maureen and Brudney, Jeffrey L. (2003). Learning organizations in the public sector? A study of police agencies employing information and technology to advance knowledge. Public Administration Review, vol 63, no. 1 (Jan/Feb): 30-43.

Available from: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/action/showPdf?submitPDF=Full+Text+PDF+%28123+KB%29&doi=10.1111%2F1540-6210.00262&cookieSet=1

Week 15: Factors related to remaining "competitively" effective.

Reading: Chen, Hsinchun, Chau, Michael, and Zeng, Daniel (2002). CI Spider: a tool for competitive intelligence on the Web. Decision Support Systems, vol. 34, no.1 (December): 1-17.

Available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6V8S-46H21CD-2-T&_cdi=5878&_user=130907&_orig=search&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2002&_sk=999659998&view=c&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkzS&md5=9300a353a96da5e82f25d55a836f4a8d&ie=/sdarticle.pdf

Week 16: The individual in the organization: personal management issues and consequences, and social networking.

Reading: Awad, Naveen Farag and Krishnan, M.S. (2006). The personalization privacy paradox: An empirical evaluation of information transparency and the willingness to be profiled online for personalization. MIS Quarterly, 30 (1): 13-28 [March].

Available from: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=3&hid=120&sid=5cd6a215-6dd8-4e40-ba05-c2b8c7894831%40sessionmgr107

Reading: Lampe, Cliff, Ellison, Nicole, and Steinfield, Charles (2007). A familiar face(book): Profile elements as signals in an online social network. ACM CHI 2007 Proceedings, April 28-May 3, San Jose, CA, pages 435-444.

Available from: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1250000/1240695/p435-lampe.pdf?key1=1240695&key2=2706607911&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=46068552&CFTOKEN=98732812

Assignment 4: Knowledge Strategy

Introduction Post: Explanation of Blog and Its Features

So I have decided to join the foray and throw my name into the blogosphere hat with this INLS 285 portfolio. I was given the idea to do a blog by a friend of mine who had previously taken this course. After thinking about using a blog it made good sense. I am rubbish at making websites and I do not have the patience or really the creativity to make something really good on paper. The great thing about a blog is that I can easily borrow design features from other blogs, input pictures, video, music, hyperlink to all the articles I will be discussing, make use of html markups, and a bunch of other really cool features.

Secondly I decided to do a blog because I feel like blogging is going to get more and more popular as time goes on and I will probably have to learn about it eventually. I am using Blogger as my blog client because it is owned by Google and I love Google. I will be using a variety of different methods to upload to this blog. Currently I am using the blog feature in Office 2007 which allows me to connect to this blog and add posts do it. This is great because I can use the power of Word to do all my formatting and all I have to do is hit “Publish” and it goes straight to the internet. I will also use the built-in editor in Blogger, Google Docs, and whatever features I can find in Flock, a blogging and sharing-centric web browser based on the open source code used for Firefox.

*Note at the moment I cannot actually publish from Word. It says the provider I am trying to post to is unavailable. I will have to see how long it takes to remedy the situation. *Solution: So it turns out once I hit the publish button once I cannot hit it again to repost or update an entry. So I will have to make sure my post is totally complete before I hit publish. I do not like that.

Some things to note about the layout of this blog:

• On the navigation bar to the left you will see an advertisement. This was an option I elected to use which uses Google’s AdSense to show ads that have to do with the words I that are on this page. It could be interesting to take notice of what comes up.
• Also the navigation bar on the left shows news feeds for a number of different searches I put in. Feel free to click on the different keywords to see the latest information science related news.

As far as discussing the class lectures and readings I plan to go over the theme of each week and talk about what I learned and what I felt was important. I may not always review the class reading, it just depends on how I felt about it. In some cases I may look up papers from outside the class and talk about them should they be relevant.

My goal for you during the reading of this blog is to get an understanding of my opinions and views about information and organizations. I plan to do this effectively by making strong, well supported arguments with plenty of citations and good evidence. I am going to take your advice Dr. Barreau and not think about my grade on this one. I will instead focus on completing the assignment in such a way that I am proud of the final product. I think this could be a good exercise for me because when I get a job I will not be explicitly graded on things. This should provide a good avenue for me to explore what I need to do to do a job well done.

Enjoy reading and feel free to comment on anything I have written.

Jordan

The Assignment!

What is the personal portfolio?

The personal portfolio is a presentation of your best work in this class, along with your comments and reflection upon what you have learned. It may include other information, ideas, or reflections you have had over the semester. It should demonstrate that you have mastered goals of the class.

The purpose of the portfolio is to encourage you to think about the issues, topics, theories, and themes of the class and to relate them to your own knowledge and experience. Your portfolio should reflect your ideas of how information is used in organizations and how it might be used more effectively.

How is it organized?

The portfolio must be organized in a logical manner. This could be by general course themes or topic, according to the course outline, or any organization of your choosing.

What goes into a portfolio?

You choose the things that go into the portfolio, but nothing should be included that you have not commented upon in some way. For example, you may submit a past assignment, but you should explain why you chose it and why you think it is worth including. You may even re-do an assignment to illustrate that you have a better understanding of ideas or concepts.

Other things that go into the portfolio are things that you may find through the course of the semester. For example, a newspaper article that describes how an organization has used a new technology in an innovative way, a promotional brochure that may be used to help someone find what they are looking for, or even a copy of an email message that demonstrates a point you wish to make. You may do additional reading (several books and articles will be suggested throughout the course) and comment on those as well if you would like.

What is the format for the portfolio?

The portfolio may be in paper form, presented in a notebook or folder, or it may be in digital form such as a Web page or a blog. It should be attractive, well-organized, and it should demonstrate your knowledge and accomplishments. You should approach the assignment as if you were preparing a portfolio of your work to demonstrate to a potential employer that you understand the challenges of information management in organizational contexts.

You should provide both a brief introduction to the portfolio and a brief conclusion.

How will the portfolio be graded?

There are five standards that will be applied when grading the portfolio:

1. Comprehensiveness - how many of the goals are addressed and how well.

2. Organization - how neat and well-organized the contents are.

3. Clarity - how clearly the individual expresses points.

4. Creativity - how original the examples and ideas are within the portfolio.

5. Quality of the Analysis - how well the portfolio demonstrates critical thinking.