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Team working is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. A team's performance levels are determined by complex interactions between the attributes of its individual members, the communication and dynamics between members, the working environment, and the team's work tasks. As organizations evolve, so too does the nature of team working. During the past two decades, product development in engineering organizations has increasingly been undertaken by multidisciplinary integrated product teams. Such increasing complexity means that the nature of research methods for studying teams must also evolve. Accordingly, this paper proposes an agent-based modeling approach for simulating team working within an engineering environment, informed by research conducted in two engineering organizations. The model includes a number of variables at an individual level (competency, motivation, availability, response rate), team level (communication, shared mental models, trust), and task level (difficulty, workflow), which jointly determine team performance (quality, time to complete the task, time spent working on the task). In addition to describing the model's development, the paper also reports the results of various simulation runs that were conducted in response to realistic team working scenarios, together with its validation. Finally, the paper discusses the model's practical applications as a tool for facilitating organizational decision making with respect to optimizing team working.

A business intelligence architecture comprises of different unique components to collect, transform, analyze and present the structured and unstructured raw data in simple formats to assist decision makers in making timely decisions. The introduction of service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables reusable services which are accessible over a network on demand. However, there is still a lack of academic literatures on the business intelligence architecture with service-oriented concept. Based upon various references on BI architectures from major vendors, a novel BI architecture that is built on service-oriented concept is presented and described in this paper. The proposed service-oriented architecture enables enterprises to deploy a more agile, flexible, cheaper, reusable, reliable and responsive BI applications in supporting decision making process.

As industrial systems become increasingly more complex, the maintenance and operating information increases both in volume and complexity. With the current pressures on manufacturing, the management of information resources has become a critical issue. In particular, ensuring that personnel can access current information quickly and effectively when undertaking a specific task. This paper discusses some of the issues involved in, and the benefits of using, open hypermedia to manage and deliver a diverse range of information. While the paper concentrates on the problems specifically associated with manufacturing organizations, the problems are generic across other business sectors, such as healthcare, defence and finance. The open hypermedia approach to information management and delivery allows a multimedia resource base to be used for a range of applications and it permits a user to have controlled access to the required information in an easily accessible and structured manner. Recent advancement in hyp...

The ability to forecast job advertisement demands is vital to enhance the customer retention rate for recruitment companies. On top of that, it is uneconomical to cold call every individual on a regular basis for companies with a large pool of customers. This paper presents a novel approach in predicting the re-ordering demand of a potential group of SMEs customers in a large online recruitment company. Two feature selection techniques, namely Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) and Subset Consistency (SC) Feature Selection, were applied to predictive models in this study. The predictive models were compared with other similar models in the absence of feature selections. Results of various experiments show that those models using feature selections generally outperform those without feature selections. The results support the authors’ hypothesis that the predictive model can perform better and further ahead than similar methods that exclude feature selection.

A model of learning transactions is offered for use in the development of e-learning materials and toolkits. The model identifies the key components required for effective learning, and in doing so, helps the development team ensure the provision of these components to the teacher or learner.

A methodology for e-learning systems engineering is offered for use in the development of e-learning materials. The methodology draws upon the practices of software engineering to identify the key stages and steps required for the development of effective e-learning materials.

This paper presents an approach to locating an expert through the use of existing organizational information. This approach was realised through an Expert Finder framework developed by the authors. The framework enables the relationships of heterogeneous information sources to experts to be factored in to the modelling of an individuals’ expertise. The framework also provides an architecture that can be easily adapted to different organizations. The framework has been applied to a real world application and been evaluated using the notions of precision and recall.