Recent concerns about the issue of knowledge management (KM) within an organization have accentuated the need for more efficient and effective knowledge sharing - that is, knowledge sharing plays an increasingly significant role in determining the outcomes of KM. Most scholars explore this issue from the economic perspective, while only a few research studies have focussed on organizational capabilities. Drawing from the theories of resource-based view and KM, this study aims to investigate the relationship between organizational knowledge capabilities (OKC) and knowledge sharing (KS). Using regression analysis with data from questionnaires collected in different industries with a valid response rate of 62.4%, the results show that OKC have a positive association with KS. Technical, structural, and human knowledge capabilities are significant for organizational knowledge sharing. Moreover, the effects of implementing KM on OKC and KS are also significant.

Information systems outsourcing has been one of the critical issues facing IS management recently, but it still stays in the stage of conceptual discussion about how to outsource the IS activities. The determinants used so far, for instance, transaction costs and`strategica or`commoditiesa characteristics, are too narrow to help the end users determine if their system should be outsourced. This paper argues that "ve factors, including management, strategy, economics, technology and quality, should be considered for outsourcing decisions. Furthermore, the paper proposes a decision model, which uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method to help users in structuring the outsourcing problems. The decision model generates numeric values for users to decide whether they should adopt the outsourcing strategy for each IS systems under consideration.

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Purpose-Drawing on a network perspective on enterprise agility, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether firms with superior network structure not only may be better able to generate direct effect on firm performance, but whether a superior network structure may also help firms to create better firm agility and thus enhance their performance. Design/methodology/approach-The study employed a survey method and data were collected from 250 companies in Taiwan's glass industry. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) technology, it specified the measurement properties of survey instrument such as reliabilities and validities and then identified causal relation among latent constructs to examine causal effects of hypotheses testing. Findings-The results show that a firm's agility capability and its network structure are a critical competitive strategy source of firm performance. Moreover, network structure also partially mediates the impact of enterprise agility on firm performance. Research limitations/implications-Because the data were collected from a single industry and firm performance is evaluated by subjective managerial assessments, further research may be necessary by using the data involving multiple industries with objective performance indices for more meaningful and generalized results. Practical implications-The findings confirm the importance of enterprise agility for contemporary firms in today's dynamic business environment. By reinforcing enterprise agility, firms could react better to unpredictable changes. In addition, firms also are suggested to put more effort into developing and maintaining their network structures, both as repositories of external resources and as boosters of enterprise agility. Originality/value-The paper provides evidence regarding the impact of enterprise agility and network structure on firm performance.

Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi‐experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.

Subject content analysis of Web query terms is essential to understand Web searching interests. Such analysis includes exploring search topics and observing changes in their frequency distributions with time. To provide a basis for in-depth analysis of users' search interests on a larger scale, this article presents a query categorization approach to automatically classifying Web query terms into broad subject categories. Because a query is short in length and simple in structure, its intended subject(s) of search is difficult to judge. Our approach, therefore, combines the search processes of real-world search engines to obtain highly ranked Web documents based on each unknown query term. These documents are used to extract cooccurring terms and to create a feature set. An effective ranking function has also been developed to find the most appropriate categories. Three search engine logs in Taiwan were collected and tested. They contained over 5 million queries from different periods of time. The achieved performance is quite encouraging compared with that of human categorization. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach is efficient in dealing with large numbers of queries and adaptable to the dynamic Web environment. Through good integration of human and machine efforts, the frequency distributions of subject categories in response to changes in users' search interests can be systematically observed in real time. The approach has also shown potential for use in various information retrieval applications, and provides a basis for further Web searching studies.

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This study compares the job satisfaction and turnover intentions of private-and public-sector employees in Taiwan. Questionnaires were used to collect data from employees of various private enterprises and public organizations. The results show that the job satisfaction and turnover intentions of public employees are different from those of private employees'. First, public employees in Taiwan have lower extrinsic job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions compared to their counterparts in the private sector. Second, the negative relationship between extrinsic job satisfaction and turnover intention is weaker in public than in private employees. To enhance employee motivation, public-sector managers in Taiwan should improve their employees' extrinsic job satisfaction and help unsatisfied employees transfer to jobs they find more satisfying. In addition, they may wish to examine if turnover rate at their organizations is too low to support healthy workforce mobility.