A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction (ISO9001:2015). It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality is increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both, and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.
Volatility risk is the risk of a change of price of a portfolio as a result of changes in the volatility of a risk factor. It usually applies to portfolios of derivatives instruments, where the volatility of its underlying is a major influencer of prices.
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".
Myra Lesley Shackley was formerly Professor of Culture Resource Management and Head of the Centre for Tourism and Visitor Management at Nottingham Trent University Business School. She retired in summer 2011 after an academic career spanning more than 40 years, during which she became recognised as a leading international authority on the management of historic sites. She has written 15 books (of which the latest is 'Atlas of Travel and Tourism Development', a core text for historical geography and tourism studies. Much of her recent research has been concerned with the management of sacred sites as visitor attractions and she wrote the textbook 'Managing Sacred Sites; service provision and visitor experience'.
A value network is a graphical illustration of social and technical resources within/between organizations and how they are utilized. The nodes in a value network represent people or, more abstractly, roles. The nodes are connected by interactions that represent deliverables. These deliverables can be objects, knowledge or money. Value networks record interdependence. They account for the worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.
Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) is a US Air Force program that develops tools, techniques, and processes to support manufacturing integration. It influenced the computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) project efforts of many companies. The ICAM program was founded in 1976 and initiative managed by the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson as a part of their technology modernization efforts. The program initiated the development a series of standards for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement, called Integrated Definitions, short IDEFs.
In computing, ambient intelligence (AmI) refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Ambient intelligence was a projection on the future of consumer electronics, telecommunications and computing that was originally developed in the late 1990s by Eli Zelkha and his team at Palo Alto Ventures for the time frame 2010–2020. Ambient intelligence would allow devices to work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in an intuitive way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices. As these devices grew smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technological framework behind them would disappear into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.
Organizational storytelling is a concept in management and organization studies. It recognises the special place of narration in human communication, making narration "the foundation of discursive thought and the possibility of acting in common." This follows the narrative paradigm, a view of human communication based on the conception of persons as homo narrans.
Organizational intelligence (OI) is the capability of an organization to comprehend and create knowledge relevant to its purpose. In other words, it is the intellectual capacity of the entire organization. With relevant organizational intelligence comes great potential value for companies and therefore organizations find study where their strengths and weaknesses lie in responding to change and complexity.
Value network analysis (VNA) is a methodology for understanding, using, visualizing, optimizing internal and external value networks and complex economic ecosystems. The methods include visualizing sets of relationships from a dynamic whole systems perspective. Robust network analysis approaches are used for understanding value conversion of financial and non-financial assets, such as intellectual capital, into other forms of value.
Travel technology is the application of Information Technology (IT) or Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Some forms of travel technology are flight tracking, pre-travel planning through online travel agencies, and systems that allow tourists to review their experiences.
Organizational memory (OM) is the accumulated body of data, information, and knowledge created in the course of an individual organization's existence. The organizational memory includes the components knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing or maintenance, and knowledge usage in terms of search and retrieval. Falling under the wider disciplinary umbrella of knowledge management, it has two repositories: an organization's archives, including its electronic data bases; and individuals' memories.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.
A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern which empowers knowledge workers to create and leverage information to increase competitive advantage through the collaboration of small and agile self-directed teams. It is emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.
The Mountain Quest Institute (MQI) is a research, retreat and conference center on 450 acres (1.8 km2) in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in the Allegheny Mountains of the United States. MQI claims three "quests": the Quest for Knowledge, the Quest for Meaning, and the Quest for Consciousness. MQI promotes itself as scientific, humanistic and spiritual and claims to find no contradiction in this combination.
Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) is a web-based collaborative environment developed by Triune Group for the U.S. Air Force (USAF). From 1999 to 2012, AFKN grew to more than 19,000 Communities of Practice (CoPs) and 400,000 members. In 2004, Air Force CIO John M. Gilligan designated AFKN the Air Force Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management, making it the USAF’s only certified and accredited enterprise-wide knowledge management program. By focusing on social, behavioral and cultural aspects of knowledge sharing, AFKN evolved beyond traditional knowledge management systems, which focused on capturing information through technology.
Arnold Kransdorff is an American author and consultant who has researched knowledge management.
Ross Dawson is an Australian author, futurist, entrepreneur and former stockbroker. Best known for his 2002 book 'Living Networks', Dawson founded the futures think tank Future Exploration Network and consults on digital futures to various big organisations such as Ernst & Young, Macquarie Bank, Microsoft and News Corp.
Richard Barrett, is a British author who writes about leadership, leadership development, values, consciousness as well as cultural evolution in business and society. He is responsible for developing the theory of the Universal Stages of Evolution, the concepts of personal and cultural entropy, and creating assessment instruments to map the values of individuals, organisations, communities and, nations to the Seven Levels of Consciousness Model. He founded the Barrett Values Centre in 1997.
A world café is a structured conversational process for knowledge sharing in which groups of people discuss a topic at several small tables like those in a café. Some degree of formality may be retained to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak. Although pre-defined questions have been agreed upon at the beginning, outcomes or solutions are not decided in advance. The assumption is that collective discussion can shift people's conceptions and encourage collective action. Events need to have at least twelve participants, but there is no upper limit. For example, in Israel in 2011 an event called 1000 Tables was hosted in several cities on a single day as part of a series of social justice protests held around that time, and around a thousand people participated.
