2015 KIPA Annual Conference

March 6 &7, 2015, Denton, Texas

KIPA provides a forum for knowledge and information professionals to exchange ideas and share experiences. The KIPA Annual Conference is an annual event dedicated to bridging the gap between theory and practice by bringing together knowledge management researcher, academician and practitioners to discuss, improve, and extend knowledge management efforts extant in any thriving organization. . Knowledge Management is intended to create repeatable, formal processes to discover, capture, organize, transfer, use and retain vital data, information and decision-making required to conduct the work of an organization. The 2015 KIPA Annual Conference was held at the Hilton Garden Inn in Denton, TX on March 6 & 7, 2015.

The topics open for discussion were the following:

Knowledge Management  Theory — What is knowledge management?  How does it differ from project or information management? What attributes does KM share?

Knowledge Sharing and the organization — exploring best practices in sharing and implementing organizational KM efforts and creating a shared organizational vision.

Knowledge Management Praxis — Best KM practices.  Practical implementation of KM programs.  Creative means for transferring valuable knowledge.

Knowledge Management Case Studies — Exemplary programs and their organizational benefits.

Knowledge Management Education , Evolution and Adaptability  How can we be sure that KM evolves as discipline to serve all kinds of communities of practice?

Knowledge Management Alignment — Methods and metrics for aligning organizational vision.

The convergence of Project Management and Knowledge Management — Distilling knowledge assets from large construction and engineering efforts.

Knowledge Management Technologies — What are the latest technologies and consulting services that can help to enable KM?

Knowledge Discovery, Data analytic and Big Data —the process of collecting, organizing and analyzing  large amounts of different data

Competitive & Strategic Intelligence.   — the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors,

Other KM topics — Do you have an interesting case study or analysis you would like to present among industry peers?  If so, consider submitting an abstract.

Information about the speakers at the conference can be viewed here.

2015 Invited Talks

Invited Talk 1

Creating Knowledge with Big Data and Analytics by Dursun Delen
Spears and Patterson Endowed Chairs in Business Analytics, Director of Research

Center for Health Systems Innovation, Professor of Management Science and Information Systems, Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University

Invited Talk 2 

Innovations in Onsite and Online Learning Spaces by Paul Signorelli
Independent consultant, Writer, Trainer and Instructional Designer.  Paulsignorelli & Associates, San Francisco.

2015 Organizing Committee

2015 Venue

Hilton Garden Inn Denton

3110 Colorado Blvd
Denton, TX  76210
USATEL: 1-940-891-4700
FAX: 1-940-891-4701
http://hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com/en/hotels/texas/hilton-garden-inn-denton-DFWDNGI/event/index.html

2015 KIPA Annual Conference Speakers

2015-kim.jpgAbdulaziz Alhassan and Jeonghyun (Annie) Kim — Research Data Management Services: Context, Opportunities, and Implications —The exponential growth in big data has become an important agenda item across nearly every area of information technology and has led to the development of a new competitive arena as revolutionary measures are needed for the management, analysis, and accessibility of this data. Such data growth has fundamentally changed the landscape of scientific research as well, and the need for organized, accessible, and well-preserved sets of data is increasing among researchers. Research Data Management (RDM), which is the practice of organizing data from the beginning of the research cycle through the dissemination and archiving of valuable outcomes to provide access for these data sets, has become a pressing issue and a critical factor in both conducting and funding research.Since the National Science Foundation (NSF) started requiring data management plans for research proposals in 2011, many academic libraries across the United States have begun to adopt and establish RDM services to help their communities. RDM services are defined as services that provide information, consulting, training, or active involvement in data management planning, data management guidance during research, research documentation and metadata, research data sharing, and the curation of data. According to a recent survey of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries (Fearon, Gunia, Pralle, Lake, & Sallans, 2013), almost three-quarters currently offer RDM services and one-quarter of respondents plan to. However, it should be noted that libraries are facing various challenges, including technical and financial challenges, to providing reliable and sustainable RDM services that meet the needs of their community.This presentation will discuss the context, opportunities, and implications surrounding the planning, development, and management of RDM services. It will also discuss different approaches adopted in academic research libraries by outlining their strategies and best practices for planning, implementing, and delivering RDM services.References
Fearon, D., Gunia, B., Lake, S., Pralle, B., & Sallans, A. (2013). Research data management services in ARL libraries: a SPEC kit. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, Office of Management Services. Retrieved from http://publications.arl.org/Research-Data-Management-Services-SPEC-Kit-334/
2015Albar_Pic.jpgAli A. Albar — Collaborative Information Seeking Behavior: An Ethnographic Research in Technical Support Setting —This study aims to describe the multifaceted concept of collaborative information seeking behavior in technical support settings. Previous studies have discussed diverse factors that could establish the collaborative work in different settings such as healthcare, business, and education. The literature reveals that lack of knowledge, lack of information access, and level of task complexity are triggers that could establish the collective work. Computer technical support environment has not been qualitatively investigated with information seeking behavior. The findings of this research provide some practical explanations of recent collaborative information seeking models and their triggers. Moreover, the deep analysis of the collected data from participating observations and interviews led to newly discovered triggers related to the natural of work tasks in technical support setting. The discussion part in this research puts forth some future research directions and recommendations for information science researchers and technical support professionals that could enhance the quality of service and team collaboration.Keywords: Collaboration, Collaborative Information Seeking, Technical Support, Collaborative Problem-Solving, Collaborative Troubleshooting
2015-clevelandphilbrick.pngAna D. Cleveland, PhD, AHIP, FMLA & Jodi L. Philbrick, PhD — Using Knowledge Management Principles to Develop the Next Generation of Academic Library Leadership —As more and more academic libraries face turnover in leadership positions, it is important to employ principles of knowledge management in the profession to capture and share knowledge from the current leadership to the next.   Succession planning, knowledge-sharing programs, and mentoring are some methods that can be used to ensure that knowledge is communicated and transferred.  The role that professional associations, educational programs, and professional development plans play in ensuring a new generation of competent and effective leaders will be discussed.
2015Angela-Hoyt.jpgAngela R. Hoyt, Esq. — A Big Picture Overview of Knowledge and Information Management in the Legal Arena —Ms. Hoyt will present an overview of knowledge and information management issues and evolutions in the legal arena.  Ms. Hoyt will look at and discuss two different buckets of information and knowledge management considerations:1. How private practice lawyers/law firms and in-house corporate legal departments research, obtain and manage information, institutional knowledge, legal opinions and precedent, and laws/regulations needed to tackle various legal issues for clients.  What’s in a law library these days?  What’s in a client file these days?  What did you do with my briefs?2. How private practice lawyers/law firms and in-house corporate legal departments respond to a litigation hold letter and requests for information, documents, and electronic data in the litigation arena.   Oh no, it’s a lawsuit — what do we do now, and what is this “e-discovery”?
Cathy Koloff and Sunny Harris — Knowledge Management Frameworks for Managing Work Processes in Global Contexts —Companies doing business in the global economy find themselves in a situation where knowledge pathways must be clearly defined and formally structured with underlying business process controls so that all parties within the organization are consistently applying and always improving the knowledge assets that support their daily activities as well as their core functions and key strategies. Redefining the way that an organization does knowledge management when that global context is far-flung and not well integrated is critical to getting everyone on the same page and facilitating process consistency and business improvement, as well as laying the foundation for defining the importance and role of knowledge transfer in future acquisitions and mergers, reorganizations, outsourcing efforts, and other types of fundamental shifts in how the business operates. This presentation is a case study of how a model for that framework is assessed and defined, and how the foundational elements and processes behind a sustainable knowledge system are engineered, deployed and managed for long-term strategic growth.
Chuck_Tryon.jpgChuck Tryon — PROJECT IDENTIFICATION: The Missing Member of the Project Life-Cycle —Where do your projects come from? This could be the most overlooked question in all of Project Management. Many organizations, it seems, believe that projects arrive through a process no less magical than stork delivery. While formal processes for project initiation, execution and completion are firmly embedded in an organization’s project culture, little is said about project origins. As a result, projects tend to arrive wrapped in crisis with unrealistic expectations and unreasonable due dates.Long-time Project Management author and teacher, Chuck Tryon, introduces a formal, repeatable process to organize, evaluate and then select candidate projects for execution. And it goes a giant step beyond by providing you with a mechanism for identifying and capturing great ideas and inspired thought as new project proposals. Best of all, this approach will leverage an existing organizational asset – your knowledge workers – to address real issues and opportunities in your organization. This greatly benefits your organization and provides your staff with recognition for their creativity.The material in this new presentation is based on Chuck’s latest book, PROJECT IDENTIFICATION: Capturing Great Ideas Dramatically Improve Your Organization. Taylor and Francis has scheduled the book for publication in late 2014. Additional information on Chuck and his approach to Project Management is available at www.tryonassoc.com.
Chuck_Tryon.jpgChuck Tryon — 3rd GENERATION KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT… and Beyond! —Even given its short life span, Knowledge Management has clearly evolved through three distinct eras, and is already entering a fourth. The four generations include the Technology Era, Service Era, Deep-Knowledge Era and now the emerging Personalization Era.
The Technology Era began in the early to mid-1990s in response to the need to store documents to protect against legal or financial challenges. Sophisticated document management software and hardware products enabled organizations to capture volumes of content that was formerly retained on paper. For many organizations, however, it has become a “store and ignore” reality.By adding repeatable work flows to repository products, organizations are able to enhance help desk operations as they responded to calls for customer or product support. This Service Era of Knowledge Management provides procedures and needed information to resolve specific questions and problems.In the Deep Knowledge Era, organizations are learning to dig below the surface of procedures and documents to understand the knowledge that is often locked away inside the heads of employees. Advanced discovery and capture methods are transforming knowledge that was formerly classified as tacit into explicit form.While many organizations strive to create comprehensive knowledge portals, emerging trends suggest that usable knowledge must be partitioned into smaller applets that may be selected and uniquely arranged by smart phone and tablet-toting users. This Personalization Era will not negate integrated corporate knowledge portals, but it will alter the way knowledge is consumed and refined.
These generations are not mutually exclusive events, but building blocks. In this presentation, KM researcher and author, Chuck Tryon, will explore these generations and clarify how they apply to your organization. Recognizing the distinction of these generations is the basis for Mr. Tryon’s new book “MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE: 3rd Generation Knowledge Management … and BEYOND! that will be published by Francis and Taylor in Fall, 2011.
2015-Horne.jpgDr. Stephanie Burnett Horne — Factors Impacting the Implementation of Enterprise Content Management Systems —A qualitative case study was conducted to identify key factors that impact the success of enterprise content management (ECM) systems implementations. A theoretical framework was developed from the information systems literature resulting in a research model defining five categories of factors that impact ECM implementation success with these questions: Are there managerial, user, task, technological and content related factors that impact ECM implementation success? The research model was tested in a case study of interviews with 15 team leads and members that implemented ECM systems within their departments at a university. The results included 12 factors that were supported by the interview data as well as a small collection of documents.Keywords: enterprise content management, implementations, factors, success.
Dursun DelenDursun Delen, Ph.D. — Creating Knowledge with Big Data and Analytics —Undoubtedly, analytics is one of the most popular information trends of the recent history, both in business and science. In most general terms, analytics can be defined as the art and science of creating knowledge by using large and feature rich data sets along with sophisticated modeling techniques to support problem solving, better and faster decision making. The sudden surge in the popularity of analytics can largely be attributed to the following factors:Need – increasing competition coupled with decreasing resources are forcing organizations to do more with less (i.e., be both effective and efficient at what they do).
Technology availability – software/algorithms are becoming more sophisticated while simultaneously the hardware and infrastructure continues to become better, faster and less expensive.
Data availability – data is everywhere! As the saying goes “we are drowning in data but starving for knowledge.” Organizations that are effective in converting data into information and knowledge are those most likely to survive and thrive in these difficult economic conditions.
Cultural shift – the reliance on data driven, fact-based actionable information is becoming more prevalent now than ever before.  The sole reliance on experience and intuition are finally giving way to data and analytics in decision-making processes.This talk will take a holistic and a historical/longitudinal view to analytics. It will provide a simple taxonomy of analytics and how it may relate to knowledge management. Several application cases, ranging from healthcare/medicine to entertainment, will be used to showcase the recent trends and capabilities of analytics.
2015-oyarce.jpgGuillermo A. Oyarce, Ph.D. — A Content Analysis and Study of the 2000-2009 Electronic Dissertations at UNT —UNT started requiring Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) in 2000. There are over 3,000 of these documents from the period between 2000 and 2009. The examination of this collection shows that there has been a constant interest in Knowledge Management (KM) across time and disciplines. Intrigued by this fact, the researchers have started to methodically analyze the materials seeking to identify areas of concern, disciplinary commonalities and differences of the problems being addressed, of the methodologies used in each case, and any other interesting points that may emerge from the study and analysis of the corpus. The references used in each KM ETD will be examined and compared with the other KM ETD in search of patterns. This presentation will report on these findings.
2015chang-upchurch.pngHsia-Ching Chang and Eric Upchurch — Big Data Visualization as Storytelling: A Means-Ends Chain Approach —The big data taxonomy classifies big data into six knowledge domains: data, compute infrastructure, storage infrastructure, analytics, visualization, security and privacy (Cloud Security Alliance, 2014). The Uniqueness of the big data phenomenon stems from its volume, variety, velocity and veracity, which has changed the way work and life revolve around data. Much like the data.gov initiative, open government policy enables open data availability and accessibility where citizens can benefit from the usefulness and value added by mashups of open data. A growing number of vendors including Socrata, Junar, and CKAN provide open data platforms that make open data publishing and use more intuitive by supporting a variety of users, such as citizens who are interested in gaining insights into open data, decision makers, and data experts. With those platforms, consumers can utilize data visualization tools to analyze, visualize, and interpret open data on the Web. Different consumers may have different means and ends (goals) with respect to the creation of the visual representation of data, which may tell different stories.This study aims to explore big data in the context of open data, understand the relationship between big data and open data, the role of visualization in open data, the status quo of open data platform products, how these products can be used to realize open data visualizations and how information and knowledge professionals use them. To understand the decision making process of information and knowledge professionals in an open data visualization context, this study takes a means-end chain theory approach, which assumes consumers consider products as means to achieve important goals. Proposed by Rokeach (1968) and applied to consumer behavior by Gutman (1981), the means‐end chain represents users’ cognitive structure by associating product (concrete/abstract) attributes with both the functional and psychological consequences of product use and the personal values behind the consequences. Analyzing means-end chains assists in identifying users’ demands, means to achieve their goals and underlying values. Pilot laddering interviews on decision-making of adopting open data visualization tools will be conducted with several information and knowledge professionals. Beginning with extracting key dimensions of (visualization) product attributes based on the product descriptions and advertisements from multiple open data platform vendor websites, the laddering interviews will ask the respondents to choose the identified product attributes that matter most to them and several words from the big data visualization taxonomy regarding their stories/experience on open data visualization. For instance, big data visualization techniques can be broadly divided into three categories: spatial layout visualization (including charts & plots and trees & graphs), abstract/summary visualization (compact/reduced dimension representation of data) and interactive/real-time visualization. The interview results which describe means-end chains and selected concepts/words from the taxonomy can generate meaningful associations, which reveals consumers’ means, the major processes of open data visualization that affect the consequences, and perceived values. As a result, a hierarchical value map can be constructed to address the gaps between the product attributes and consumers’ demands.
2014ColanninoJoe.pngJoe Colannino — KM in R&D Organizations: Fire’s Last Hurrah? —Organized societies have existed for ~10,000 years, and for as many years, fire has been its constant companion.  Yet only in the last century and a half did men teach fire to empower the industrial revolution.  This quantum leap – second only to the creation and discovery of fire itself – may be characterized by the transition from the buoyancy-dominated flame (e.g., campfires and fireplaces) to the momentum-dominated flame (furnaces and engines).  Why did this innovation take so many millennia to discover?  Steam engines, internal combustion engines, gas turbines, and jet engines all trace their pedigree to that unique time in the mid-nineteenth century.  Since then, fired equipment has undergone continual refinement, but the field has experienced nothing like the quantum leap that occurred during the industrial revolution.  Is this fire’s last great hurrah?It is now well known that both the creation and the diffusion of innovation follows a characteristic trajectory known as the “S” curve, with a relatively long induction period, a period of lightening-fast creation and dissemination, and a slow period of incremental improvement until the next innovation cycle.  Why should this be so?  How is it that innovations punctuate history rather than permeate it?  Can disruptive rather incremental innovation become the norm?  Historical case-studies, an appropriate interpretive framework, and practical life’s lessons illuminate how organizations can continue to innovate with a shift in thinking.   And as for a new way to do fire… that is presented too.
2015-mastenchen.jpgKathryn Masten and Jiangping Chen — From Data to Knowledge, From Local to Global, the Research Questions for Information Professionals —What are the important problems we may be able to address as a researcher and information professional in this fast changing digital world? This presentation raises some research questions related to challenges we face in dealing with data, information, and knowledge under local context as well as global environment. Also it reports an exploratory analysis of funding opportunities from federal agencies such as IMLS, NSF, and NIH in the areas of intelligent information access, big data, community knowledge, education, and information users. Sample projects will be discussed to explore collaborative research opportunities with national and international information institutions.
2015-Moore .jpegKimberly Moore — Digital Youth: Technologically Savvy but Not Literate —According to a 2013 PEW report on teens and technology, 95% of teens are online and 93% of youth have a computer or access to one. Young people spend about as much time consuming media every day (7 hours, 38 minutes) as their parents spend working, according to a study of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today’s youth are more plugged in, peer-connected, networked, and social online than ever before. They don’t even communicate via e-mail anymore, an instant message in shorthand works just fine.  They are growing up in a world of intense stimulation – fast-paced games, cell phones and the Internet in their hands at all times, even television is flashier. Toddlers have smart phones and computers. Their brains “hop” faster than that of adults. Fast “hopping” and multi-tasking is the norm for this generation.Bombarded with digital media this generation of digital natives is inherently savvy with information and communication technologies but this does not translate into a generation that is technologically and digitally literate. The information-seeking habits of digital youth have been a fascination with me for a long time. How do we raise youth to be effective users of information and to make digitally responsible decisions, both while researching and creating new knowledge?Digital information literacy courses are not the norm. How can we as educators allow this to slip through the cracks? It is no wonder that today’s “copy and paste” youth see nothing wrong in digital piracy and online plagiarism when we have not set an example and trained them how to use technology and social medias. We cannot assume that even at a graduate level, our students are technologically literate. I have taken my high school level Web 2.0 research course and transformed it into a tool for teaching graduate students about digital youth. This serves double duty showing them how to serve youth today by teaching them digital literacies and learning about new technologies along the way. I am forcing my UNT students to look at new technologies in unique ways to connect to digital youth and to set an example for future generations. I will discuss what digital youth look like today, how I teach high school sophomores to become technologically responsible users and creators of information, and graduate students how digital youth think and act along with digital technologies and skills to serve youth today.
2015-elwani.jpgNabil Elwani — The Information Seeking Behavior of Individual Investors in Saudi Arabia —Investors’ decision to invest their financial resources in capital markets is a critical decision. Hence, investors should have enough information and knowledge about their future investment. The exponential growth of information, diversity of formats, availability of sophisticated information and communication technologies, immediacy, and economic barriers could affect that quality and relevancy of available information. The purpose of this quantitative study is to examine the information seeking behavior of investors in Saudi Arabia, and especially the non-advisory context of the investors’ decision making process. Empirical research in that area, and in this part of the world, is scarce, hence this study will add value and will be the beginning of more extensive research in that area.
Pau SignorelliPaul Signorelli — Innovations in Onsite and Online Learning Spaces —Our onsite and online learning spaces in libraries and other learning organizations are rapidly, creatively, and dynamically evolving to match changes in our approaches to learning. An ever-growing shift from a focus on teacher-centric learning (learning by lecture) to learner-centric learning (learning through collaboration and project-based learning) means that our learning spaces need to be flexible enough to support that learner-centric focus. This session will take an interactive approach to exploring innovations in learning spaces that are onsite (e.g., spaces that can quickly and easily be reconfigured by learners and learning facilitators), online (e.g., learning spaces created within Facebook groups, Google+ communities, and connectivist MOOCs), and blended (spaces that synchronously connect onsite learners and learning facilitators with online colleagues via Twitter, Google+ Hangouts, and other tools). Session facilitator Paul Signorelli, a San Francisco-based writer-trainer-consultant with extensive experience facilitating onsite and online learning opportunities, will draw upon examples from libraries, academic settings, and other learning organizations to provide participants with ideas they can immediately begin applying within their own worksites; he will also help participants identify additional resources they can draw upon in their own day-to-day teaching-training-learning endeavors.
2015Pickels-Suzan.jpgSuzan Pickels — The Great Crew Change —As is true with many industries, the oil and gas industry is faced with “The Great Crew Change” where our more experienced employees are nearing retirement. According to research from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the O&G industry will need to fill over 120,000 positions to avoid skills shortage in the coming years (1). Research like this, as well internal realities, have placed a much needed urgency on knowledge capture and retention. The challenge is how best to not only capture this information but also put it in context for newer employees in order to build their knowledge base as quickly as possible. The discussion is how best to marry governance, process, people and technology to ensure we don’t lose the wisdom and expertise from retiring employees.Footnote: The Telegraph, Sept 5, 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/10286787/Oil-and-gas-sector-need…
2015TondaBone.jpgTonda Bone — Storytelling: The Swiss Army® Knife of Knowledge Management —Humans think in story, speak in story, and learn in story … which is why storytelling has been widely recognized for its strength as a managerial, marketing, training, and branding tool. Storytelling also has been recognized for its power as a knowledge management (KM) approach and strategy for the sharing and retention of tacit knowledge. However, there is less formal research and discussion regarding its multifunctional role in KM. Storytelling, in fact, is a powerful strategy and multi-tool for use in all phases of the KM life cycle, regardless of the KM model framing the KM program: If there is a human presence involved in the development, implementation, or use of the KM program, storytelling can play an important role in the success of the project. Furthermore, it is the intentional development of “storytelling behavior” – my terminology for an individual’s use of storytelling as a method of information sharing, seeking, and assimilation – which can provide the foundation for developing a knowledge-sharing culture and method for capturing critical intellectual capital. Understanding where and how to apply storytelling methods can lead to a more robust and effective KM program.
2015XinWang.jpgXin Wang — Establishing Image Attributes for Designing a Visual Knowledge Infrastructure through Analyzing Medical Image Users’ Classifying Behavior —Due to the upcoming retirement of senior image analysts from the baby boom generation, the imperative need for cultivating new generation professionals is rising (Shyu, Erdelez, & Cho, 2008). How to retain experienced image analysts’ knowledge and allow it to be transferred to successive generations is a significant and challenging issue in the intelligence community (Shyu, et al., 2008). The issue is especially prominent in the community of radiography. Unlike other medical specialties, radiographic technologists’ decisions are heavily relied on visually-based tacit knowledge, untold heuristics, and subtle cues. Therefore, it is critical to develop robust tools that may archive, retrieve, and share various image data (e.g., tomographic image) carrying with domain expert’ tacit knowledge. In order to best serve future-generation image analysts’ knowledge acquisition and exchange among interdisciplinary communities, the ongoing project, VisKM infrastructure, is a content – based image retrieval (CBIR) and knowledge-management system. VisKM is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2008 and is carrying on via the collaboration of researchers from three disciplines: computer science, information science, and health informatics.This present study reports a part of research results from a broader research project. This study focuses on the classifying behavior of medical image users. When users had a vague idea of what images they want to find, there was a need for classification of images based on the abstract concepts. Another challenge for designing information retrieval systems is how to display large groups of records representing documents. Thus, studying user classification behavior can make substantial contribution to the user-centric interface design of image retrieval systems. Examples are designing categories for browsing search, menu categories, and organized result displays.The purpose of this study is to investigate how do domain experts classify images differently from novices? 40 x-ray images were randomly selected from the UMHC Centricity PACS (Picture Archiving Communication System) and all these x-ray images were uploaded to the online sorting tool. Twenty-seven (27) participants were asked to group these images in order to find these images at a later time. After they were finished with sorting, participants was asked to label a name for each group and provide a brief description of the common characteristics of each group of images. At least two common characteristics (visual cues, semantic judgments, or both) need to be identified in one group. The group labels and the common characteristics were analyzed. As a result, novices and experts preferred image attributes with this sorting task were identified and will be recommended to be integrated to the future design and development of a medical image system.References:
Shyu, C.-R., Erdelez, S., & Cho, K. (2008).  (pp. 25). University of Missouri National Science Foundation.  
2015-Alfarhoud.jpgYousef Alfarhoud — Information seeking behavior of members of Kuwait National Assembly —The Kuwaiti government consists of the executive, legislative and judicial bodies. The legislative body is the Kuwait National Assembly (KNA). Legislators affect the decision-making process. They represent a broad range of interests, backgrounds, experiences, and networks. The legislators acquire information that reflects on their work. Legislators have the privilege to suggest new laws and legislate proposals. The decision-making process largely depends on the quality of information acquired. As such, the quality of information provided to them or acquired by them may affect the quality of the legislative proposals they present.The purpose of the study is to identify and evaluate the information seeking behavior of members of the KNA. It will aim to evaluate the information role in the political life. Moreover, the study will indicate the important role of the administrative assistants on acquiring information related to the member’s legislative work. The study will help to identify the role of the RIC on the information process of the members of the KNA. Furthermore, the study will provide suggestion that will help improve the services and resources to enhance the utilization of this center. Finally, it will discover the impact of SNSs on the members of the KNA work.