Information technology has inevitably become a facilitator of knowledge sharing. Often, organisational members are separated not only geographically but also culturally. Earlier studies have posited that culture can significantly facilitate or hinder knowledge sharing in culturally diverse teams. Greater enlightenment on the cultural effect is a useful contribution to understanding the most effective way of managing knowledge sharing in organisations. However, little effort has been put into dimensioning culture in such a way as to enable comparative and large-scale study. This investigation tries to fill this gap by bringing together and examining the few attempts at dimensioning this concept. This review results in the proposing of cultural dimensions, which are grouped into organisational and societal classes. The proposal is in the form of a theoretical model that requires further investigation as explained in the paper.

Information Technology (IT) has revolutionized the world economy in the past few decades by practically changing the economic activities globally. Given its applicability in various manufacturing and services sectors, IT has significantly affected the economy by providing information and development content on products and processes. Accordingly, faster rates of output and productivity growth have become the trends of information processing and communications. In the United States (US), the substantial growth in both the Labor Productivity (LP), and the Multi-Factor Productivity (MFP) after 1995 proves the significance of automation. It proves that IT has definitely steered the economical advancement of industrialized nations such as the US and the United Kingdom (UK). Unfortunately the same conclusion can not be reached for developing countries. For instance, India and Ghana have yet to achieve significant economical advancement through the use of IT. To address this issue, we propose: An Economic Development Model Based on IT for Developing Countries (EDM-BITDC). Major components of the EDM-BITDC include, Large Foreign Investments (LFIs), Government policies and support for IT, Social awareness of IT importance, and Efficient use of IT.EDM-BITDC provides an answer to the concerns of poor nations. It suggests that governments of these nations entice LFIs in the field of IT. Implementation of EDM-BITDC in DC economies is expected to result in tremendous achievement in conformity with what has already been summarized as success stories of US and UK.

Many look at knowledge management as an organizational initiative. However, can KM also be used to assist low technology situations such as rural villages? This paper describes the application of KM to the creation of a self-reliant community in Thailand. Changing demographics are threatening the ability of rural villages to sustain their viability as traditional methods of passing knowledge from one generation to the next are circumvented by the movement of the young to more urbanized areas of Thailand. KM is seen as a way of changing the traditional knowledge transfer process to something that assists those who remain in the villages. The KM approach investigated consisted of five stages: 1) Preparation, 2) Create motivation, awareness, promote participation, 3) Develop the KM plan, 4) Implement the KM plan, and 5) Evaluation. The approach was assessed and found to be successful by using eight organizations over an 8-month period.

Abstract-Web applications incorporate important business assets and offer a convenient way for businesses to promote their services through the internet. Many of these web applications have evolved from simple HTML pages to complex applications that have high maintenance cost. The high maintenance cost of web applications is due to the inherent characteristics of web applications, to the fast internet evolution and to the pressing market which imposes short development cycles and frequent modifications. In order to control the maintenance cost, quantitative metrics and models for predicting web applications' maintainability must be used. Since, web applications are different from traditional software systems, models and metrics for traditional systems can not be applied to web applications. The reason for that is that web applications have special features such as hypertext structure, dynamic code generation and heterogenousity that can not be captured by traditional and object-oriented metrics. In this paper, we will provide a comparative analysis of the different approaches for predicting web applications' maintainability and point out areas that need further research.

Under economic and technological changes, companies become more conscious of the importance of their structures, technologies and intellectual capital. The progress made in information and communication technologies (ICT) allows for storage and fast circulation of information. Indeed the communication networks supported by the various existing applications such as the electronic messaging, the teleconferences, and the groupware are drawing up the foundations of a new community which does not have the same temporal, geographical or organisational constraints. However, this is not the case in Tunisia. Survey results reveal that the Tunisian companies are not yet completely committed to the revolution of the information. This lack of initiative is primarily explained by the fact that these new technologies require investments, including development of human resources, which the Tunisian companies do not feel ready to provide.