Annual Report: KPJ HEALTHCARE BERHAD (2011)
Vision, Mission and Core Values
Vision
* The preferred healthcare provider
KPJ vision is to become the preferred healthcare provider. The aim for KPJ to set this vision is because they wanted their clients to choose KPJ as their lifelong companion on its healthcare journey. Besides that, they also wanted to help their client, take care of them in every way in their healthcare needs.
Mission
* Deliver quality healthcare services
KPJ’s mission is to deliver quality healthcare services serves to provide coordinated medical services to all customers across a continuum of care. This is way KPJ always strengthen its commitment to provide customers highest standards services and treatment through teamwork and unity between the Medical Consultants and the clinical as well as non-clinical staff.
Core Values * Ensuring safety * Delivering service with courtesy * Performing duties with integrity * Exercising professionalism at all times * Striving for continuous improvement
Introduction
KPJ Healthcare Berhad (KPJ) leading healthcare service provider in Malaysia and operating 20 private specialist hospitals in Malaysia and two hospitals in Jakarta, Indonesia. Since the opening of the first hospital in Johor Bahru in 1981, KPJ has now served the community for three decades. Today, KPJ has its staff strength of 8,992 employees who support the medical services provided by 860 Medical Consultants specializing in various disciplines including Cardiology, Oncology, Plastic, Orthopaedic and Reconstructive Surgery. KPJ always continue to invest in the latest equipment to enhance medical and surgical outcomes.
Financial Position In the fiscal year of 2007, KPJ Health Care Berhad had earned the first billion dollar and this achievement had brought the KPJ Group come in to a new chapter after more than 25 years of operation on the land of Malaysia. KPJ had achieved a bright new record in the fiscal year of 2011 where KPJ had doubled their revenue about RM 2.74 billion over these two years. With the accomplishment of this highest revenue, KPJ from standing on the placed of 91st in the year of 2009 and surged to 75th of the Top 100 Companies on Bursa Malaysia in the year of 2011.
History & Award KPJ Health Care Berhad which currently ranks as one of the top health care service provider in Asia as well as international. KPJ was established on 20th February 1979 and the first private hospital was constructed in Johor, named KPJ Johor Specialist Hospital and official opening in the 10th May 1981. The first nursing college of KPJ was named as Puteri Nursing College and was launching on 09th January 1992 by YB Tan Sri Lee Kim Sai, former Minister of Health. After 13 years of fighting, KPJ Health Care Berhad was listed on the Main Board of Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange on 30th August 1994. Over thirty years of footing in Malaysia, KPJ had been awarded with several honors and this had proved the success of KPJ Health Care. With the greatest accomplishment of KPJ by doubling their market capitalization, KPJ had been recognized by The Edge Billion Ringgit Club which named KPJ as the “Best Performing Stock-Highest Return to Shareholders over Three Years (Trading and Services)”. KPJ also won the honor of “The Most Outstanding Healthcare Provider in Asia 2011”. Besides, the management of KPJ also obtained the Quality Management System (MS ISO 9001:2000) and Occupational Safety and Health (OSHAS 18001:1999) recognition. KPJ had undergoing the accreditation survey and had been recognized by the MSQH-Malaysia Society for Quality in Health. The Managing Director of KPJ, Datin Paduka Siti Sa’diah Sheikh Bakar, was appointed since March 1993. She directly involved with JCorp’s Health Care Division during the year of joining. She had led the KPJ community hit the brilliant achievement during her 18 years of serving in KPJ. Datin Paduka was honored with the trophy of “Global Leadership Award-Masterclass Women CEO of The Year” by the Malaysia Business Leadership Award.
Business Review
KPJ Health Care Berhad provided various facilities to their customers (inpatient and outpatient). Its cover 24-hour Accident and Emergency Unit, 24-hour ambulance services, 3-D or 4-D ultrasound, dental X-ray and more than 20 facilities. KPJ Health Care not only provide services to the local community but they served our neighbor country, Indonesia as well. KPJ provide services from general medicine to more specialized areas such as Cancer & Cardiothoracic Surgery, Neurosurgery, and Ophthalmic Laser and so on.
KPJ had put lots of effort in improving their health care quality and patient safety. These efforts had been proved by the high consumer confidence in KPJ’s hospital operation with the total number of patien more than 2.6 million in 2011. KPJ emphasized on building relationship with their corporate clients and insurers. Apart from this, KPJ not only focus on promoting their brand to local community but also to the international market.
KPJ believe that one of the way to maintain a sustainable growth is to expand their market to the other area where there had high potential to get more clients. Therefore, KPJ began to emphasize its medical tourism activities in 2011. They also started to promote KPJ at international exhibitions which cover the market segment in Asia, Middle East and Australia. The marketing strategy of KPJ directly assisted in the government’s plan, health care travel industry.
In addition, with the significant of increasing of the international clients and local community, KPJ had invested almost RM900 million to construct seven new hospital in the coming few years. KPJ planned to afoot new development of the hospital in the area of Klang, Pasir Gudang, Muar, Kangar, Kuantan, Bandar Dato’ Onn and Kota Kinabalu. Besides, KPJ had invested up to 250 million in the existing hospital to upgrade the services provide to the client and increased the beds capacity, additional space for latest equipment and new facilities.
KPJ newly introduced the KPJ Education and Knowledge Management Services (KPJ EduKATE) into the organizational structure at the beginning of year 2011. KPJ EduKATE covers 4 main areas which are Formal Education and Training, KPJ Corporate Intellectual Property Management and Resource Center, Knowledge Events and Training, Knowledge and Skill Enhancement for KPJ staff. KPJ EduKATE aims to promote the instillation and nurture of knowledge sharing among the KPJ community through the collection of tangible and intangible intellectual property available in the KPJ for the three decades of time.
KPJ Group’s operations were supported by several ancillary services such as Laboratory Services, Central Purchasing and Distribution Services, Health Care Technical Services and so on. These may help KPJ to reduce their operating cost as well as contribute in the growth of annual profit. Each of the services played an important role in boosting the operation of KPJ so as to enhance a better service quality to the local and international community.
KPJ has started their operation with a comprehensive approach and social responsibility to sustain their business by matching their practices to its core value. KPJ Group used community engagement, community outreach, accountability, empowering people and environmental protection to achieve their Corporate Responsibility. In addition, KPJ focused on community, marketplace, workplace and environment to make sure the corporate able to sustain their businesses in the future.
Conclusion
For KPJ, the strategy for sustainability depends on the values that support the growth of the organization and the community, and this can be achieved through good business sense alongside true commitment to care for the community and the environment. KPJ also inspires its staff members to observe good ethics and best practices through various learning opportunities. They also encourage to preserve the environment for future generations and to care for the indigent through many charitable events conducted by the Group.

Wikis as an effective group writing tool: A study in Taiwan

Wesley Shu and Yu-Hao Chuang
Department of Information Management, National Central University, Tao-Yuan, Taiwan

Abstract
Collaborative writing is an interactive process that combined the knowledge of various writers. Wiki is one of the platforms for collaborative writing besides MS Word. Face-to-face collaborative writing with wikis will led to higher levels of participation and externally evaluated quality of the writing product and satisfaction with the product and process if compared to the use of MS Word. Finding showed wikis have important implication for business.
Introduction
According to Wikipedia, collaboration is a process that more than two people or organization work together for a common goal. Based on the IBM 2006 Global CEO Study, 75% CEO listed collaboration is an important part of innovation. Collaborative writing is one of the important types of corporate collaboration. Studies show that collaborative writing has been widely used in the academic world and industry.
Wiki is a collaborative writing tool that provides for mass collaboration. Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that a huge number of people work independently in a single project. Wikis are favorable for mass collaboration because they are easy to install and widely available on the internet. Wikipedia is one of the good examples.
Perceived benefit of wikis
Wikis are web-based hypertext applications intended for collaborative writing. The wiki pages are available online, everyone that can access to the internet can edit them. The editing process is not controlled by any rules so everyone have the right to add their own input. This type of co-writing is also called as the democratization of contributions. Democratization of contributions provides a way to edit documents. Wiki allows users to edit wiki pages with ease (Wikipedia, 2009). During the writing process, the content can de displays immediately to other group member. Then, the others group members can give their own promptly and no need to wait the editor to assemble all the ideas.
Wikis also will save all the edits (Kane and Fichman, 2009) and standardized it so that they can be compared later. Therefore, wikis help users to understand the evolution of the document and the collaboration process determine the contribution of each group member. Besides that, wikis also provide rollback to prevent malicious of the document.
Wikis can also help with knowledge management. There are two components of knowledge management: knowledge transfer and knowledge retention. Regarding the latter wikis save all the versions of a document in a publicly accessible location. Compared to email, which saves documents in private folders, wikis give users more and easier access to all the created documents, thereby improving corporate memory.
By saving and comparing all versions of a document, as well as providing for discussion of it, wikis can be seen not only as document repositories, but also as places users can go to review all the discussions, revisions, changes and new ideas. Free discussion, collaboration, version comparison, and preservation of edits are features that wiki users can access to document their own ideas and solicit the ideas of others.
Wikis can facilitate knowledge management by how they format the collaboration. Besides, wikis also facilitate open business models, again with no organizational boundaries to the collaboration.
Although previous studies have shown a variety advantages of wikis but individual case studies must be supplemented by carry out systematic surveys or experiments to verify these benefits.
Below is the experiment carried out.
Dependent variables * Productivity
Collaborative writing systems allow for rapid exchanges of ideas and document cross-checking, it was measured by a survey developed by Nunamaker. * Quality
Many studies have found that collaboration will improve document quality that is separated internal quality from external quality. Internal quality is the quality that judge by the team members themselves whereas external quality is the quality judge by independent respondents. * Satisfaction
This show that the group members’ satisfaction about the reports and final product. Positive correlations have been found in the past between satisfaction and collaboration and collaborative writing studies use satisfaction as a variable.
The discussion session began with the facilitator asking participants the following question in writing:
Ethics is a system of moral principles and rules of conduct that determine what is right and what is wrong. Information ethics concerns the ethical issues arising from the development and application of information technologies. It provides a critical framework for considering moral issues concerning information privacy, unauthorized use of accounts and usernames, IP addresses, spreading of rumors, plagiarism of digital works and others. Your task is to discuss information ethics with the other members of your group and write a report.
The processes for the test session are given as follows: * Brainstorming- Discuss the test question by using MSN. * Data collection- The tasks were assigned and the participants searched for information on the internet. * Collaborative writing- Participants wrote their individual reports based on the discussion and collected data. * Consolidated writing - The individual reports were merged into the final group report.
Independent variables * Face-to-face, synchronous distribution or asynchronous distribution * The mode of face-to-face is telling something to someone in front of them. * The mode of synchronous distribution is an arrangement where participants are in different places but work simultaneously. * The mode of asynchronous distribution is an arrangement where participants work at different times. * MS Word or Wikis
Conclusions
From the experiment above, we found that the groups showed the participation level satisfaction with the reports and process and quality in all the three modalities. Based on the above findings and the nature of wikis, the research has demonstrated two important implications of wiki use are collaborative writing and facilitation of innovation.
With regard to collaborative writing, we found that wikis produce higher quality documents, provide contributors with greater satisfaction and offer increased writer participation. Wikis may be unpopular because of three other characteristics, which are provision for only a limited number of collaborators, small user base and the absence of tools for document generation. Wikis do not good for collaborations between two peoples, but may be good for multi-person collaborations. In addition, wikis are good tools for collaborative writing but they do not produce good report.
Other researchers have noticed their limitations. Wikis do not have a common syntax. Their content is not verified and when the number of editors is not large enough, accuracy can be sacrificed. Since wikis are open platforms, security can be a concern.
Besides, wikis’ capacity to facilitate innovation in organizations is worth considerable attention. Wikis were designed for collaboration. This core function has had unique consequences, such as new emergent roles in moving conversations forward, the “democratization of contributions, and community-based policing, and separation of dialogue from decision. These characteristics not just make wikis good collaborative writing tools, but they also create “participatory ‘spurts’ of innovation”. We believe that the theory underlining wikis’ participatory innovation is useful for business community.
How to consider innovative? A tool must contain features that make it easy to adopt, so that its features can be used to increase business value. Therefore, dedication of this study is not barely to contrast wikis with MS Word, but proof of wikis’ usefulness as a tool for innovation. So, we will plan to analyze the use of wikis for innovation on the next research project.
There are two other issues to be considered which are practice and privacy. It is important to keep in mind that wikis motivate participation as well as knowledge sharing in term of privacy. However, people still may not share because of concerns about the privacy even though wikis have a feature that rewards sharing. We may need to learn which wikis modalities give the best results for the practical purposes. The relationship between wikis and innovation can be understood better through case studies.
Challenges in collaborative writing in the contemporary corporation
Kerryn Colen and Roslyn Petelin
School of English, Media Studies, and Art History,
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Abstract Collaborative writing is pervasive in the contemporary corporate workplace. As workplace writers seek to meet the business goals of their employers, they require sophisticated skills in joining with other writers to collaboratively produce documents. Taking advantage of the benefits, and meeting the challenges of this demand, requires corporate and academic communities to collaborate: to address gaps in the knowledge about collaborative writing and to train and develop competent collaborative writers.

Introduction
The first American political cartoon in 1754 which is a woodcut drawing of a snake in pieces, each representing a colonial government which appeared in The Pennsylvania Gazette. Entitled “Join, or die”, the cartoon was based on the superstition that a severed snake would come to life if the pieces were re-joined. In contemporary organizations, the survival of professionals requires the ability to write and collaborate with other during the writing process.
Richardson claims that collaboration is “this decade’s hottest skill”. Improving collaborative writing practice in the workplace requires the joint efforts of the academy and the corporation. Hence, we examine the demands for collaborative writing skills and processes, the benefits of collaborative writing, desirable skills for corporate collaborative writers and areas where the corporate and the academic communities can join together to improve the practice of collaboration.

Collaborative writing: interacting in the workplace
Writing in the workplace frequently requires collaboration. Many writing theorists argue that writing is inherently social. Ede and Lunsford also share the view of writing as a socially constructed act, as “inherently collaborative” .Others, such as Anderson, provide a more specific framework. Although there has been some confusion in the use of “collaboration” to refer to both collaborative writing and collaborative learning about writing, collaborative writing is identified as writing involving two or more writers working together to produce a joint product. Within the organizational context, collaborative writing is influenced by cultural, political, and technological factors.
A rhetorical situation, with its range of reader roles must be seen as embedded within a complex context that affects both writers and readers. The “subject” or “topic” is not context-free, but situated, involved in what the members of the organization must know, feel, or believe in order to accomplish their goals .

The demand for collaborative skills
Many people must write with some skill in order to succeed with their jobs. It is important to understand workplace writing as part of the power and politics that characterize corporate workplaces. Many documents are composed on a regular basis in the workplace (Redish). Most business reports and significant shorter communications are either formally written in groups or are reviewed by key readers in a company. Ede and Lunsford report that 87 % of workplace writers they surveyed collaborate in the course of their writing. Beyond the ability to write well, professionals require competency which is skills, knowledge, and abilities in collaborative writing.

The demand for collaborative processes
Collaboration is prompted by a number of practical and political factors related to the writing task and corporate events. Business procedures and supervision also drive the collaborative process. The benefits of the collaborative process are comprehensively documented in business communication literature .Benefits include higher quality documents and motivation, opportunities for less experienced writers to improve their skills and enhanced work relationships among colleagues and higher levels of acceptance of the final document. However, collaborative writing is not always successful in the face of logistical, political, and social challenges. There are coordinating a collaborative process is more complex , documents are not necessarily of a higher quality than those individually authored, the personal communication can interfere with their receptivity to the ideas of others, personal conflict may arise because of status differences.
Cross’s ethnographic study of the writing of a two-page executive letter for inclusion in an annual report. Cross argues that the process became inordinately protracted for a number of reasons. There are chief among them were the low status of the writer ,the failure of senior staff to properly brief the writer about what they wanted, the physical separation of the participants, the large number of people who edited the letter and the idiosyncratic changes made to the letter by the executive secretaries who were asked to type it.
The complexity of the writing task influences the level of collaboration, with writers seeking to engage stakeholders in the document. Research shows that workplace writers collaborate by participating in planning groups or workshops, participating in writing teams where authorship is shared and reviewing, editing, and providing feedback on the work of others – peers or subordinates. Workplace writers require the ability to identify and apply appropriate collaborative models and processes in the course of their work. Richardson (2002) lists the interpersonal qualities and skills that contribute to successful collaborative writing. There are trust building skills the management of defensiveness, decision-making skill, the ability to process multiple perspectives ,the ability to distinguish others’ interests, issues, and positions, the ability to respond to others’ communication, learning, and conflict styles.
In corporate writing education and corporate collaborative writing, we would add team-reflection skills ,the ability to assume multiple roles throughout a writing project , the ability to prioritise audiences and the ability to “satisfice” which is to select the “most satisfactory solution” within a specific corporate context.

Advice from the academy
Researchers describe some practical strategies that apply to specific stages of the writing process or to specific collaborative activities (such as meetings and problem solving).
At the planning stage, Burnett (1990) advocates the technique of collaborative planning, allowing participants to explore and plan their writing together by discussing the rhetorical elements of content, purpose, audience, organization, and document design.
Many collaborative writing strategies address the writing process. Research also recommends the use of technology in collaborative writing – e-mail, word processing features to circulate drafts, manage versions, and incorporate revisions and edits.
Central location
A central location create[s] a stronger sense of presence of the project to the coordinators and outsiders, but the temporary dwelling also create[s] a ‘we’, a subculture”. The writing team responsible for the SLA (Service Level Agreement) also used a large, visible chart – dubbed the war board – to track the progress of the phases and deadlines in the writing project.
Centrally locating staff during a writing project has two main advantages. * Reducing the physical length of active lines of communication increases efficiency and reliability of communication * Dedicated room makes the project more tangible than ephemeral e-mail messages and meetings in anonymous conference rooms

Role-based approach
Adopting a role-based approach to revising and editing involves identifying a document’s stakeholders and clarifying their role in relation to a document. It can be useful to distinguish subject matter, or technical experts from the document’s sponsors and other political stakeholders. A role-based approach to editing does not eliminate the need to carefully track and sensitively accommodate feedback and review comments; however, it does ensure that the time and expertise of stakeholders is focussed on specific areas of a document’s development.
Incorporating the views and specific feedback of reviewers into a document may involve maintaining a record of changes, determining a course of action , communicating with stakeholders and balancing stakeholder feedback with the (perceived or real) needs of the document’s intended readers.

Future directions
Building the collaborative competency of workplace writers requires continued collaboration of another kind – joint effort between corporate and academic communities. These connections allow insights and expertise to be shared; they could also provide the catalyst to refocus the existing practical strategies – primarily designed for the classroom context – for the workplace.
To support the collaborative efforts of workplace writers, future research could be directed to the concept of multi-authorship, or the writing team.
Studies of writing teams would provide valuable information for the theory and practice of collaboration. There are definition of best practices, analysis of rhetorical situations where a writing team is effectively employed and an evaluation of the task requirements. Key concern for future research into writing groups is the concept of audience: how do writing teams perceive, prioritize, and address their audience. In addition to answering these questions may help writers understand how writing teams integrate the work of multiple authors to achieve both political objectives and stylistic quality. The ability of collaborative, corporate-academe partnerships to translate the findings and recommendations of research into solutions for the corporate community will be an important indicator of success. The products of research are typically consumed by the academic community. Research done by Gilsdorf (1998) showed that organizations commonly use meetings, training and circulated documents to influence communication behavior. Therefore, research products designed to improve the collaborative skills and processes of workplace writers could take the form of white papers, straightforward guidelines for practice, or educational materials.