Knowledge Management Community Research Articles

An elusive antecedent of superior firm performance: The knowledge management factor

Knowledge management (KM) concepts, principles, and technologies provide a foundation for understanding and building systems for acquiring, assimilating, selecting, generating, and emitting knowledge-a crucial resource of the firm. In the knowledge management community, it is commonly contended that knowledge, and capabilities for processing it, comprise a major resource that can differentiate one firm from another in the sense of yielding better performance or a competitive edge. However, aside from anecdotes, there has been little to substantiate this contention. Can any empirical link be discovered between a firm's KM success and that firm's financial performance? To develop an answer to this question, we use an independent research company's reports of firms judged to be highly successful in their KM initiatives, plus related data reported by COMPUSTAT. As an initial investigation of the linkage between KM performance and firm performance, as measured by financial ratios, this study uses the Matched Sample Comparison Group methodology to evaluate research hypotheses. The analysis reveals a heretofore elusive antecedent of firm performance-evidence that superior KM performance is indeed a predictor of superior bottom-line performance. This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by demonstrating that KM, a basic foundation for IS, is an important factor to consider from the standpoint of achieving strong financial performance. As such, it suggests that KM furnishes an important context for understanding designs, applications, and possibilities for IS with respect to achieving such performance. In the context of devising and executing KM initiatives, both technological and human treatments of knowledge need to be cultivated and integrated in ways that lead to superior KM performance. This study also contributes to the management literature by going beyond anecdotes and case studies in buttressing the proposition that a firm's KM competencies are an important ingredient in that firm's performance. It solidifies the raison d'etre for investigating KM phenomena and methods (computer-based and human), both within and across modern organizations. It gives practicing managers evidence that bottom-line benefits are indeed associated with superior KM strategy and execution.

SE-MABKM: An Epoch For Organization Knowledge Management

It is true to say that current working environment is ‘MFSWE’ i.e. multi facet smart working environment. Such environment requires smart system that performs tasks intelligently and smart system can be developed by the smart framework. In order to support such environment the concept of SE-MABKM has been brought forward for effective management of organizational Knowledge Management. While as SE-MABKM is providing a conceptual framework for OKM especially for software organization. In the software organization knowledge management became parts and parcel. SE-MABKM framework will work as per the requirement and authorization of knowledge Management Communities to design and develop an effective tools or application for smart working environment for various life cycles like Management life cycle, Organizational process Improvement Life cycle, and Software development Life cycle as well as Software Test Life cycle. Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. Reason of this paper writing is providing a framework for multi agent based knowledge management for software companies and after that this framework to be applied at various life cycle model in individual as well as collaborative manner for effective knowledge management tools and application development. Keywords: SE-MABKM, MFSWE, KM, OKM, MABKM, MAS

A Model for the Application of Interactive Digital Television to Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice make intensive use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to meet their needs of interaction among their members. At present, the main supporting tool for these communities is the Internet and the software tools available for their users. With the advent of digital TV, however, new resources have become available to these interactive communities. This study aims at analyzing the basic needs of technology support for virtual communities, identifying the essential software services that can meet these needs and propose an application model for interactive digital television that can meet the main needs of a Community of Practice. To achieve that, the essential services for a Community of Practice were identified by means of a field research applied to a knowledge management Community of Practice in order to propose an application model for Interactive Digital TV to Communities of Practice. The results discussed here may be used to develop applications for Interactive Digital TV and Communities of Practice, exploring the interactive resources of this new platform.

Making memories available: a framework for preserving rural heritage through community knowledge management (cKM)

While most of the research in Knowledge Management (KM) has focused on business communities, there is a breadth of potential applications of KM theory and practice to wider society. This paper explores the potential of KM for rural communities, specifically for those that want to preserve their social history and collective memories (what we call heritage) to enrich the lives of others. In KM terms, this is a task of accumulating and recording knowledge (using KM techniques such as story-telling and communities of practice) to enable its retention for future use (by interested people perhaps through KM systems). We report a case study of Cardrona, a valley of approximately 120 people in New Zealand's South Island. Realising that time would erode knowledge of their community a small, motivated group of residents initiated a KM programme to create a legacy for a wider community including younger generations, tourists and scholars. This paper applies KM principles to rural communities that want to harness their collective knowledge for wider societal gain, and develops a community-based framework to inform such initiatives. As a result, we call for a wider conceptualisation of KM to include motives for managing knowledge beyond business performance to accommodate community (cKM).

The Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging: An Analysis of Tag Vocabulary Application in Knowledge Representation, Discovery and Retrieval

This study investigates the contribution of collaborative tagging to the design of user-driven vocabularies in knowledge management systems (KMS). Three metrics, tag growth, tag reuse, and tag discrimination, were used to examine the evolution of the tagging vocabulary of the knowledge management community of interest in CiteULike over a three-year period. Results indicate a steady decrease in the number of unique tags over the four years, suggesting an increasing stability in the community vocabulary over time and the establishment of domain-specific vocabulary. Members reused each others' tags over time and exhibited increasingly collaborative tagging behaviour. Tag discrimination was high, with 4.11 distinct articles per tag. The stable and discriminatory nature of the community's tags suggests that collaborative tagging may serve as a useful resource for vocabulary choice or maintenance by KMS managers.

Dynamics of social roles in a knowledge management community

With the emergence of community-oriented Information and Communication Technology (ICT) applications, e.g., Wikipedia, the popularity of socio-technical phenomena in society has increased. This development emphasises the need to further our understanding of how computer-supported social group structures change over time and what forms emerge. This contribution presents the results of a qualitative field study of a Socio-Technical Community (STC). The STC is described from its founding (in 2001) to its sustainable development (in 2006) as well as its transformation phase (2007–2008). The design-based research approach revealed changes of social structures by social roles within the STC over time. The central conclusion is that such STC’s – networks of computer-mediated communication and human interaction – evolve a specific kind of social structure, which is formal rather than informal. The results indicate that a group evolves from an informal trust-based community with few formal roles to a STC where the social mechanisms, and not the software architecture, supports knowledge management processes.

Let’s Get Natural: The Discourse of Community and the Problem of Transferring Practices in Knowledge Management

Knowledge is the crucial resource for business survival and prosperity in the 21st Century. But knowledge is also one of the most difficult resources for organisations to manage successfully. To tap and make the most of knowledge organisations must learn to appropriately manage people - individually and in teams. The challenge of effectively doing all this comes together in the creation of communities of practice. In this paper, we argue that the influence of Japanese management practices has led organisations towards a ‘naturalized’ view aiming to resolve the ontological dilemmas that exist between communalism and individualism. However, many of the knowledge management practices operate within the rational view framework. We discuss the challenges and make a plea to the knowledge management community to go further than simply making the case of community benefits within organisations.

Knowledge outsourcing: an alternative strategy for knowledge management

PurposeIn knowledge outsourcing, external knowledge providers, rather than in‐house experts, are contracted to provide services which result in the production of knowledge‐intensive assets for the organisation. The purpose of this paper is to present the notion of knowledge outsourcing as an alternative strategy for knowledge management.Design/methodology/approachA case study research method is adopted to examine the knowledge outsourcing processes and activities at a for‐profit higher education enterprise that has been successful in using a knowledge outsourcing approach in the development of its online courseware.FindingsA general process model of knowledge outsourcing is developed from the case data. The paper also draws attention to three conditions under which knowledge outsourcing may be a suitable strategy for knowledge management. Additionally, two main areas of knowledge outsourcing risk, which are related to the quality of knowledge services and the effort required to manage the outsourcing relationship, have been identified.Research limitations/implicationsGiven that the study involves only a single case, the findings may likely be influenced by the peculiarities of the case, including the nature of the industry, availability of external experts and top management support. Going forward, a more refined theory for knowledge outsourcing can be developed through further empirical validation with more cases.Practical implicationsThe notion of knowledge outsourcing is introduced to managers who wish to exploit external sources rather than relying on internal capability for knowledge creation.Originality/valueThis paper represents one of the earliest efforts to introduce the notion of knowledge outsourcing to the knowledge management community.

Ontology for Data Mining and its Application to Mining Incomplete Data

Ontology has recently received considerable attention in the knowledge management community. This article discusses the needs of ontology development for data mining. Based on a domain analysis of knowledge representations in data mining, it proposes a generic structure of ontologies for data mining. Furthermore, this article specifies the unique ontology resources of the subdomain of innovative data mining with incomplete data. A project on an ontology-based data mining system for discovering knowledge from incomplete data demonstrates the effectiveness of ontology in knowledge management.

Creating and sustaining successful knowledge management in purposeful communities‐summary of key experiences from pioneers

AbstractBased on research organized as a number of workshops, case studies and interviews with experienced practitioners as well as academics, we present in this report the most important findings on how to create and sustain successful knowledge management in a community environment. The cases, workshops and interviews deal specifically with the Microsoft Solutions Sharing Network (SSN) program, but the findings, conclusions and preliminary recommendations can be applied more generally to the development of any knowledge management community. A key conclusion is that the bulk of efforts toward creating successful knowledge management communities focus on less technical, or softer aspects like leadership, culture, social settings and value of participation. However, these are essential, but not sufficient, ingredients for success. Technical issues, issues regarding development and customization of the tools used to facilitate knowledge management (for example, the SSN web portal), and emerging legal issues surrounding the sharing of intellectual property (IP) may be perceived as somewhat less important to the participants, but are nevertheless key factors in the long term success of these communities. It is also concluded that the foundation for successful collaboration is primarily laid in the initial phases of community development. A community must make a positive impression on its participants from the very beginning because most people will not give it a second chance. In this report we have highlighted three important areas to consider when establishing portals for knowledge management: Leadership, Purpose and Process/Infrastructure. A leadership with high credibility in the subject is needed to lead the participants in the right direction, manage the cultural processes and to make sure that relevant content can be found. Initially it is the content that brings people to a specific community. Thus, there has to be some common purpose that not only needs to be in congruence with the professional role of the participants but also be inspiring for them as well. Additionally, the community should have some sort of process that the participants can understand and suits the way they would like to interact. Face‐to‐face meetings and networking activities create trust which is important to get the process started. Language, IT platform, support and rules governing the contribution, creation and sharing of ‘knowledge’ for the community are other concerns that need to be considered within the process. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Knowledge Management Enhances Technical Training Program

Pillars of the Industry - How knowledge management enhances technical training programs. World demand for oil is at an all-time high, and the oil industry is riding one of its busiest cycles in history. This creates a wonderful market in which current college graduates and young professionals can get involved. Positions are open across the industry for almost any type of technical degree. While this is great for the young professionals of the world, it creates many challenges for the industry. Issues arise regarding how to train and mentor these new employees as they progress into productive positions as quickly as possible. If it isn't enough to provide training on oilfield practices and technology; we are also facing what many in the industry are referring to as "the great crew change." In the next 5–10 years, a large majority of employees who hired on in the boom of the 1970s and early 1980s will be retiring. These employees are commonly referred to as the "knowledge base" for the industry. This means that in addition to training young professionals on general oilfield material, we must also pass along or otherwise retain as much of this knowledge as possible. Halliburton has taken a somewhat blended approach to this problem involving a tailored Technical Training Program (TTP) and what we refer to as Knowledge Management (KM) communities for collaborating on and cataloging solutions to issues. This article will address each one of these separately to point out their unique benefits, but also explain how they complement each other to create a complete training and development environment. First look at the TTP.

Managing knowledge security

Purpose – This short paper aims to help in understanding how to manage the tension between knowledge sharing and intellectual property protection.Design/methodology/approach – The paper combines narrative and analysis.Findings – Understanding how to manage the tension between knowledge sharing and intellectual property protection should be a critical goal of the knowledge management community. Challenges include calculating return on investment, characterizing risk, and managing the transience of knowledge through systems, processes, and partner organizations.Originality/value – The paper illustrates how this tension is key to understanding how to manage knowledge in a highly competitive, continually innovating, constantly learning, global environment.

An empirical study of factors impacting on knowledge processes in online forums: factors of interest and model outline

Based on a literature review of the fields of research of knowledge management, collaborative systems and online communities, this paper presents an outline of factors expected to contribute to collaborative knowledge creation and knowledge transfer processes in online forums, and proposes corresponding hypotheses. The paper depicts the model's underlying framework and its general methodological approach, describes the method for the indirect derivation of individual actor's knowledge process contributions, and expands in detail on input factors expected to contribute to knowledge process relevant contributions within online forums. Finally, the integration of these factors into a common Measurement and Structural Model is described. The research project is currently being conducted at International University Bremen (IUB).

Critical success factors for establishing a multidisciplinary health community knowledge management system using internet-based ICTs: the cardiology paradigm

The current paper concerns the development of an internet-based Health Community Knowledge Management System in the field of Cardiology. The research conducted covers a wide range of state-of-the-art technologies (ontologies, knowledge management techniques, etc.). The objectives of the final system are: to create an ontology for the modelling of the knowledge base around cardiology, while facilitating every day working needs of the various intended end users. Pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professionals, and biomedical companies are all interested and are participating in the formation of the virtual community for disseminating valuable knowledge in cardiology. The technological challenges of applying such an internet-based system, as well as the sociocultural and political factors affecting the application of similar internet-based ICTs and the integration with existing processes and systems in healthcare are examined. The research was conducted in three countries/pilot sites (Greece, Spain and Italy) and two experiences for testing purposes are being considered. The work concludes that some of the major success factors are: • knowledge critical mass • political commitment and endorsement • well-structured ontology • multilinguality of the content and the system • timeless processes • multipartnership participation • patient- and problem-oriented knowledge management system.

Linking social network analysis with the analytic hierarchy process for knowledge mapping in organizations

PurposeTo provide an interesting approach for determining interval measures, through the analytic hierarchy process, for integration with social network analysis for knowledge mapping in organizations.Design/methodology/approachIn order to develop improved organizational and business processes through knowledge management, a knowledge audit should be conducted to better understand the knowledge flows in the organization. An important technique to visualize these knowledge flows is the use of a knowledge map. Social network analysis can be applied to develop this knowledge map. Interval measures should be used in the social network analysis in order to determine the strength of the connections between individuals or departments in the organization. This paper applies the analytic hierarchy process to develop these interval measures, and integrates the values within the social network analysis to produce a meaningful knowledge map.FindingsThe analytic hierarchy process, when coupled with social network analysis, can be a useful technique for developing interval measures for knowledge‐mapping purposes.Research limitations/implicationsThe analytic hierarchy process may become tedious and arduous for use in large social network maps. More research needs to be conducted in this area for scalability.Practical implicationsAs social network analysis is gaining more prominence in the knowledge management community, the analytic hierarchy process may be able to provide more valuable measures to determine the strengths of relationships between actors than simply using ordinal numbers.Originality/valueCoupling the analytic hierarchy process with social network analysis provides a novel approach for future knowledge‐mapping activities.

Clustering documents into a web directory for bootstrapping a supervised classification

The management of hierarchically organized data is starting to play a key role in the knowledge management community due to the proliferation of topic hierarchies for text documents. The creation and maintenance of such organized repositories of information requires a great deal of human intervention. The machine learning community has partially addressed this problem by developing hierarchical supervised classifiers that help people categorize new resources within given hierarchies. The worst problem of hierarchical supervised classifiers, however, is their high demand in terms of labeled examples. The number of examples required is related to the number of topics in the taxonomy. Bootstrapping a huge hierarchy with a proper set of labeled examples is therefore a critical issue. This paper proposes some solutions for the bootstrapping problem, that implicitly or explicitly use taxonomy definition: a baseline approach that classifies documents according to the class terms, and two clustering approaches, whose training is constrained by the a priori knowledge encoded in the taxonomy structure, which consists of both terminological and relational aspects. In particular, we propose the TaxSOM model, that clusters a set of documents in a predefined hierarchy of classes, directly exploiting the knowledge of both their topological organization and their lexical description. Experimental evaluation was performed on a set of taxonomies taken from the Google™ and LookSmart™ web directories, obtaining good results.

Why cross‐cultural knowledge transfer is a form of translation in more ways than you think

AbstractKnowledge transfer is often likened to acts of translation. It is argued that translation is a very robust analogue of knowledge transfer and that theory provides insight into cross‐cultural sharing processes. Three issues which affect the quality of translation and, hence, knowledge transfer are highlighted: ambiguity, interference (intrusion from one's own cultural background) and lack of equivalence. Other terms from translation science, which can serve as a useful reference for knowledge management experts, are discussed: translation as a networking activity, process and end‐product quality, levels of accuracy and constraints on the production of good translations. A new concept is introduced to the knowledge management community; namely convertibility, which refers to the perceived utility of a knowledge source and the availability of domain experts to reveal its import to final users. Two models representing knowledge transfer as translation are presented, the second of which incorporates Nonaka's SECI model. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Technological issues towards knowledge‐powered organizations

Organizations have already realized the significance of capturing, sharing and applying the collective experience and know‐how of their members. The aim is to increase operational efficiency, productivity, quality of services and get innovative products and solutions to their customers. However, it is well known that technological approaches for managing organizational knowledge need further development for their effective deployment in real settings. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of previous work done in information technology solutions to support knowledge management, to specify important features that an advanced knowledge management system must have in order to be successfully deployed in an organization, and identify emerging technological issues that must be researched and be developed in order the technological expectations of the knowledge management community to be fulfilled.

Contextual constraints in knowledge management theory: the cultural embeddedness of Nonaka's knowledge‐creating company

AbstractNonaka and Takeuchi's book The Knowledge Creating Company is one of the most influential in the field of knowledge management. The famous SECI Model, representing the four modes of knowledge creation (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) seems to have been accepted by the knowledge management community as universally valid in conception and in application. This paper argues that the model must be seen first and foremost as a product of the environment from which it emerged, namely Japan. It is contended that each of the four modes can only be understood with reference to their embeddedness in Japanese social and organizational culture and related value systems. Thus the model should be used with caution. It should be seen as a map rather than a model; or perhaps as a special kind of mirror, which allows us to see ourselves and our knowledge management practices in new ways for directing change. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Knowledge Management in Communities of Practice

Knowledge Management in Communities of Practice