Creating Collaborative Advantage Through Knowledge and Innovation

The following sections are included:

• CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

• PREFACE

Individuals don't offer information (knowledge) for free. Therefore, knowledge sharing can be regarded as a business transaction process. During this process humans use a tacit but probably unique function--independent from cultural roots--to evaluate the value of information. After conducting a comprehensive company survey in Europe, we found indicators supporting the business transaction theory. Additionally, we selected a subset of companies and asked employees their thoughts about the motivators for knowledge sharing and working performance. In so doing we performed a cluster analysis and mapped the answers to Alderfer's pyramid. Very important cultural-dependant moral hazards for knowledge sharing were detected.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• The Method

• Strategic Analysis
  • Strategy Mapping
  • Impact of Sonatrach Strategy on the PED Department
    • The PED, a Significant Reservoir of Strategic Know-how
    • Strategic Competences for PED

• Professional Knowledge Analysis
  • Knowledge Mapping and Criticality Analysis
  • The Results

• Strategic Alignment

• Capitalization of Tacit Know-how

• Designing Transfer Devices

• Conclusion

• References

While the knowledge-based economy (KBE) and its effects are often recognized and discussed, there is a lack of consensus within the international community about how an economy's progress in the knowledge arena is definitively measured. This paper focuses on the context of Singapore and seeks to develop a set of indicators that could be used to track Singapore's economic development as a KBE. To achieve this objective, major KBE assessment models were reviewed and conflated into an interim set of KBE indicators for Singapore. Thereafter, the appropriateness of the indicators was subject to experts' opinions solicited from the Singapore Economic Development (EDB). The findings yielded specific recommendations to help build capabilities in the areas of knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge dissemination, and knowledge application for the economy of Singapore.

Our so-called “Information Society” is gradually changing into a “Knowledge Society”. The Shannon's Theory provided a formal and mathematical framework for information. It was very fruitful for avoiding ambiguity on the concept of information. This paper proposes a transposition of this theory for knowledge. From the three axes of a formal model designed for knowledge engineering (information, sense and context), three quantitative measures are proposed to get a measure of the quantity of knowledge of a system. This notion permits to consider applications as the cognitive measure of a web site, of a knowledge community (community of practice…).

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Knowledge Management in Australia

• Knowledge Management Standard

• Knowledge Management Literature

• Knowledge Management: The Socio-Cultural Perspective

• Information Behavior Research

• Parallel Growth: Socio-Cultural Perspective in Information Behavior Research

• Common Ground

• Collaborative KM-IBR Research: The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) ‘Knowledge Cultures’ Project

• Conclusion

• References

Knowledge creation is presented as a strong change of power within an organization structure. A knowledge framework must be built in order to understand how leadership arises. Leadership is built upon a four-phase process of organizational knowledge creation (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) as well as both an ontological (levels of knowledge) and an epistemological (tacit and explicit knowledge) dimension. Thus, two leaderships are identified: change and altruistic. This paper establishes a relationship between Herbert Simon's sociability concept and Nonaka and Takeuchi's socialization process in order to define an altruistic behavior in organizational leadership. Organization needs altruistic leaders in order to create a balanced firm once knowledge creation has been developed by the change leader. The need for altruistic leadership is the consequence of the power of knowledge creation.

The current thriving interests in introducing knowledge management (KM) initiatives have been accompanied by the limited understanding of the link between KM and business value. This paper begins with a critical review of conventional approaches for measuring the value creation of KM programs. We argue that current research uses operational performance improvement as the primary focus for measurement, and that this method is subject to various limitations. A conceptual framework for measuring the value creation—one based on organizational knowledge sharing capability—is then proposed. Based on previous theoretical and empirical research, our study shows how each of the four dimensions of the framework is cultivated through the implementation of KM programs. We then demonstrate how business value can be generated through the improvement of each dimension. Thus, the framework is seen as the vehicle through which KM programs bring value and can also be used as a tool for tracking the implementation of knowledge management programs.

Social network analysis was performed by examining the co-authorship patterns of authors from four departments at the National University of Singapore whose work was published in 2004. A tie between two authors was established when they co-authored a paper. From the results, inferences were made regarding the social cohesiveness and the level of social capital in networks. It is argued that social network analysis can be used for three purposes: (1) to identify research networks and the inner and outer circle of an author's professional acquaintances; (2) to map the structural dimension of the social capital; and (3) to identify emergent communities of practice. Lastly, avenues for further research are proposed.

Collaboration within and between organizations is usually examined in dyadic terms, between pairs of organizations or organizational subunits. But, it is argued here that there are analytical benefits from considering collaboration in the context of the network of relationships in which individuals and organizations are typically embedded. This paper extends the exploration-exploitation framework, conceiving this as the product of regions of strong and weak ties within complex networks. Drawing from a wide review of recent research, a number of insights arising from this network are presented, together with significant challenges for management. Some principles for effective management of collaborative networks are proposed.

The knowledge management portfolio includes knowledge sharing as a means to connect knowledge to knowledge and knowledge to actors to support decision making, problem solving, viewpoint resolution, conflict negotiation, education and innovation. A knowledge sharing activity comprises two elements—(i) the content of the knowledge being shared and (ii) the context within which the knowledge is being shared. The context in which knowledge is sought and shared amongst peers is of significant importance in establishing the relevance and applicability of the knowledge content. In this paper we present a context-aware, ontology-driven knowledge-sharing framework that leverages ontology to both describe the knowledge sharing actors and the knowledge being shared. We model knowledge sharing in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Our P2P knowledge sharing framework comprises: (a) a domain ontology that is used to semantically model each peer; each peer is described as an instantiation of the ontology, (b) a weighted structural graph-based approach to establish affinity between peers and their contexts for the purpose of sharing relevant, needed knowledge resources, and (c) a task-feature relevance matrix to model the domain tasks influencing contextual affinity determination.

The literature on computer-supported scientific collaboration substantiates that the community often focuses on supporting tools to assist in the execution of research projects. We are currently concerned with the design of a system that enables scientists to collaboratively structure a research project. This system is reliant upon both a widely known actions coordination model and a three-level workspace model. In addition, the academic work to which the proposed system is accounting is first examined with respect to higher regulating levels constrain work at the organizational and regulating agencies level. Such a perspective allows us to foresee further development toward actual scientific knowledge management.

The objective of this study is to compare the e-commerce sites for two industries, namely hotels and airlines, in Singapore using a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria designed specifically for e-commerce sites. The instrument used in this research was developed by Van der Merwe and Bekker (2003);); the e-commerce portal sites for this study were selected randomly. Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) was used in the data analysis to examine interval variables. Overall, the study showed that, compared with airlines, hotels received lower values and greater variability with interface, navigation, and content categories.

This article aims to present a first approach to characterize strategists and decision makers, in the context of the Strategic Knowledge Management (SKM) model. SKM is a process of creation, capture, assimilation and diffusion of the organizational knowledge. It involves knowledge about planning, description, impact, prediction, evaluation and generation of strategies. This knowledge is formed by strategic and no strategic information, as well as the wisdom accumulated by strategists and decision makers in the process of formulate and make strategic decisions. The methodology applied in this study comprises a research of kinds of skills and competences, focusing activities developed by strategists and decision makers. Thus, it was developed a survey with practitioners in formulate strategies and/or take strategic decision to verify which competences and skills are involved with their jobs. Peliminary results point to different tendencies about which competences and skills are most important to strategists and decision makers. They also show that there is a tendency to emphasize intellectual and knowledge competence in strategic formulation and strategic decision process.

This paper describes the goals, methods, and preliminary findings of an on-going research project funded by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to investigate current practices among North American college and university archives and records management programs. The project used an online survey and follow-up interviews to document approaches to capturing, storing, organizing, and making available a broad range of materials such as administrative records, digital assets, email, and institutional publications and websites. The findings indicate that the field is less advanced in its efforts than many practitioners, particularly at small- and medium-sized academic institutions, have believed. For many the key to introducing even a rudimentary e-records management program is to focus on a single, often highly visible area and to modify existing policies and procedures to encompass e-records.

Aiming at the measurement of “ intellectual capital kernel ”, this paper proposes to construct a mathematic model with the artificial neural network (ANN) and demonstrate how the executive process of intellectual capital resource can be simulated by the ANN. This model will show the mathematical relationship between intellectual capital carrier instructors and firm performance. BP (Back propagation) network—considered classic and simple—is taken for granted in the case study of Sweden Skandia in order to measure intellectual capital kernels. The empirical study is done based on data from the Skandia intellectual capital report. A deep analysis is made for the results, which show that for its limited samples, the model operates normally. Additional case studies are anticipated to further validate our conclusions.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between organizational climate and the productivity of managers' services in industrial organizations with the goal of presenting a suitable management pattern. The subjects were 349 managers who were randomly selected from a research population comprised of all managers who work in the companies of the National Petro-Chemical Industries. The research tools are questionnaires given to staff regarding organizational climate (Litwin & Stringer, 1968) and management productivity (Smith et al., 1998). For each manager, three clerks (totaling 1,047 subjects) were chosen to complete the questionnaires and evaluate their immediate managers. The results of applying the analysis of multi-variation regression are as follows:

A) There is a relationship between the organizational climate and the productivity of the managers' services.

B) The math pattern for the productivity of the managers' services in industrial organizations is demonstrated

Productivity = 0.65 × organizational climate +(−29.19)

The average of two natural numbers always falls between those two numbers. Partitioning a document set into two non overlapping subsets, the words in the set will appear only in one subset or on both. These properties can be used to present users with choices that can allow them to build a phrase where chosen terms have context. The average frequency of a term can be used to study relevance by comparing it to the same term's average in the relevant and the non-relevant subsets. A coefficient of variability (VAR) is defined as the normalized distance between these two values. The vast majority of words seem not to be significant because VAR as their relative comparative value is minimal. But a few words show very high values. This could be exploited by a system to find strong word instances that represent relevant concepts. It is possible to imagine an iterative procedure based on these properties through which a user identifies significant words with high VAR values. Such procedure would be desirable for a diversity of text-related computer-based tasks such as content analysis, thesauri construction, data mining, computer-based indexing and feature selection. A software instance to help users build context has been developed as a prototype to show the concept. Knowledge is always related to a given context and requires a support structure which has some cognitive elements such as other knowledge, data, concepts, information, etc. Using objective and subjective measures, users derive conceptual relationships. Users gauge and build topical relevance by engaging the system, which can then offer more suggestions. There is great advantage in reducing cognitive load and extraneous information. Users deal directly with easier to identify words, phrases and their combinations to form information capsules.

One of the challenges in knowledge management in a computer-mediated environment is how to analyze the huge log file. Markov chain models have been widely used for analyzing several types of sequential activities such as web navigation and human-computer interaction analysis. However, the Markov chain analysis of computer-mediated communication is still unexplored. In this paper we consider the dyadic activity of computer mediated negotiation as sequential and having a temporal structure. The communication process is represented as a sequence of transition between states using a Markov model. We show that it is possible to discover probabilistic patterns in the negotiation activity by discovering sequences that may characterize the negotiation activity.

Retrieving information stored electronically has become a more and more time consuming task, especially in IT-driven companies. We assume this is partially due to the commonly accepted “one-fits-all” construction of search engines. In order to increase the quality of Information Retrieval (IR) in the company environment, we developed a system that increases the accuracy of standard IR engines by two means: One, expanding user queries using a description of the user context and two, learning terms describing user contexts out of implicit user feedback. This paper presents a formal description of the architecture of the system, the implementation details, and our results.

Blogs (web logs) seem to be growing in popularity and are a phenomenon of the Internet. Could blogging be an innovative tool for knowledge management (KM)? This paper looks at the concept of using blogs to store and share knowledge about healthcare. A general research question is whether information systems (IS) incorporating intranet-based or restricted blogs might provide an innovative, user-friendly method for identifying and preventing medical errors. This research looks at ways to uncover explicit and tacit knowledge about human-system situated processes associated with nursing care in a hospital. Information concerning errors must to be uncovered without threatening healthcare professionals in terms of ethics, legal problems or job security. To conduct the research, a blog was established in a protected, anonymous-posting system and was provided as an interactive medium where novice nurses could share information and develop knowledge. The study provided proof of concept and showed that blogs can support communities of practice (CoP). Therefore, web-based sharing (blogs, wikis, and forums) might provide effective tools for discovering medical-errors. The collected information and data then could be used with analytical tools to create knowledge-based reports that improve procedures and provide quality assurance. Blog data was analyzed for information concerning procedures, errors, quality assurance, and job definitions. The research showed there are potential benefits in regularly using blogging tools in a medical environment (or other domains) as a framework for KM. Blogging can support sharing and reusing personal knowledge to improve applications, enterprises, and human-system environments.

In this paper, the authors applied Goffman's sociological theory of “Face Work” to an analysis of the Web. The authors stated that a user's ability to judge the credibility of related sites may be enhanced by examining the hyperlinks named on link pages and comparing those to the ones named on other pages. It was discussed that hyperlinks on link pages offer distinct meaning. The authors analyzed only Web communities that contained hyperlinks on link pages, noting the distribution between the number of incoming hyperlinks (in-degree) and the number of out-going ones (out-degree). The reconstructed Web community indicated that no site existed with a high in-degree, as well as a high out-degree. The variation of the evaluated values of the link pages (e.g. the in-degree point) suggested that credible sites could be hyperlinked to other credible sites through link pages. The results of the two analyses suggested that a credible site (an authority) carefully selects the hyperlinks named on its link pages. This qualified selection could be founded on the site administrator's Face Work, which strongly constrains his or her observable conduct. The authors suggested that Face Work could be valid on the Web. They claimed that the observable credibility implied by related sites could be utilized in order to obtain knowledge about an unfamiliar topic.

This paper presents a meta-tag suggestion tool that selects topics from a given taxonomy of categories. It works by extracting keyphrases from the textual content of electronic data and using them as entry points to search for appropriate topics in a hierarchically-organized taxonomy. The keyphrase extraction module, based on the Kea system, has the functionality to use prebuilt Kea models or create new Kea models on the fly, thereby providing flexibility in controlling keyphrase extraction. Terms in each keyphrase are stemmed and used as a query to search for appropriate topics in the taxonomy. All taxonomy topics retrieved by repeated searching are considered as candidate meta-tags. They are ranked based on the significance of keyphrase(s) matching the topic, the significance of the type of hit, and the specificity of the matching topic based on its position in the taxonomy.

The following sections are included:

• INDEX