Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

The era of knowledge economy has arrived, and knowledge has become a key resource for enterprises. How to keep creating and using new knowledge has become an important concern for modern business administration. How to manage knowledge efficiently and effectively will become a crucial issue in future. However, owing to differences in educational backgrounds, people may have different perspectives on knowledge management (KM), and so the effectiveness of KM may not be maximized owing to lack of integration. In view of this, the Departments of Library and Information Science, Business Administration, Information Management, and Computer Science and Information Engineering of the National Taiwan University put together a "KM Curriculum Program" that seeks to educate and train all-round KM professionals. This paper begins with the proposition that KM will be the focus of business administration in the 21st century, followed by the need to train interdisciplinary KM professionals and create channels for such training. Lastly, it takes "KM Curriculum Program, NTU" as a sample to explain the ideas behind its education and training. Further, by sharing experiences, we hope to motivate other colleges and universities to draw up similar programs to train skilled KM professionals and to improve Taiwan's competitiveness in the business world.

Given the emerging nature of the knowledge management (KM) profession and the differing schools of thought on KM by academics and practitioners, designing a curriculum in KM poses substantial challenges. One of these challenges is to be able to determine the optimal mix of subjects from the various disciplines that best meets the objective of developing the requisite professional competencies of knowledge professional. A two-pronged methodology was adopted for this study comprising a survey research to gather perceptions on KM and KM education as well as an investigation of relevant web sites on the Internet for existing postgraduate programs. The latter was used to support a comparative review of the courses' objectives and curriculum, where available. The study established that the adoption of KM in Singapore was most significant in large organizations and the public sector. However, there were differing perceptions as to who in an organization should be responsible for KM and what full-time KM roles should be in-scaled. Nonetheless, the findings did suggest that there is a potential market for knowledge professionals and reinforced the fact that KM is indeed interdisciplinary and drew upon the theories and practices of a number of disciplines such as information technology, information science, communication, business, and management.

Few would refute the importance of harnessing organizational knowledge — for reuse, learning, and process improvement. Once retained in a concrete form, knowledge becomes less fragmented and more easily accessible and useable. Such a knowledge management system indeed becomes a source of competitive advantage for an organization. The key to achieving this is by retaining the existing organizational knowledge so that we do not have to rely solely on available expertise. A number of knowledge management frameworks exist which help us to classify and structure knowledge. No single framework dominates, because different organizations have different needs depending on factors such as culture and business processes. At the same time, there is a lack of case studies on how organizations create or operate such a knowledge management system. In this paper, we present a case study of a knowledge management system used in a specific context — an Australian construction company. The study shows that, at least in this particular context, a knowledge management system can operate only where it does not interfere with the existing workflow of the organization. Furthermore, the importance of retaining valuable tacit knowledge is emphasized. We also discuss the implications for future research and practice.

Knowledge-based economy and globalization have led to changes in organizational structure (e.g. decentralization, project and matrix teams, flatter structure) and the rise of a multicultural, diverse workforce. As such, organizations are reevaluating their strategies, and one of the trends is to adopt organizational culture as a knowledge-management tool. The purpose of this paper is to lay down a persuasive communication-based model for cultivating a synergetic, multicultural work environment that allows for knowledge sharing and transfer. This model can be broken down into three components: (1) cultivation of a well-defined organizational culture; (2) development of cross-cultural skills and flexibilities; and (3) establishment of a cross-cultural mediation process. It highlights some issues and areas for consideration during assessment, planning (such as message, spokesperson, measurable objectives), implementation, and evaluation

This paper presents a framework for the integrated use of formal knowledge engineering methods and data mining based knowledge discovery methods. Knowledge is a key enterprise asset, and organizations are adopting both knowledge engineering and knowledge discovery paradigms for better knowledge management and enhanced decision support capability. Although there exists a useful interdependence between these endeavors, not much effort has been focused on using the full potential of one for the other. This paper presents a framework for the integrated use of established formal knowledge engineering methods and knowledge discovery processes with the ultimate intent of better managing the enterprise knowledge life cycle. It provides a brief overview of the knowledge discovery processes, and introduces a class of formal knowledge engineering methods and the perceived role of these methods in supporting the integration between the two worlds of knowledge discovery and knowledge engineering.

This article describes a successful experience on a software project of Technology Development Program (TDP) of Ministry Of Economic Affairs (MOEA) in Taiwan. It describes the design and implementation of a smart office task framework to automate system integration and to enable user-centric application. To achieve the goal of implicit knowledge accumulation and inheritance, we developed a service framework at the backend for integrating diverse systems seamlessly and an interface agent at the front for hiding complex efforts on manually binding different systems. Based on years of experience in components-based system development with multilayered flow architecture, the ACT (Advanced e-Commerce Technology) laboratory adapted Web Services to wrap various existing systems into a general RPC/RMI format, used ontology to define and integrate new functionalities semantically, and took advantage of agents to enable a user-centric office environment. The design rationale, application scenario, architecture, and future plan are presented.

Organizations intend to achieve a high level of information systems flexibility and success. They plan information systems with multiple approaches and adopt different planning methodologies. A broad range of measurements is available in the literature to assess IS planning effectiveness and success. This study theoretically develops a causal model to assess and predict IS planning success, empirically validate the model, and simulate the empirically tested model to predict the "ends" and "means" of the IS planning. The Systems Dynamics approach is used to model and simulate the "ends" and "means" variables. The model represents the user involvement in IS planning and flexibility variables ("means") and IS success variables ("ends") in a framework. The questionnaire survey method is used to validate the model, and the survey was administered to 296 respondents from 42 organizations selected from eight different sectors. The survey results validate the existence of relationship between user involvement, flexibility, and IS success. The empirically validated model is used to predict flexibility and information systems success in the surveyed organizations.

The emergence of knowledge-based organisations has seen an emphasis shift in recognising people as the prime competitive asset and the push of management to nurture social capital within organisations. This supposedly produces an environment of openness, trust, and free communication, thereby leading to greater knowledge sharing among organisational members. A well-managed knowledge management process helps to create and sustain knowledge capture, sharing, and creation of new knowledge. This paper traces the development of a knowledge management framework in an information technology environment of an international bank, focussing on the process, derivation, and implementation of the framework and presents the important lessons learnt along the way.