Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

The use of cross-functional teams in integrated product development (IPD) has become a common practice in industry. Despite an extant body of literature on the importance of knowledge management in cross-functional team execution, the drivers of knowledge sharing in cross-functional teams in IPD projects have not been adequately addressed. Knowledge sharing among the IPD team members help in complex problem solving and decision-making during the course of the concurrent project environment. In this article we present findings on knowledge sharing in IPD projects from our interviews with project executives from four diverse companies. Based on social cognitive and information processing theories, the current case study proposes a theoretical framework on some of the important determinants of shared knowledge. An understanding of such determinants can help managers in IPD to promote information and knowledge sharing which may lead to superior IPD project performance.

A major challenge facing firms competing in electronic business markets is the dynamic integration of knowledge within and beyond the firm, enabled by internet-based infrastructure and emergent fluid socio-technical networks. This paper explores how social actors dynamically employ intranets to integrate formal and informal knowledge within evolving socio-technical networks that emerge, permeate and extend beyond the organisational boundary. The paper presents two case studies that illustrate how static intranets can be useful for dynamically integrating knowledge when they are interwoven with other knowledge channels such as e-mail through which flows the informal knowledge needed to make sense of and situate formal organisational knowledge. The findings suggest that businesses should carefully examine how employees integrate intranets with other channels in their work, and the shaping of knowledge outcomes that flows from such use. There are practical implications for the proper skilling of the people who share and integrate knowledge in this way. The paper also provides a framework for dynamic knowledge integration in socio-technical networks, which can help underpin future research in this area.

Knowledge is a key resource that must be managed within organisations and across collaborative enterprise networks. In particular, the two major challenges that such organisations face are ensuring that they have the appropriate knowledge to support their operations and ensuring that they optimise these knowledge resources available to them. In recent years, researchers, consultants and industrialists have developed approaches in an attempt to address these requirements. Most of these approaches have been technology oriented. In other words, the implementation of information technology systems is seen as the solution to enterprise knowledge management problems. However, research indicates that organisations are still failing to convert individual skills and competencies into tangible products and services. Knowledge management is an emerging discipline and it is still not very well understood or managed in industry. Consequently, new knowledge initiatives are not exploited to their full potential. In other words, companies are not reaping the full benefits of knowledge management projects. This paper explores the key constituents to managing knowledge and examines the main problems with sharing knowledge across teams and organisational boundaries. Findings from a qualitative study suggest that the key problems to managing knowledge across a collaborative network are person centric and consequently managers should focus their efforts on improving critical areas such as motivation and trust as well as people oriented methods and tools.

This paper presents the role of an innovative university masters' degree programme as a basis for skills development in human capital analysis for finance and business students in their core degree programmes. The programme uses general systems theory to provide a framework for describing two components of the sustainable organisation: firstly, the inter-relationships of organisations to their context; and secondly, to describe the configuration of internal management systems. In the subject, the students take the role of human capital analysts in order to focus on defining, assessing and measuring the human elements of corporate sustainability. This postgraduate business subject has been developed within the framework of the UNSW guidelines on teaching and learning, designed to encourage innovation in both content and process. The authors conclude that the role of education is instrumental in creating a community of practice which uses sustainability principles as a basis for investment decision making amongst business students, who will be the next generation of executives and financial analysts.

In this article, agent based process management model is proposed, which is for the process management of knowledge worker and service workers in order to establish the basis for the new knowledge management system. In this article, we applied several methods from 6-Sigma and personal software process for personal process definition, process execution and process measurement. This study attempts to improve the process execution accuracy through process visualisation and standardisation and to accumulate the base data to improve the process through measuring the process execution. We proposed guidelines and detail procedures for developing three advisor agents for guiding the process definition, process execution and process measurement. We showed the simple case study applied our guidelines.

This article defines online communities and their constituent elements. It provides a framework in which online communities can be discussed and compared irrespective of topic or content. It explores the notions of core and peripheral membership and behaviour and provides a set of metrics for determining the activity profile of the community. Finally it presents a case study of an online community and discusses it using the framework and metrics presented.

Information system project failure is described as a common phenomenon. Escalation occurs when there are continued commitments for a troubled project and has been observed as one pattern of failure. The main purpose of this research was to investigate whether software development risks were the factors to discriminate between escalated projects and non-escalated projects. Thirty critical risks were selected and classified into nine risk categories under three dimensions such as product, people, and process. Probability and loss in each nine risk category were measured on the basis of 247 survey cases from IS professionals. The results show that the risk probability in the people dimension and the process dimension with management aspects was more important to predict escalation than the risk loss in those dimensions and the risk impact in the product dimension with technical aspects. The results imply that managerial factors are more critical than technical factors in predicting IS development project escalation. Additionally, it was noticed that the CMM level of an organisation was very significant to predict successful projects.