Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

This research, using large questionnaire data collected from a Japanese pharmaceutical company, attempts to examine the impact of organisational culture, leadership, and reporting styles on knowledge management, which can support innovation, assessing the significance of levels of comprehension and implementation of the corporate mission. Those with a better understanding and consistent realisation of the corporate mission were found to spend significantly more time on knowledge management activities, suggesting that the organisation should better communicate the corporate mission to employees and translate it into clear objectives.

Moreover, these results have revealed discriminate enablers of knowledge management among employees with higher levels of comprehension and implementation of the corporate mission and those with lower levels. In the former group, time spent on knowledge management activities was solely the result of organisational culture, while in the latter, involvement in knowledge management was the product of both high open-mindedness and more inclusive reporting. These findings suggest first that a strong mission shared and put into practice among the workforce is a powerful driver of knowledge management, and second, that open-mindedness and more inclusive reporting can substitute for a strong corporate mission and support knowledge management activities.

An ever-accelerating rate of growth is altering the pace of change and making global organisations perform trade-offs in terms of organisational capabilities and quality of output. This paper reports on the empirical findings of a case study conducted at one of the world's largest software organisations and analyses the implications of rapid growth within global organisations. The paper further correlates the findings with the problems and issues confronting the world's largest automobile manufacturer, and establishes that growth needs to be planned to allow organisational capabilities and systems to support rapid expansion. Overall, the research highlights the important lessons learnt from accelerated growth within global organisations, and identifies the areas of future research required to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon.

Knowledge Management (KM) efforts cannot be successful unless employees open their minds to share their valuable knowledge. Knowledge sharing is a voluntary act which requires an individual's motivation. Based on the notion that an individual's motivation is of two types, namely intrinsic and extrinsic, a framework of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of knowledge sharing was presented at the International Symposium on Information Technology (ITSIM) in June 2010, in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. There is a lack of research work which attempts to understand knowledge sharing motivation from intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivational perspective. Hence, the proposed framework incorporated extrinsic rewards, representing extrinsic motivation, and Organisation Citizenship Behaviour (OCB), representing intrinsic motivation, in Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). Apart from understanding the individual's knowledge sharing motivation from a two-dimensional motivation perspective, the primary aim of this study is to extend the framework proposed in ITSIM'10 by adding demographic variable as a moderating variable. This will help to understand individual differences in knowledge sharing behaviour. At the same time, the study will present the results of ITSIM paper in detail. This study has used training institutes of an oil and gas company in Malaysia as a case. The proposed framework will overcome the research gaps in the literature by re-analysing the impact of extrinsic rewards, OCB and demographic variables on knowledge sharing. To test six major and, in total, 19 hypotheses, the questionnaire method was used to gather data from the trainers and facilitators at three training institutes of the oil and gas company. The data was analysed by using multi-regression technique. The results have shown that intrinsic motivation, represented by OCB in this study, is one of the strongest motivating factors for knowledge sharing behaviour, whereas extrinsic motivation, represented by extrinsic rewards in this study, has a moderate effect on an individual's knowledge sharing intention. The results have also shown that individuals differ in manifesting their knowledge sharing intention into behaviour based on their gender and education level, whereas there is no difference among individuals with different experience levels in manifesting their knowledge sharing intention into behaviour. The study will help to understand the individual's knowledge sharing motivation from intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivational perspectives and, at the same time, individual differences in knowledge sharing behaviour. It will aid the managers at training institutes to promote knowledge sharing in their organisations.

Evidence for learning in organisations is given, once alternative or novel ways of task accomplishment are discovered by their stakeholders or management. Besides triggering a learning step, this knowledge should propagate to all concerned members of an organisation or a network of organisations, namely via context-sensitive exploration and re-construction of work processes. We introduce a learning framework based on existing organisational theories and findings. Its implementations cover generating evidence and interactive processing along individual and collective learning processes. Knowledge is supposed to be elicited in an intuitive way, either using a semantically open table top, or applying subject-oriented business-process modeling techniques. Keeping all provided inputs in an organisational memory allows stakeholders and management timely involvement in learning processes. The aligned Knowledge Management System features tracing of learning steps, sharing views, complementing expertise, and exploring content in a collaborative way. Implementation-wise evidence-based learning support does not only require semantic tagging and networking information, but also the exchangeability of perspectives on inputs or results of collaborative exploration sessions. Interactive enablers to that respect are annotations kept in views. Besides content enrichments, they contain links from the fine-grain content elements to social interactions, such as forum entries, as occurring in learning processes.

This study introduces two knowledge-related constructs (i.e., consumer competency and product knowledge) into online purchasing expenditures and then analyses variables (i.e., convenience, trust, and privacy) that have been discussed in existing literature in order to investigate how knowledge plays out in the online purchasing context. The findings, derived from the responses of 124 survey participants, show that consumer competency is the focal element of online expenditures. While convenient service is still one of the most important factors, trust and privacy do not directly impact online expenditures. It is interpreted that competent consumers, who are already determined to purchase something online, are able to locate trustworthy sites and make purchases from those sites; consequently, these issues that are traditionally considered important do not necessarily dissuade consumers' online expenditures, but may affect individual web sites. This study shows that consumers' knowledge about technology and the Web are the main determining factors for online purchasing expenditures.

This study adopts the organisational learning perspective to examine knowledge required by advanced total quality management (TQM) for the purpose to attain organisational performance. Regression analysis was used to test the proposed hypothesis of interest based on a survey of senior managers in 153 largest manufacturing firms in Taiwan. The results of this research showed a positive correlation between TQM practice and knowledge types (e.g., experiential, conceptual, systematic, and routine knowledge). This observation partially indicating that the TQM practice has a mediating effect on organisational performance through the knowledge types. They also demonstrate that organisational learning facilitators have a moderate impact on the relationship between knowledge types and performance improvement. It is concluded that when organisational learning facilitators are well arranged, a provision of knowledge is more likely to be linked to effective learning, hence improving organisational performance.

The convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science is transforming global society. Technological convergence is beginning to define the way societies themselves interact, the way science is done, and the way the global marketplace is organised. In the middle of 2006, Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company, established a pioneering, multi-disciplinary team of senior academics and end-users working in partnership to identify potential opportunities and benefits surrounding this convergence of technology. The goal of this paper is to present the methodology adopted by Petrobras — an e-science collaborative project fostering the generation of ideas for new opportunities identified in areas of converging technology. The Petrobras effort is based on contributions by a group of 50 senior scientists from the top five Brazilian research institutes working iteratively via the Web. This convergence analysis is based on developments in text mining, and involves processing the abstracts of the selected papers to start fruitful discussions and to analyse comments in the knowledge fusion activity. It is completely integrated into a collaborative network environment. Results from one of these convergence cycles are discussed.

This paper presents a novel approach for extracting personal data and automatically generating Personal Data Reports (PDRs) from relational databases. Such PDRs can be used among other purposes for compliance with Subject Access Requests of Data Protection Acts. Two methodologies with different usability characteristics are introduced: (1) the G^DSBased Method and (2) the By Schema Browsing Method. The proposed methdologies combine the use of graphs and query languages for the construction of PDRs. The novelty of these methodologies is that they do not require any prior knowledge of either the database schema or of any query language by the users. An optimisation algorithm is proposed that employs Hash Tables and reuses already found data. We conducted several queries on two standard benchmark databases (i.e. TPC-H and Microsoft Northwind) and we present the performance results.