Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

This study aims to identify the strategic roles of competitive intelligence and to examine the mediating effect of competitive intelligence practices on the relationship between perceived strategic uncertainty and firm performance. Data are collected from 123 public listed companies in Malaysia using mail questionnaire survey. The study highlights the essential role of competitive intelligence in supporting strategic decision making and strategic planning as well as in identifying opportunities and threats. Results reveal that perceived strategic uncertainty relates positively to competitive intelligence practices, which in turn, relates positively to firm performance. This paper includes implications, limitations, and recommendations for future studies.

The academic discipline of Knowledge Management is maturing. The maturity of knowledge management scholarship has been considered as well as its curricular coverage and alignment with the needs of business. This research suggests that a mature academic discipline is grounded on a mature academic programme. The research defines five dimensions of a mature academic discipline, including: (1) curriculum design; (2) nature and coverage of research programmes; (3) faculty credentials and status; (4) academic programme administration; and (5) programme goals. Maturity factors are identified for each of the five dimensions. In 2012, an open public survey was conducted to determine the level of maturity of academic programmes in knowledge management. The survey results suggest that while there is notable maturity in curriculum design, the remaining four dimensions — research, faculty credentials, programme administration and programme goals — are immature. The research suggests that additional focus be given to these maturity factors in terms of standards. The research further suggests that an annual survey is needed to track progress towards a mature academic discipline.

Knowledge sharing is a process through which knowledge is exchanged, resulting in the creation of new knowledge. Knowledge sharing has been highlighted as one of the main factors positively affecting team performance. However, simply putting students into teams does not guarantee increased levels of collaboration and enhanced quality of knowledge creation. This exploratory study examines students' perceptions of the quality of knowledge creation in virtual teams using collaborative online tools. The research data was collected from 169 LIS students across seven blended courses in 2011. The perceived quality of knowledge creation was measured and divided into three levels for analysis: enhanced, moderate and baseline. The role of interaction and communication was found to be critical in facilitating knowledge sharing and enhancing knowledge creation, leading to an overall superior learning experience for students. The findings also indicate that effective use of various online collaborative tools results in a perceived enhanced quality of knowledge creation.

This paper analyzes two different approaches to assessing the knowledge assets of multiple firms in a given industry. Typically, in evaluating knowledge management (KM) results by measuring intellectual capital (IC), studies in the field have looked specifically at individual firms or a small cluster of organisations. Measuring a large number of firms has proven more of a challenge even though the discipline has some established metrics to do so, principally those using some variation of Tobin's q. In moving such methodologies forward, we look at two variations on Tobin's q for assessing KM requirements in an industry and the relative level of KM success in member firms. We contrast different industries with apparently different KM circumstances, allowing some deeper insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our two metrics. These results will be of interest to those studying KM and IC as they provide guidance in evaluating performance (as well as the need to invest in order to keep up with industry top performers). For the same reason, the results and methodology will inform practitioners taking a strategic approach to knowledge investment, giving them a way to assess relative standing within and across industries. KM strategies can and should differ, and these metrics provide guidance for such decisions.

A growing number of people are seeking health information on the Internet. To meet demands, healthcare providers are increasingly disseminating information online. While online health information has enhanced the dissemination of health information and improved people's health-related knowledge, critics posit that such dissemination has widened knowledge disparities in health information and health benefits as a result. Drawing on existing studies, this study identified the main causes of such disparity, namely education, health literacy, computer self-efficacy (CSE) and usage of health-related social media. The finding showed that education resided at the centre of the disparity and impacted other elements. An interesting finding is although individuals possess high levels of CSE, the efficacy does not highly impact their health benefits, meaning that computer does not directly cause health information disparity but is the tool to promote health-related knowledge disparity.

This research is an exploratory study of innovative communication channels, effective coordination strategy and integrated knowledge management in the UK local government planning system. The UK local government planning system at present suffers delays, which slow down or prevent people building new homes, creating new facilities and bringing disused or neglected land and buildings back into productive use. This study has been carried out in the subject area to explore enhanced efficiency and effectiveness in the UK local government planning system. An integrated knowledge-based planning system is considered as an appropriate solution to achieve smart and sustainable development in the local government planning system. This research study is based primarily upon fieldwork conducted in five participating local authorities in the South East Midlands (Bedford Borough Council, Central Bedfordshire Council, Luton Borough Council, Milton Keynes Council and Northampton Borough Council) and on literature drawn from many different disciplines. A mixed methods approach is chosen for the research fieldwork. The key data collection methods applied during the fieldwork include: structured questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, online group forums, email correspondence, prearranged observations, literature review, document analysis and reviews of the local government publications and their statistical reports. The key purpose of this study is to investigate how the planning system in the UK local government can be transformed from its current "As-Is" state towards a smart and sustainable development future "To-Be" state.

In today's knowledge-based economies, appropriate Knowledge Management (KM) has proved a strategic management tool to survive and thrive in the ever-changing global market. Therefore, increasingly, all types of organisations including tertiary institutions are adopting KM. This paper focuses on university libraries and presents the partial findings of a study carried out to investigate and explore KM practices in Southern African Development Community (SADC) university libraries. A structured questionnaire was used to carry out the study. The study revealed the main reasons for practicing KM to improve library services: to improve library services and productivity, produce more with less, avoid duplication of efforts and leverage existing knowledge. The major challenges were identified as constant budget decline, lack of incentives, inadequate staff training and expertise, a lack KM strategy, insufficient information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and a lack of knowledge sharing culture. Finally, the paper puts forward some recommendations and a framework for KM implementation in university/academic libraries.

With the rise of social media, many library and information services have begun to incorporate a wide variety of social media and social networking applications into their systems and services. Among the mainstream social networking applications, micro-blogging, in general, and Twitter, in particular, have gained increasing popularity. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the application of Twitter in the context of a large public library system. Specifically, this study has sampled, content analysed and categorised a select number of tweets created by a public library system in order to identify and document the ways in which Twitter can be used for various information services and knowledge management practices in public libraries. One of the main outcomes of this study is a tweet categorisation scheme that has a specific focus on the information services offered by public libraries.

Trust has been noted as a key component for the success of knowledge management. Recent research on affection in interpersonal trust using empirical research suggests that affection plays a critical role on team effectiveness, knowledge transfer and sharing in team. Yet, the empirical research only obtains a certain period of affection reflecting interpersonal trust; it can not observe the dynamic change of affection. The empirical data lacks universality, which is merely focused on a designated team. In this paper, we give a primitive attempt, by using an agent-based computational model, to explore interpersonal trust, especially to study the quantitative method of emotion and affection generated by knowledge exchange and factors on emotional and affective intensity. We hope that our bold attempt improves the understandings of affection generation and development, and provides agent-based modelling simulations as a supplement of the empirical research to study team effectiveness in future.

This document critically reviews the papers that investigated the impact of funding on scientific output and on scientific collaboration. For the output, the focus is on the number of articles as a measure of the scientific productivity and the number of citations that a paper received as an indicator of the quality. Various methodological approaches have been adopted (e.g. bibliometrics (a set of methods to analyse the scientific literature quantitatively), statistical analysis) for this purpose. Reviewing the literature revealed that although the general assumption of the positive effect of funding on scientific development is completely (or partially) acknowledged in some studies, one can also find some contradictory results. In addition, we note that analysing the impact of funding on scientific output has attracted more attention of the researchers while investigating the impact of funding on collaboration has been only recently taken into consideration. The paper concludes by comparing the major results and methodologies of the reviewed studies while highlighting the research gaps.

The present study explores several of the most significant social and cognitive human factors that have been found to motivate or inhibit organisational knowledge sharing in previous empirical studies. Of specific interest is the individual and collective effect that trust, shared language, shared vision, tie strength, homophily and relationship length have on three important conditions necessary for effective knowledge sharing to take place (i.e. willingness to share, willingness to use and perceived receipt of useful knowledge). The study also considers the nature of the employee working relationship (positive versus negative) and the form of knowledge sharing (explicit versus tacit). In total, 275 surveys were completed by employees working on projects at one of Canada's largest multijurisdictional law firms. Quantitative methods were used to examine the relationships between the dependent variables and independent variables, while controlling for all the other variables in the model.

It is important for all types of organisations including non-profit organisations (NPOs) to manage knowledge for effective and efficient utilisation of resources. Technology is considered as one of the key enablers of knowledge management (KM) practices but it can be costly to develop and implement in an organisation. With the advent of social media, NPOs such as public libraries have the opportunity to harness the power of technology for KM purposes as it is considered a low cost medium. A study was conducted, using an exploratory qualitative interview technique, in two contrasting public libraries: one is a large urban public library, and the other is a small rural public library. The data were analysed using a grounded theory approach informed by a social constructionist theoretical framework. This paper presents comparative findings from these case examples on their understanding of KM as a concept and their use of social media in management of knowledge. Results show that social media are valuable KM tools in public libraries, not only when directed externally for the purpose of promotion, but also to foster engagement with the public and collaborative work within the organisation.

A transformation in the way in which primary care is delivered is underway in the US. Across the country primary care practices are grappling with how to change from the traditional physician-directed model to a more patient-centred collaborative style as part of the effort to curb the rise of chronic disease. To date, few tools or techniques exist to help the individual primary care provider make this difficult and complex transformation. One such tool that has arisen is the shared care plan (SCP). As defined in the Taking Action for Learning and Knowledge Management to improve Diabetes Mellitus (TALK/DM) study (a NIDDK funded pilot project to implement SCPs in primary care), the SCP of primary care becomes the product of collaboration between the practice and the patients. The SCP is created by combining knowledge management (KM) techniques and motivational interviewing (MI) health counselling methods to form a new knowledge object. This paper focuses on this aspect of the TALK/DM study and takes a case study approach to explore how one primary care practice is implementing the SCP as knowledge object (both a paper document and an electronic record in the EMR system) in its organisation. This study adds nuance and insight into how knowledge objects such as the SCP can serve as a tool for collaboration in primary care.

Demanding business environments increasingly require knowledge work. Hereby, knowledge creation needs to rely on meaningful entities and representations, in particular for organisational change processes. In this paper, we report on exploring essential benefits for stakeholders and communities when applying major principles of Maria Montessori when articulating and communicating knowledge. Experienced benefits stem from stakeholders' self-determined and individualized design experiences. We motivate the embodiment of stakeholders into physically enriched and ambient knowledge management (KM) environments and reveal insights from testing those ideas. The results of our work should guide the development of enriched KM environments.