Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

The ageing workforce soon leads to a number of retirements in government organisations that will put the knowledge basis at risk. Addressing this point the present study provides an analysis and evaluation of a Swedish municipality’s dealing with the aspects of knowledge management and succession planning against the background of demographic developments and the increased relevance of knowledge. It reports findings based on semi-structured interviews conducted with executive staff of the municipality. Results of data analysed show that the municipality is far from being ready to master the challenges ahead. To date the municipality follows a sporadic approach rather than a strategic and planned one when addressing the issue of succession planning. Indeed, the findings suggest that a muddling through approach prevails. Based on the findings some suggestions were derived that may help both municipalities facing similar circumstances as well as policy makers drafting suitable policies.

Multiple official languages within a country along with languages common with other countries demand content consistency in both shared and unshared languages during information sharing. However, inconsistency due to conflict in content shared and content updates not propagated in languages between countries poses a problem. Towards addressing inconsistency, this research qualitatively studied traits for information sharing among countries inside global brands as depicted by content shared in their country-specific websites. First, inconsistency in content shared is illustrated among websites highlighting the problem in information sharing among countries. Second, content propagation among countries that vary in scales and coupling for specific content categories are revealed. Scales suggested that corporate and customer support related information tend to be shared globally and locally respectively while product related information is both locally and regionally suitable for sharing. Higher occurrences of propagation when sharing corporate related information also showed tendency for high coupling between websites suggesting the suitability for rigid consistency policy compared to other categories. This study also proposed a simplistic approach with pattern of sharing to enable consistent information sharing.

Knowledge management (KM) is considered an important intervention in improving health care services. KM facilitates the transfer of existing knowledge and the development of new knowledge in hospitals. This research focuses on investigating the relationship between KM practices and performance in selected hospitals in Kuwait, exemplified by perceived productivity and quality. Survey data were collected from 277 doctors working in public and private hospitals in Kuwait. As predicted by previous studies, the doctors who responded to this research perceived good KM practices to have positive correlations with the productivity and quality of hospitals. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated a significant predictive power of knowledge capturing practices in predicting productivity and quality of hospitals. Knowledge sharing practices showed no significant predictive power in the model, and knowledge generating practices showed a slight prediction power.

Although knowledge sharing (KS) and personality traits are primarily studied in business organisations, these issues are equally important for universities. However, few attempts have been made to investigate the relationship between personality traits and KS, particularly in the context of Malaysian higher education. The present study fills the research gap by examining the effects of personality traits — specifically agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience — on KS in the student–supervisor relationship. Using probability sampling, data was collected from 175 doctoral students. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience are significantly and positively related to the KS behaviours of research supervisors. Openness to experience was revealed to be the most influential factor in the supervisor’s level of KS. This is the first study to investigate the relationship between personality traits and KS in the context of the student–supervisor relationship, thus marking a significant contribution to the KS literature. The findings of this paper have implication for academics and higher education administrators.

The study examines media resource utilisation and effective publication output by agricultural researchers in Southwestern Nigeria. The respondents consisted of agricultural researchers in agricultural research institutes in Southwest Nigeria. The descriptive survey of correlational type was used. Four hundred and sixty two copies of the questionnaire were distributed using total enumeration technique, 334 were returned representing 72.3 return rate. The data collected were analysed using descriptive statistic of frequency counts, percentages, mean and standard deviation while Pearson product moment correlation and multiple regressions were used to test the hypothesis. The result of the finding showed that the internet ($\text{Mean}=3.78$), Email ($\text{Mean}=3.75$), and laptops ($\text{Mean}=3.32$) were the frequently used media resources. Agricultural databases were scantly used. The result also revealed that Email and the internet were the most available media resources while AGORA, LanTEEAL and FAO publications were the most available agricultural databases. Also, some researchers (0.6%) and others (62.3%) had below four local publications while on international publications, 3% researchers had above 16 international publications and 50.6% researchers had below 6 international publications. The study further revealed that there was a positive and significant relationship between media resources utilisation and publication output of researchers ($r=0.273$, $N=334$, $P<0.05$). A significant relationship also exists between media resource availability and publication output and a joint relationship existed among media resource availability, media resource utilisation and publication output. The study identified poor funding, irregular electricity and inadequate electronic media resources as constraint to electronic media usage in Nigeria. Finally, the study recommends constant electricity, more funding for purchase of media and training for researchers.

Although the importance of knowledge management, little is known concerning the creation process of new knowledge. This process can be applied into several contexts in order to create new knowledge and use it better; one is environmental education (EE), which regards the increasing environmental degradation. This paper analyses the knowledge creation (KC) process in EE programmes conducted by two of the largest and most prestigious universities in Brazil. This research is qualitative with a descriptive characteristic and was conducted through case studies. The data collection and analysis methods were qualitative, including interviews and content analysis. The main contribution of this paper concerns suggestions to improve the environmental programmes at universities, providing green practices around the campuses with more efficient and systematic knowledge production and dissemination related to the topic. Additionally, some evidences of the case studied motivated the authors to ask some questions about the KC theory of Nonaka.

The aim of the research is to develop theory and practice of strategic planning in the field of knowledge generation as competitiveness factors of economic entities. The paper presents results of empirical researches of knowledge generation strategies that the Russian industrial enterprises realise. This study focuses on analysis of microdata (enterprise level) as the key instrument to reveal facts and hypotheses describing the innovation activities depending on different types of changed resource, quantity of new products made by the company, structure of costs for different types of knowledge, profit growth. The idea locates about strategies generation of different types of knowledge (operational, structural, functional) considerably differ. The authors prove that effective innovative company development, particularly in the difficult economic condition, stresses the importance of organising optimal cost structure for different types of knowledge. It is strategic knowledge management based on company strategy, its aims and growth trends that gives the most significant effect in the field of providing competitiveness.

The quality of a knowledge base does not depend mainly on the number of knowledge objects (KOs) that are available, but on the number of objects that are actually shared, combined, internalised, adopted, or even validated to be value creatable. In support of this goal, knowledge management has paid increasing attention to the most valued KO of knowledge base for a variety of managerial decisions. This paper proposes a model called knowledge object use appraisal model (KOUAM) based on knowledge flow profile to help derive the appraisal of KO use in knowledge base. The KOUAM considers three phases, namely, incubation, adoption, and validation as the appraisal base. A demonstrated example is presented and evaluation of the proposed KOUAM is acceptable. Feedback and managerial implications are also addressed.

One of the fundamental issues in Grid decentralised resource discovery services is high communication overheads that affect the Grid system’s performance significantly. The rationale is that Grid resources are geographically distributed across the world through a wide area network under various virtual organisations. To address the issue, a significant amount of effort has been made by proposing various decentralised overlay algorithms with semantic solutions. Current Grid literature reveals that when semantic features are added into discovery services, the probability of finding resources is enhanced and communication overheads could be better. However, most of the existing decentralised resource discovery models utilise a domain-based semantic ontology with First Come First Serve (FCFS) basis scheduling for allocating Grid resources that can cause job rejection at run time and can pick resources that are far from the user nodes. As a result, communication overheads of the models are affected as the proximity criterion is not being considered in the selection process. To overcome these issues and enhance the application performance, we propose a Unification of Proximity and Semantic similarity for Appropriate Resource Selection (UPSARS) algorithm in a decentralised resource discovery model by using a sub-domain ontology structure for Grid computing environments. The purpose of this unification is to get optimised resources for user jobs (Gridlets) so that Grid brokers could select optimum resources in terms of proximity with high semantic relevancy. The algorithm considers both semantic and proximity criteria and selects the nearby nodes resources and reduces the communication overheads in terms of proximity and latency. We design and implement the model using the GridSim and the FreePastry simulation and modelling toolkits. The experimental results provide promising outcomes to reduce communication overheads and enhance resource allocation performance.

Health information systems (HISs) provide automated solutions for the clinical, informational, and managerial life of a hospital. These systems are optimally used when the knowledge workers are adequately equipped with the needed competencies. Three Kuwaiti hospitals have been engaged in adopting and using the same HIS. Jahra Public Hospital, one of the three, has been making progress in the use of HIS. It was hypothesised that capabilities and preparedness of knowledge workers are correlated with their extent of use of the HIS. Data were gathered from 124 healthcare knowledge workers using stratified random sampling. It was found that skills and abilities of these knowledge professionals are strongly correlated with their use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and HIS. Almost all the professionals used HIS, yet there was a wide variation in the use of HIS modules and applications. We also examined whether personal attributes of knowledge workers made any difference in their ICT and HIS skills and use. Results however revealed no such association. These professionals attached a great deal of importance with formal training, but urged that these knowledge workers had enhanced and involved role.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) provides tools to explore data cubes in order to extract the interesting information, it refers to techniques used to query, visualise and synthesise the multidimensional data. Nevertheless OLAP is limited on visualisation, structuring and exploring manually the data cubes. On the other side, data mining allows algorithms that offer automatic knowledge extraction, such as classification, explanation and prediction algorithms. However, OLAP is not capable of explaining and predicting events from existing data; therefore, it is possible to make a more efficient online analysis by coupling data mining and OLAP to allow the user to assist in this new task of knowledge extraction. In this paper, we will carry on within works achieved in this theme and we suggest to extend the abilities of OLAP to prediction (enhancing the OLAP abilities and techniques by introducing a predictive model based on a data mining algorithms). The model is calculated on the aggregated data, and prediction is done on detailed missing data. Our approach is based on regression trees and neural networks; it consists to predict facts having a missed measures value in the data cubes. The user will have in his disposition, a new platform called PredCube, that offers the possibility to query, visualise and synthesise the multidimensional data, and also to predict missing values in the data cube using three data mining methods, and evaluate the quality of the prediction by comparing the average error and the execution time given by each one.

This paper aims to identify two different knowledge management (KM) systems and their underlying capabilities by accounting for two contextual factors: organisational structures and type of knowledge. Specifically, it seeks to explore how two different organisational structures (mechanistic and organic) shape the way explicit and tacit knowledge is shared, created, and learned. The paper uses a case-based approach of two sports teams as archetypal contexts to inform management research. Findings suggest that a mechanistic structure (American football) emphasises explicit knowledge for sharing of specific directives, centralised, incremental knowledge creation, and organisational learning through memorisation and repetitious actions. In an organic structure (ice hockey), sharing of tacit knowledge, decentralised novel knowledge creation, and organisational learning through empowered experiential learning episodes are emphasised. Findings illustrate the importance of accounting for organisational structures and knowledge needed for different KM systems geared towards efficiency and routine work, and flexibility and non-routine work.