Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

Many organisations are confronted with challenges in getting employees to effectively participate in information and knowledge sharing (IKS). Further, IKS is embedded in multifaceted social contexts, which are influenced by several different social and cognitive factors. This study is in support of the hypothesis that perceived trustworthiness is widely implicated as a mediating factor between those social–cognitive factors and IKS. Previous work, however, uncovered only a handful of such mediating effects. It is argued here that the paucity may have been due to limitations of the statistical methods. This study employs PROCESS, a more powerful current method for mediation analysis in an attempt to uncover previously hidden relationships. Analyses were performed on data collected from 275 knowledge workers (legal professionals and paralegals) engaged in shared legal project work, at one of Canada’s largest multijurisdictional law firms. Social–cognitive factors that were considered were shared language, shared vision, tie strength, age/gender/educational homophily and relationship length. IKS outcomes were willingness to share, willingness to use and perceived receipt of useful information/knowledge. Consistent with the hypothesis, the more powerful method revealed a large number of significant mediating effects of perceived trustworthiness. Out of possible 112 simple mediation models, 62 were significant, 44 of which had been previously undiscovered. The results highlight the importance of trust as well as the power of current methods for mediation analysis and serve as a strong argument for their use. The paper concludes with implications for research and practice.

As one of three prominent flows (material, money, information) in a supply chain, the information flow plays a key role in supply chain performance and also in reaching high degrees of integrity and cooperation between supply chain members. Regarding the vagueness and multi-dimensional nature of information sharing, evaluating the information sharing level in supply chain is a complex problem. This paper aims to develop a new rule-based inference system to evaluate the level of information sharing in a supply chain. To this end, first, the influencing parameters are obtained from the literature and are screened and refined by the experts, using Lexicography method. Then, they are categorised into a multi-level hierarchical structure. Finally, a hierarchical inference system, which consists of a set of fuzzy rule bases, is constructed to infer the information sharing degree. The use of fuzzy rule bases is due to the lack of explicit functions between the influencing factors as well as ambiguity of these parameters. Also, in this research, the input parameters’ measurement process is defined and some relevant indices are designed. The developed assessment system is a four-leveled hierarchical inference system, built of six fuzzy rule bases. The inference system has eight input parameters, the values of which are calculated utilising six designed indices and two quick questionnaires. Eventually, the developed inference system and the measuring method are implemented in a real case.

From utilising the mobile applications to lessen the price and durations by abolition of displays of procedures and systems of governments, e-Government intends to deliver services to the private and public segments of the country’s communities through the use of mobile applications. Across the globe, every country, but particularly developing countries, is in search of the application and dispersal of e-Government services. This research study will specifically assess the effect of mobile applications have on e-Government services application in Jordan. The debate as to whether mobile applications trigger addiction within the public segment in Jordan will be closely investigated and analysed in this research study. A collaboration of data gathered from a random selection of the population of the Income and Sales Tax Department staff ($n=220$) exposes the fact that both the females and males from the random sample are likely to be using mobile applications for numerous hours each day. With this considered, the study also reveals that mobile applications have a substantial influence on the accomplishment of e-Government application within the public segment in Jordan.

This paper assumes that the key to understanding successes and failures in knowledge creation (KC) by academic innovation teams in a scenario of university–industry relations is to identify and evaluate preconditions, needed for efforts to flourish. We examine the synergistic intervention of individual competence, information literacy, innovation culture and communication in academic project team work while KC occurs, resulting in technological innovation. Our in-depth research with 20 university project teams has led us to a more differentiated picture of KC in academic innovation projects. The qualitative technique of categorical content analysis was used. As the main contributions, we present in a four-dimensional perspective the resulting relationships between the knowledge created by the teams and the critical factors that influence its creation. Moreover, deriving from these relations, six patterns of behaviour were found in the study.

In the last decade, international organisations (World Bank, OECD and OEU) and many European countries have been apprised of the urgent need to develop and enhance what is generally termed “intellectual capital” and thus the “knowledge creating organization”. The importance of this is something that is increasingly being realised. The importance of Intellectual Capital and how to analyse its important components such as human capital, structural capital and customer capital are also being recognised. In fact, these components constitute the main factors whereby institutions produce and disseminate knowledge which in turn serve as the means through which the quantity of knowledge produced within a country can be added to the national pool of knowledge. This paper deals with the importance of measuring and analysing Intellectual Capital, and furthermore, performs an extensive review of national and international practices related to IC. The paper then proposes a model for measuring the Intellectual Capital of private HEIs in Oman. Indeed, such a model as of the kind we visualise, will improve the performance of organisations, develop better understanding of the nature of IC and go on to study the construction of IC and IC reporting in developing countries. The research was done in the Sultanate of Oman and the results show that the level of measuring the IC of HEIs is still in its early stages. The technique called “the point estimate of overall performance” and “overall performance index” are proposed and implemented to differentiate between the performance of ICs of different institutions. Finally, the paper discusses the difficulties that hinder the assessment of IC in institutions.

The present research explores the role of knowledge storage and documentation and realised absorptive capacity as mediating variables between potential absorptive capacity and internal knowledge creation. The theoretical model is developed and further tested with a sample of 111 organisations from multiple industry sectors. The results show that the technology-driven process of knowledge storage and documentation, as well as the realised absorptive capacity of the respondent companies, reinforces the human-driven process of internal knowledge creation, and mediates, individually and jointly, the relationship between potential absorptive capacity and intra-firm knowledge creation. Mediation analysis relies on the use of bootstrapping confidence intervals. The authors draw practical implications for organisational psychologists and human resources managers. The small sample size and the cross-sectional design limit the generalisation of the present findings. Further research should explore the complementarity of absorptive capacity phases with other knowledge management processes that could enable the creation of new knowledge in organisations.

For more than two decades, the literature has shown that information and communication technology (ICT) and knowledge management (KM) are among the best business practices in the development and competitiveness of large corporations. Recently, for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), these elements have represented a challenge and an opportunity for the consolidation of innovation processes, knowledge protection, and the path to sustained profitability. The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of ICT on KM and their link with innovation and intellectual property (IP) in order to identify how SMEs can achieve higher yields. The data were obtained from a self-directed survey administered to the managers of 412 industrial and service companies established in Northwestern Mexico. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used for the statistical analysis of the data. This work contributes to the development of the literature on the strategic management of SMEs, particularly in relation to the theory of resources and capabilities (TRC) and the theory of dynamic capabilities (TDC). The results show that ICT significantly influences KM, innovation and profitability. In addition, KM significantly influences innovation, and innovation and IP management significantly influence profitability. However, innovation does not influence IP management.

The relationships among effective knowledge management (KM), organisational innovativeness (OI), market orientation (MO) and organisational performance (OP) have been explored in the literature. These constructs are generally analysed in pairs, such as the influence of KM on OI, or KM on OP, and other combinations, but the relationships among the full set of constructs in question are not fully understood yet. In the extant literature, the relationships among them are analysed for the most part with covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM). Partial least-squares (PLS) path modelling is a component-based approach to SEM that is not as widely used as CB-SEM, but it has the potential to allow increased flexibility in handling various modelling problems in comparison with CB models, particularly for predictive and exploratory purposes. This paper aims to verify whether the PLS method could confirm or reject the results of the more restrictive covariance-based method in modelling the relationships among KM, OI, MO and OP. The results indicate that both methods yielded convergent and discriminant validity for the constructs, displaying stability across model analysis and depuration. The PLS model revealed the influence of KM on MO, OI and OP. It also shows that OI is the main driving factor for OP. KM seems to have a direct effect on OP, which is greatly magnified when mediated by OI. The sample size, although borderline adequate for the CB method, was more than adequate for PLS, yielding excellent model stability.

The cloud computing is an augmentative and progressive paradigm that supports a huge amount of characteristics. It demands the optimal allocation of resources to the tasks present in the virtual machines (VMs) system using load scheduling algorithms. The basic objective of load scheduling is to avoid system overloading and thereby achieve higher throughput by maximising VM utilisation along with cost stabilisation. The first come first serve and min–min approaches allocate the load in a static manner and resources are left underutilised. The particle swarm optimisation obtains the motivation from the social behaviour of the flock of birds. It analyses various approaches for load scheduling. The paper proposes an improved balanced load scheduling approach based on particle swarm optimisation (BPSO) to minimise total transfer time and total cost stabilisation. The proposed BPSO approach is compared with the existing approaches used for load scheduling in cloudlets. The efficiency in terms of the transfer time and cost of the proposed algorithm is showcased with the help of simulation results. As evident from the results, the proposed algorithm reduces transfer time and cost than the prevalent algorithms thereby making a system with stable cost.

Products and web pages are the main components of the e-commerce data knowledge and the relationship among them is an important issue to be highly considered in recommender systems. This study aims to focus on the similarity and complementarity relationships among the products that have wide applications in the recommender systems. In the previously proposed methods, products and their relationships were revealed using taxonomy and “IS-A” relationship. In addition, the similarity and complementarity calculations were conducted based on edge computation by assigning a similar degree to any edge. More specifically, the children of a concept in the taxonomy was supported by a similar father’s “IS-A” degree. In contrast, this study provides a new approach based on ontology, data mining, and automatic discovering algorithms for the relationships with different degrees for the edges among the concepts. Accordingly, these relationships are initialised according to the “IS-A” degree. With regard to this weighted taxonomy, the semantic similarity and complementarity are measured based on concept distance. In addition, the proposed recommender system is item-based, which uses semantic similarity and complementarity. The required data for the present study were collected from construction materials supplier. The results illustrated that our proposed method is effective for construction materials recommendation.

To gain insight into how successful community banks are continuously “adaptive” to environmental challenges, we examined the role absorptive capacity (ACAP) plays in effecting improved performance. ACAP is the formal mechanism used for sensing and experimentation of knowledge — and as such is adopted to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit knowledge so as to positively influence performance. Data obtained from a survey of 151 community bank CEOs confirmed that ACAP does indeed enhance performance. We also demonstrated the multi-dimensional structure of ACAP, the consequence of cultivating an active learning orientation and the relevance of potential cultural inhibitors on decision behaviour for innovative performance. Several directions for future studies utilising knowledge-based responses are proposed.

Numerous enterprises rely on cross-functional teams (CFT) to integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge. However, unexpected results occur in many CFT projects. This exploratory research attempts to illustrate how knowledge integration (KI) is influenced by combining and bonding capabilities in CFT. After a qualitative investigation into a Chinese mobile application company, we found that if a team’s performance was poor, team members tended to work separately, which led to less communication among one another. We defined this type of KI as “modular knowledge integration (MKI)”. In contrast, teams that performed well tended to communicate sufficiently with team members and cooperate well. We called this kind of KI “integral knowledge integration (IKI)”. We propose that enterprises should include IKI rather than MKI in CFT. Additionally, if an enterprise expects to avoid MKI, “combining capability” and “bonding capability” should be improved accordingly.