Developing and Maintaining Knowledge Management Systems for Dynamic, Complex Domains

An effective knowledge-based organization is one that correctly captures, shares, applies and maintains its knowledge resources to achieve its goals. Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) enable such resources and business processes to be automated and are especially important for environments with dynamic and complex domains. This chapter discusses the appropriate tools, methods, architectural issues and development processes for KMS, including the application of Organizational Theory, knowledge-representation methods and agent architectures. Details for systems development of KMS are provided and illustrated with a case study from the domain of university advising.

Management of Knowledge in New Product Development in Portuguese Higher Education

This chapter uses key concepts in the knowledge management literature to analyse the procedures and practices used by a team during a new product development project. More precisely, the knowledge process or knowledge cycle is used as a means to examine issues relating to knowledge identification, creation, storage, dissemination, and application in new product development. Results from the case study also suggest that the knowledge process may be valuable in assessing the structural elements of knowledge management, but fails to provide a more comprehensive explanation of the dynamics and complexities involved. This suggests that more elaborate models are needed to explain how knowledge is created, shared and used in knowledge-intensive processes.

21st Century Organizations and the Basis for Achieving Optimal Cross-Functional Integration in New Product Development

The theoretical basis for achieving optimal levels of cross-functional integration in new product development and the management of large scale engineering projects is developed in this chapter. Sources of environmental uncertainty and their effects on integration requirements are identified based on the literature. Structural modes of integration are discussed and presented in a theoretical framework based on degree of integration required, progressive combined information processing capacity, and cost.

An Investigation to an Enabling Role of Knowledge Management Between Learning Organization and Organizational Learning

This chapter is an exploratory investigation of the relationship and interaction between the learning organization and organizational learning in terms of an enabling role of knowledge management. In the severe and dynamic business environment, organizations should respond quickly to their rivals and environment by transforming into a learning organization. A learning organization could provoke innovation and learning through its structure, task and process redesigns, and evermore adapt gradually toward the eventual goal of organizational learning. Therefore, the dynamic process between the learning organization and organizational learning is an important issue of current knowledge management and practice — that is, the enabling role of knowledge management could enhance the interaction between learning organization and organizational learning. Furthermore, the authors will explore the relationship and interaction between the learning organization and organizational learning in terms of knowledge management processes in business. Two cases, TSMC and Winbond, the semiconductor and high-tech firms in Taiwan, will be studied to illustrate the findings and insights for the study and the chapter.

Inducing Enterprise Knowledge Flows

The knowledge-based organization appears to offer great promise in terms of performance and capability. Indeed, many researchers are actively working to understand how organizational strategy, structure and technology can be combined and integrated to harness the competitive power of knowledge. However, knowledge is not evenly distributed through the organization, so rapid and efficient knowledge flow is critical to enterprise performance. This chapter builds upon the current state of the art pertaining to knowledge flow, and it develops a model to help induce the flow of knowledge through an organization. Because of the time-critical nature of most knowledge work in the modern enterprise, we focus in particular on knowledge dynamics, to enable rapid and efficient flow, and to help the enterprise become more knowledge-based. Using a global manufacturing firm as an example to illustrate how the knowledge-flow model provides practical guidance, we identify knowledge elements that are critical to effective performance in an unpredictable, dynamic business environment, and we use the multidimensional model to illustrate how to identify specific knowledge flows required for success. Further analysis reveals that different knowledge flows require different approaches in terms of IT and process changes — with the attendant insight that one size does not fit all in terms of knowledge management — and a specific focus on clumped knowledge and constricted flows enables the experienced manager to work through the necessary interventions—often with the set of tools and processes already present in the organization. We also illustrate how the multidimensional model can be augmented to depict the relative flow times associated with various knowledge elements, which provides a rough schedule as well as a roadmap to use for planning requisite knowledge flows for the knowledge-based organization.

Intelligent Enterprise Integration

This chapter describes an architecture for the eMarketplace that integrates the interests of autonomous enterprises in a single open-market environment. The environment encompasses several systems and business issues, such as the many-to-many relationships between customers and suppliers, systems, and business-related services. The architecture for this integrated environment is business-centric and knowledge-oriented. In this architecture, the eMarketplace exists as a collection of economically motivated software agents. The architecture enables and supports common economic services, such as brokering, pricing, and negotiation, as well as cross-enterprise integration and cooperation in an electronic supply-chain. We demonstrate the eMarketplace with two prototype systems.

An Overview of Knowledge Management

One of the key factors that distinguishes the intelligent business enterprise of the 21st century is the emphasis on knowledge and information. Unlike businesses of the past, the fast, high-tech, and global emphasis of businesses today requires the ability to capture, manage, and utilize knowledge and information in order to improve efficiency, better serve customers, manage the competition, and keep pace with never-ending changes. Knowledge management is an important means by which organizations can better manage information and, more importantly, knowledge. Unlike other techniques, knowledge management is not always easy to define because it encompasses a range of concepts, management tasks, technologies, and practices, all of which come under the umbrella of the management of knowledge. This chapter takes a broad view of the topic of knowledge management and aims to provide a comprehensive overview of knowledge management — the technologies, processes, and concepts involved, and the challenges and future of this important area.

Ability of the Actor Network Theory (ANT) to Model and Interpret an Electronic Market

The nature of information systems is often complex and involves both human and nonhuman components. This is particularly true in an electronic market. Actor Network Theory (ANT) can be used in general to describe the actors, intermediaries, framing and power that are the most important components of such an electronic market, which we call a network. This chapter explores whether ANT can help to analyze electronic trading systems. And if so, can ANT help us to filter the success factors of a computer trading system like Eurex, the largest derivatives electronic market in the world? It highlights how ANT is useful to define the various components involved within an electronic market. Moreover, the chapter analyses ANT’s limitations in modeling computer-trading systems. This chapter concludes that ANT is useful to analyze an electronic market such as Eurex.

Financial Markets in the Internet Age

The chapter reviews how the financial markets historically have been affected by new technologies and shows that, time and again, technological advances have impacted the very workflow of the financial market processes including the available financial instruments. Present technologies are discussed leading to a framework for how they form the basis for building intelligent agent systems. An overview of multi-agent systems is provided followed by several examples of multi-agent systems supporting investors in financial markets.

Learning Maturity

An explosion of research on the organizational learning paradigm has caused a great need for continued theoretical development to enable a more complete understanding of how to manage the concept for strategic advantage. At the same time, learning theory has not adequately addressed the technology variable in its framework, models, or propositions. The body of theory derived here centers around “learning maturity,” the capacity of an actor to effectively exhibit intelligent behavior in a wide range of situated actions. The theory is significant because it uniquely includes technology as a meaningful element in learning and intelligence. The research methodology uses over a century of published literature to serve as a “learning history” of an observed organization: the learning research community. The theory extends decades of cumulative research by focusing on the capabilities of actors to succeed in their interactions (use and development) with technology.