On Knowledge Management

It is widely acknowledged that knowledge is one of the most important assets of today’s organizations. According to Davenport and Prusak (1998), knowledge is often a company’s greatest competitive advantage in a global economy. How to support the company’s knowledge-intensive work processes (e.g., quality support, product design or strategic planning) is therefore becoming a vital issue in many organizations worldwide. Identification, analysis and characterization of the knowledge-intensive work processes become essential in order to qualify a discussion of how to support knowledge management processes. This chapter presents, discusses and reflects upon findings from a study of how highly skilled actors manage information and knowledge, i.e., how information is gathered from a wide range of sources, structured according to needs and relevance for the users, and disseminated to the relevant suppliers in the organization. The aim of the chapter is two-folded: first, to contribute to the general empirical body of knowledge about knowledge-intensive work, especially focusing on the central characteristics of the knowledge management processes; secondly, to initiate a discussion of which overall requirements we must set up for how knowledge management processes could be supported by means of information and communication technology. Knowledge-intensive work processes often concern collaborative problem-solving and mutual support that require effective ways of handling information and knowledge between different people, both in short-term and long-term situations. The distributed and dynamic nature of knowledge management work also imposes a high degree of complexity involving many different actors with different conceptualizations, interpretations, perspectives, needs, etc. of the knowledge produced and approached. The various actors have different perspectives on the concept of knowledge. The work needed to articulate knowledge and make information and knowledge accessible becomes extremely demanding and complex. Often face-to-face interaction is required. However, in complex and collaborative work settings the problem of articulating knowledge by rich interaction and communication is obvious. The actors are distributed both geographically and temporally. There is a need for computer-based mechanisms for interaction and coordination of information and knowledge (cf. e.g., Carstensen and Wulf, 1998).

Facilitating Knowledge Transfer in an R&D Environment

Managing knowledge is not a new idea. Although the term “knowledge management” is a recent introduction into the corporate lexicon, the concept is by no means exclusive to the 1990s. The underlying concepts of knowledge management, such as collaboration, exchange of ideas, communication, and so on, have always been present in organisations. Spontaneous, unrestricted knowledge transfer is vital to business success and the transfer of knowledge occurs within organisations whether the process is managed or not. In large, decentralised organisations, knowledge is constrained by organisational, cultural and physical barriers. In such cases, the transfer of knowledge is localised and fragmentary as mechanisms for accessing distant knowledge resources are poor or nonexistent. A traditional solution is the corporate librarian or other broker, who presides over a repository of knowledge and is aware of expertise across the organisation. However, this role may be unable to meet the modern demands of knowledge management, or be obsolete if the management of knowledge is to become part of every employee’s job.

Semi-Structured Data Extraction from Heterogenous Sources

The World Wide Web is known as the “universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge” (W3C, 1999). Internet-based knowledge management aims to use the Internet as the world wide environment for knowledge publishing, searching, sharing, reusing, and integration, and to support collaboration and decision making. However, knowledge on the Internet is buried in documents. Most of the documents are written in languages for human readers. The knowledge contained therein cannot be easily accessed by computer programs such as knowledge management systems. In order to make the Internet “machine readable,” information extraction from Web pages becomes a crucial research problem.

On Knowledge Management in the Internet Age

Knowledge management in general, and Internet-based knowledge management in particular, is one of the foremost strategic directions being investigated and adopted by corporations today. The promises of better decision making, faster turnaround times, improved organizational communication, and higher levels of cooperation and interaction among personnel, have all combined to create a holy grail kind of aura. Yet, like the grail the goals here are elusive, and the road to reaching them is long and fraught with pitfalls. Each of us, as individuals, performs a variety of functions that can be termed knowledge management. We remember things: names, numbers, experiences, and procedures. We know how to do things such as ride a bike; bake a cake; calculate a derivative; fix a flat tire. We know where to find information that we don’t remember on our own: we write things down; file them; enter them in a PDA. Some of us do it better, some of us are chronically disorganized, but at the end of the day each of us is performing his or her own knowledge management function.

Managing Knowledge in an ERP Enabled Virtual Organization

When is a virtual organisation really virtual? One definition would suggest that organisations are virtual when producing work deliverables across different locations, at differing work cycles, and across cultures (Gray and Igbaria, 1996; Palmer and Speier, 1998). Another suggests that the single common theme is temporality. Virtual organisations centre on continual restructuring to capture the value of a short-term market opportunity and are then dissolved to make way for restructuring to a new virtual entity. (Byrne, 1993; Katzy, 1998). Yet others suggest that virtual organisations are characterised by the intensity, symmetricality, reciprocity and multiplexity of the linkages in their networks (Powell, 1990; Grabowski and Roberts, 1996). Whatever the definition there is a concensus that different degrees of virtuality exist (Hoffman, Novak and Chatterjee, 1995; Gray and Igbaria, 1996; Goldman, Nagel and Preiss, 1995) and within this, different organisational structures can be formed (Palmer and Speier, 1998; Davidow and Malone, 1992, Miles and Snow, 1986). Such structures are normally inter-organisational and lie at the heart of any form of electronic commerce. Yet the organisational and management processes which should be applied to ensure successful implementation have been greatly under- researched (Finnegan, Galliers and Powell, 1998; Swatman and Swatman, 1992). There is even less guidance provided with respect to the management of change in organisations that embrace some degree of virtuality by leveraging their competencies through effective use of information and communication technologies (ICT). It could be argued that there is a degree of virtuality in all organisations but at what point does this present a conflict between control and adaptability? Is there a continuum along which organisations can position themselves in the electronic marketplace according to their needs for flexibility and fast responsiveness as opposed to stability and sustained momentum? To what extent should the organisation manage knowledge both within and without the organisation to realise a virtual work environment? The ability of the organisation to change or to extend itself as a virtual entity will reflect the extent to which an understanding of these concepts has been embedded into the knowledge management of the virtual organisation as a Virtual Organisational Change Model (VOCM). Managing these change factors is essential to gain and maintain strategic advantage and to derive virtual value. The authors expand these concepts by using the example of organisations that are using SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning software (ERP). Central to the discussion is the strategy of Virtual Organising (as defined by Venkatraman and Henderson, 1998) of ERP enabled organisations as they extend their scope across three vectors to enable virtual encounters, virtual sourcing, and virtual work. This is specifically explored within the context of knowledge management through the exploitation of ERP software integrated with Internet technology. This chapter proceeds as follows. A broad definition of virtual organisations is provided which highlights the need for a strategy to manage dynamic change. This is followed by the development of a model for managing such change and extended into a Virtual Organising model for ERP based organisations. This model is central to the discussion of knowledge management within the ERP context. Finally, the challenges that face virtual organisations are addressed, and solutions are proposed for the future.

The Challenges of Interorganizational Management

Contemporary business environments and trends for the future suggest that successful organizations of the future must not only be efficient, effective, competent, and competitive within any specific domain or marketplace, but that they must most importantly be flexible and adaptable, able to respond appropriately to change and turbulence in their environmental context. Thus, the challenge for managers would seem at least twofold. Managers must devise structures and strategies for their organizations that enable such flexibility and adaptability to be nurtured to ensure survival. Furthermore, it would seem that managers need to facilitate organisational learning, and thus must actively manage and capitalize on the organisation’s information and knowledge resources. The virtual organization is posited as an ideal organisational form for prospering in contemporary business environments which are characterised by turbulent change, uncertainty, intense competition, and the globalization of business and its markets (Wigand et al., 1997). The virtual organisation ideal is characterised by a number of significant components, such as:

Concept Indexes

In today’s electronic environments, knowledge is often captured through collections of documents in email or news archives, bookmark lists, document servers, and shared workspaces. Insights drawn from the documents are seldom made explicit, although persons who work in teams, form a group, or belong to a community would greatly profit from sharing their knowledge. To improve this situation, the efforts to identify knowledge in the documents and, later, to quickly find a suitable piece of knowledge must be decreased, while the benefits of reusing the knowledge must be increased. Knowledge is a subject of many disciplines and has been given many definitions. Essentially, knowledge helps an actor (a person, agent or expert system) to perform a task, attain a goal or solve a problem. Knowledge management is concerned with capturing and identifying knowledge, organising it, and distributing and accessing the knowledge. Knowledge can be passed through observation, communication and documents.

Adding Knowledge to Accounting Systems for Virtual Enterprises

Any business organisation has always needed mechanisms to control its affairs, particularly how it optimises the economic resources at its disposal to meet its objectives. Accounting essentially provides a universally established basis for optimising these finite resources, thus has long become the ‘language of business’. Being highly numeric in nature, by using monetary measures as its basis, it was relatively easy to automate accounting information on computer. As well as providing businesses with much greater decision-making capability, capturing this information on computer has given them a key organisational memory that they can retain and build upon regardless of, say, employee turnover.

The Challenge for Customer Service

It is a truism that customer service is the key to business success. It is particularly true given competition and new business practices lead customers to want products that are “free, perfect, now” (El Sawy et al., 1998). The trend in UK customer service, led by the U.S., is for service delivery via Call Centres to be deflected towards the Internet. Providing the knowledge to support this (O’Leary, 1998), along with relationship management (Duke et al., 1999) is a key application area for knowledge management (KM). However, the research into KM for effective customer service is minimal. What is clear is that publishing information on an intranet, extranet, or Internet does not constitute effective customer support. This chapter takes a case study approach to exploring knowledge management for customer service. The key problem we are working towards solving is how best to deploy knowledge via distributed information systems. The case study is derived from the author’s involvement in a project for a financial institution (referred to as AFI throughout). It describes a particular approach to managing knowledge that combines elements from information retrieval (IR) with KM. A key part of this is the evaluation of alternative interfaces that take different approaches to the presentation of search results.

Using an Intranet to Manage Knowledge for a Virtual Project Team

The Year 2000 (Y2K), or millennium bug as it has been called in the popular press, has caused many organizations to form Y2K project teams tasked with finding and fixing date problems in critical applications, embedded systems, and IT infrastructure. Most of these projects have had to perform this task under severe time restraints, typically two years or less. Additionally, these projects have been constrained with limited resources and staff. Project teams needed to maximize utilization of knowledge and experience gained during the project so they could perform to their maximum capability. Continued viability of the organization was at stake in most of these projects.