ABSTRACT:
The Centre for Business Information, Organisation and Process Management (BIOPoM) organized a very successful 1st International Conference BIOPoM 2006 on 29 June 2006. 29 papers were presented in 12 sessions by authors from all over the world, and two keynote talks were given by distinguished academics (Professor George Rzevski and Professor Peter Allen).
This special edition for the
Journal of Knowledge Management Practice takes a broad lens view of the field.
Included are 5 papers which range from a text mining approach for identifying a taxonomy for a content management system, to discussions
about the use of Blogs for knowledge sharing. These
papers were selected from submissions to the conference as being representative
of the field and being of practical interest.
Keywords: Knowledge management, organisational culture, social networks, CoPs, trust, e-procurement, OLAP technology, text mining
The management of an organisation’s knowledge is now being considered as
core to developing and underpinning their strategy and so is of increasing
importance for today’s managers. Management may understand the strategy and the goals, but
very often the fine operational details that make these efforts work are not
visible to those in senior positions.
Instead the details of these work processes and the stakeholder
participation in these processes, are worked out, understood, and implemented
by staff using their own tacit and explicit knowledge. Organisational
drivers that increase the necessity to manage their knowledge must include the
following: an increasingly complex environment; the increased volume of
knowledge available to organisations; and the
problems related to knowledge attrition (Du Plessis,
2005). Knowledge is required to operate successfully in order to understand the
complexities of the environment but this knowledge is continually dating and
becoming obsolete as the environment changes. Thus the knowledge must needs be
updated and managed so that it fulfils the organisation’s
objectives.
In these papers we see the
difficulties of managing organisational knowledge so
that it can be shared successfully. Ramirez argues that in order to
successfully share knowledge the organisation’s
culture must be adjusted for this purpose. Technology it is argued quoting Coakes (2001), is only the enabler and thus the social
aspects of knowledge sharing and management become pre-eminent.
The paper by Coakes
and Smith equally argues that the social aspects of knowledge sharing are
important. This paper develops the idea
of trust and shows how communities of practice can be formed around trust. In any organisation, social
networks operate underneath the official work team and departmental
boundaries. These social networks
incorporate those colleagues most trusted in central positions within the
knowledge sharing activities. An organisation should endeavour to discover these hubs of trust and knowledge and
either incorporate them into the activity boundary or ensure that they are not
excluded from it. In Gallivan
and Depledge (2003) it is argued that trust is a
necessary prerequisite for success in working in partnership with others -
trust being “a willingness to make oneself vulnerable to potential harm
from another party” (p162). To
discover where trust lays in an organisation is not
easy, but the paper by Coakes and Smith discusses
Social Network Analysis and its use as a tool for just this purpose.
Looking at how the management of
knowledge can become part of a strategy, the third paper by Coakes
and Young, discusses the role of knowledge in the development of an eProcurement system for the
The final two papers consider more
technical aspects of knowledge management in the organisation.
The first of these by Radonić and Ćurko,
looks at business factors in the banking environment. The use of Business
Intelligence tools, they argue supports the decision-making capabilities of
banks and assists them in attaining a competitive advantage. They demonstrate
that the use of OLAP technology in particular - OLAP being online analytical
processing using data mining techniques provided through a graphical interface
that is (relatively) easy to understand. These tools are used with banks to
provide knowledge and understanding of a customer’s needs and wants and
thus permits the banks to develop innovatory products and services that fulfil these desires.
The fifth and final paper in this special edition concerns how these
technologies can be populated with data that is usefully categorised
according to an organisation’s needs. Pais, Dotsika and Shearer discuss
text mining for the creation of a taxonomy. The
article considers a number of tools for this purpose and evaluates their
suitability for the modern business environment. It concludes that commercial
products still need much development before they can be valuable in real
practice.
References
Coakes, E., (2001), Knowledge Management: A Sociotechnical perspective, in Coakes,
E., D. Willis and S. Clarke (Eds.) (2005) Knowledge
Management in the Sociotechnical World: The Graffiti Continues,
Du Plessis,
M., (2005), Drivers of knowledge management in the corporate environment International Journal of Information Management 25 (3) pp193-202
Gallivan MJ., and Depledge
G., (2003), Trust, control and the role of interorganizational
systems in electronic partnerships Information System Journal 13 (2) pp159-190
Sveiby K-E (2001), A Knowledge Based Theory of
the Firm to Guide Strategy Formulation Journal
of Intellectual Capital 2 (4) retrieved from www.sveiby.com 21 May 2006
Contact the Author:
Dr. Elayne Coakes, Senior Lecturer,