New Trends in Knowledge Management
I-KNOW '05
J.UKM Special Issue
Klaus Tochtermann
(Know-Center Graz & Graz University of Technology, Austria
ktochter@know-center.at)
When the only constant is change, knowledge becomes not just important,
but indeed vital for the very survival and future success of organizations.
While that, in itself, is hardly a new realization, the pace of new insights
from current research as well as new applications of knowledge management
in practice continually raise the bar for what it means to be leading the
way. And only those organizations that are at the cutting edge will be
able to beat the competition. Within this context, the cutting edge results
in knowledge management research are presented in this issue.
With its first issue J.UKM publishes the best eight contributions which
were carefully evaluated and proposed for the journal publication by the
international expert committee of I-KNOW `05, the 5th International
Conference on Knowledge Management (http://www.i-know.at).
The purpose of J.UKM and particularly this issue is to provide researchers
with guidance towards novel ideas for knowledge management research and
next-generation knowledge management solutions. As the eight contributions
show, human-oriented and organisational aspects of knowledge management
are becoming increasingly important. There is a common understanding among
the authors of this issue that a well-balanced combination or even integration
of organisational and human-oriented aspects forms the basis for successful
knowledge management instruments, particularly for instruments which are
based on information technology. In addition, after various different and
exciting knowledge management instruments have been developed in the past,
the authors of this issue identify clear indications that the performance
measurement of knowledge management activities are attracting more and
more attention in the research community. Based upon the experience and
the great research results presented in this issue, the reader is provided
with an excellent overview of the current state-of the-art in knowledge
management research. But this issue does not only give answers to open
research questions. Instead, it supplements them with questions of the
authors to the research community, hoping to provide a further important
stimulus to this fascinating and still so unexplored research field.
In detail, the papers address the following topics:
An-Pin Chen and Mu-Yen Chen from the National Chiao Tung University
(Taiwan) entitled their paper A Review of Survey Research in Knowledge
Management Performance Measurement: 1995-2004.
This paper addresses the increasingly important topic of knowledge
management performance evaluation. Based upon a literature review and
a classification of articles published from 1995 to 2004 the authors
come to the following conclusions: there are clear indications that
the evaluation of knowledge management performance is becoming more
important; firms tend to prefer benchmarking and best practices for
knowledge management performance measurement rather than audits based
on the balanced scorecard idea; compared to traditional qualitative
evaluations, quantitative and non-financial analysis methods are
considered to be more important for the future.
Bernhard Schmiedlinger, Klaus Valentin and Elisabeth Stephan from
Profactor (Austria) present in their contribution Competence Based
Business Development - Organizational Competencies as Basis for
Successful Companies a new competence management approach. This
approach supports organizations in the identification, measurement,
combination and integration of organizational competencies. The
underlying model distinguishes between an elementary level (human
perspective), a passive and active level (organizational perspective),
and a learning and adaptation loop. The elementary level describes the
individual human competencies. The active (passive) level comprises
all existing potentials which are actively (not actively) used for
value creation. At the learning level competencies are continuously
evaluated and further developed to meet future demands.
Giuseppe Berio from University of Torino (Italy) and Mounira
Harzallah from University of Nantes (France) address Knowledge
Management for Competence Management. Their idea is to apply
knowledge engineering techniques to support competence identification,
assessment, acquisition and usage. A critical discussion of existing
approaches to apply knowledge engineering techniques for competence
management highlights that these approaches often do not distinguish
between competencies and qualification, availability and competencies
or required and acquired competencies. To overcome this shortcoming
the authors propose a representation which unifies the different
aspects of competence management.
David Mayrhofer, Peter Heilmeier, Ravi Nirankari and Andrea Back
from University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and EADS Military Aircraft
(Germany) conduct research in Knowledge
Management in Challenging Settings - A Case of Military
Aircraft. The descriptive case study reports on specific
challenges within a military company (e.g. age pattern of employees,
difficulties with knowledge sharing across units because of mergers,
acquisitions etc.) and suggests knowledge management concepts to
tackle these challenges. Among these concepts are Communities of
Practice, Lessons Learned Workshops, or Knowledge Portals.
Tobias Müller-Prothmann (Freie University of Berlin), Andrea
Siegberg (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) and Ina Finke (Fraunhofer Institute
IPK) (Germany) entitled their paper Inter-Organisational
Community Building: Sustaining or Overcoming Organizational
Boundaries?. The paper explores inter-organisational community
building in an R&D environment by means of social network
analysis. It provides a set of methods and measures to identify, to
visualise and to analyze the informal personal networks which exists
within and between organisations.
Wei Liu, Albert Weichselbraun (University of Western Australia),
Arno Scharl (Vienna University of Economics and Business
Administration, Austria) and Elisabeth Chang (Curtin University of
Technology, Australia) address Semi-Automatic
Ontology Extension Using Spreading Activation.
The authors argue that ontologies are of utmost importance in open
environments but that the creation of specific domain ontologies is
still a laborious process. Their key idea is to extend and refine a
seed ontology by mining textual data using spreading activation over
weighed graphs.
Gunter Nittbaur from Malik Management Zentrum St. Gallen
(Switzerland) presents to managers and their advisors a new planning
method that captures the native genius of the organisation. It is
argued that this produces the best possible results in the shortest
possible time from the largest possible number of people by making
optimised use of the knowledge of the people involved. The approach
presented is based upon Stafford Beer's idea of Syntegration which is
also expressed in the title Stafford Beer's
Syntegration as a Renascence of the Ancient Greek Agora in Present-day
Organizations.
Rüdiger Reinhardt from the Management Center Innsbruck
(Austria) presents in his paper Implementation of an
Intellectual Capital Management System: Evaluation of a
"Bottom-Up" Approach the advantages of a bottom-up
implementation of a knowledge-related measurements and monitoring
system. The paper describes the key issues of this concept, the
realization and evaluation of the concept, and shows the major lessons
learned from this approach.
I hope that this first issue of the new Journal of Universal Knowledge
Management provides you with a unique overview of the manifold trends we
are currently encountering in knowledge management.
Klaus Tochtermann
Know-Center Graz & Graz University of Technology
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