This document provides an overview of the methodology used in a study examining how knowledge management improves the service industry. It uses a qualitative case study approach to analyze two case studies - a health care project called WISECARE and a large bank, HSBC. Secondary data is collected from documentation and analyzed to understand how these organizations utilize knowledge management. Some key findings are that knowledge management can provide benefits like greater competencies, innovation, and knowledge sharing. It also discusses some potential barriers to implementing knowledge management, like capturing and integrating knowledge across an organization. The document provides theoretical background on topics like knowledge, knowledge management, culture and knowledge sharing. It aims to understand why knowledge management is important for service companies and how they can use it to
This presentation introduces Knowledge Management for organizations and includes some models of KM System we have developed. There are some models in Knowledge Mapping.
This document provides an overview of knowledge management. It defines data, information, and knowledge and describes explicit and tacit knowledge. It discusses the history of knowledge management from the 1970s to present. It also outlines several common knowledge management models and describes the typical stages in the knowledge management life cycle including information mapping, storage, retrieval, use, and auditing. Finally, it discusses some key terms used in knowledge management.
The 10-Step Knowledge Management Road map
They copied all that they could follow but they could not copy my mind, and I left 'em sweating and stealing and a year and half behind —Rudyard Kipling.
IN THIS CHAPTER
• Understand the 10-step knowledge management roadmap and how it applies to your company.
• Understand the four phases constituting these 10 steps: infrastructural evaluation; KM system analysis, design, and development; deployment; and evaluation.
• Understand where each step takes you.
• Articulate a clear link between KM and business strategy to maximize performance and impact on your company's bottom line.
• Learn how to prioritize KM processes to maximize business impact.
• Understand the key steps involved in knowledge auditing, knowledge mapping, strategic grounding, deployment methodology, teaming, change management, and ROI metrics formation.
Knowledge management is a complex activity, and like anything else that cannot deliver business impact without a concrete plan, it needs a perfect plan. This chapter introduces that plan: the 10-step knowledge management roadmap that will guide you through the entire process of creating a business-driven knowledge management strategy, designing, developing, and implementing a knowledge management system and effecting the soft changes that are required to make them work—with your company in mind. I chose to describe this plan as a roadmap rather than relegating it to the status of a methodology. A methodology undermines the level of complexity that is actually involved in managing knowledge and gives it a deceptive look of a cookie-cutter formulation.
May your competitors who thought that bleeding-edge technology was their nirvana rest in peace. For nothing—no technology, no market share, no product, and no monopoly— can ever provide a competitive advantage that is anything but temporary: They can all be copied, sometimes easily and sometimes with a little effort. Knowledge is the only resource that cannot be easily copied. Knowledge is much like copy protection: Even if your competitors get to it, they cannot apply it, for knowledge is protected by context in as copy-protected software is protected by encryption.
This strengthening idiosyncrasy of knowledge also has a negative implication for you: You cannot easily copy a competitor's knowledge management strategy and system.
Examples from your industry's leaders can be useful for understanding knowledge management, but they cannot show you the right way to do it. For these reasons, your
knowledge management system and knowledge management strategy will have to be unique to your company.
What follows in the next four sections of this book is an explication of the roadmap—not imitable methodology—that will help focus on your own company and develop a
knowledge strategy whose results are hard hitting, but one that no competitor can easily duplicate. They can co
This document provides an introduction to key concepts in knowledge management. It defines knowledge management as the deliberate coordination of an organization's people, processes, technology, and structure to promote knowledge sharing and apply lessons learned. Knowledge management aims to enhance organizational learning and create value. The document also distinguishes between explicit knowledge that is documented and tacit knowledge residing within people, and discusses different organizational perspectives in knowledge management.
This document summarizes and compares several knowledge management models:
- The KM Process Framework by Bukowitz and Williams (1999) outlines four stages - get, use, learn, contribute - and emphasizes the strategic focus and context of KM.
- The KM Matrix by Gamble and Blackwell (2001) splits the KM process into four stages: locating knowledge sources, organizing knowledge, socialization, and internalization. It provides guidelines for KM implementation but focuses only on knowledge sharing.
- The Knowledge Management Process Model by Botha et al (2008) presents KM as three overlapping categories - technology, people, and processes - and includes knowledge creation, but like the other models it lacks strategic context.
The document discusses designing an enterprise knowledge management system to share knowledge across two business units. The system would be capable of creating, capturing, categorizing, managing, and sharing knowledge. It would include features like a portal, communities, collaboration tools, problem solving capabilities, customization options, and publishing and subscribing to knowledge. The goals are to more quickly spread key knowledge, reduce costs through increased reuse, and increase innovation through expert identification and expertise sharing.
The document provides an introduction to the topic of knowledge management (KM) through several presentations. It discusses the history and definitions of KM, elements of a KM initiative including people, processes and technology, and the importance of KM for competitive advantage. It also covers the evolution of KM, the differences between information management and KM, and addresses explicit and tacit knowledge as well as ethics in KM.
This presentation introduces Knowledge Management for organizations and includes some models of KM System we have developed. There are some models in Knowledge Mapping.
This document provides an overview of knowledge management. It defines data, information, and knowledge and describes explicit and tacit knowledge. It discusses the history of knowledge management from the 1970s to present. It also outlines several common knowledge management models and describes the typical stages in the knowledge management life cycle including information mapping, storage, retrieval, use, and auditing. Finally, it discusses some key terms used in knowledge management.
The 10-Step Knowledge Management Road map
They copied all that they could follow but they could not copy my mind, and I left 'em sweating and stealing and a year and half behind —Rudyard Kipling.
IN THIS CHAPTER
• Understand the 10-step knowledge management roadmap and how it applies to your company.
• Understand the four phases constituting these 10 steps: infrastructural evaluation; KM system analysis, design, and development; deployment; and evaluation.
• Understand where each step takes you.
• Articulate a clear link between KM and business strategy to maximize performance and impact on your company's bottom line.
• Learn how to prioritize KM processes to maximize business impact.
• Understand the key steps involved in knowledge auditing, knowledge mapping, strategic grounding, deployment methodology, teaming, change management, and ROI metrics formation.
Knowledge management is a complex activity, and like anything else that cannot deliver business impact without a concrete plan, it needs a perfect plan. This chapter introduces that plan: the 10-step knowledge management roadmap that will guide you through the entire process of creating a business-driven knowledge management strategy, designing, developing, and implementing a knowledge management system and effecting the soft changes that are required to make them work—with your company in mind. I chose to describe this plan as a roadmap rather than relegating it to the status of a methodology. A methodology undermines the level of complexity that is actually involved in managing knowledge and gives it a deceptive look of a cookie-cutter formulation.
May your competitors who thought that bleeding-edge technology was their nirvana rest in peace. For nothing—no technology, no market share, no product, and no monopoly— can ever provide a competitive advantage that is anything but temporary: They can all be copied, sometimes easily and sometimes with a little effort. Knowledge is the only resource that cannot be easily copied. Knowledge is much like copy protection: Even if your competitors get to it, they cannot apply it, for knowledge is protected by context in as copy-protected software is protected by encryption.
This strengthening idiosyncrasy of knowledge also has a negative implication for you: You cannot easily copy a competitor's knowledge management strategy and system.
Examples from your industry's leaders can be useful for understanding knowledge management, but they cannot show you the right way to do it. For these reasons, your
knowledge management system and knowledge management strategy will have to be unique to your company.
What follows in the next four sections of this book is an explication of the roadmap—not imitable methodology—that will help focus on your own company and develop a
knowledge strategy whose results are hard hitting, but one that no competitor can easily duplicate. They can co
This document provides an introduction to key concepts in knowledge management. It defines knowledge management as the deliberate coordination of an organization's people, processes, technology, and structure to promote knowledge sharing and apply lessons learned. Knowledge management aims to enhance organizational learning and create value. The document also distinguishes between explicit knowledge that is documented and tacit knowledge residing within people, and discusses different organizational perspectives in knowledge management.
This document summarizes and compares several knowledge management models:
- The KM Process Framework by Bukowitz and Williams (1999) outlines four stages - get, use, learn, contribute - and emphasizes the strategic focus and context of KM.
- The KM Matrix by Gamble and Blackwell (2001) splits the KM process into four stages: locating knowledge sources, organizing knowledge, socialization, and internalization. It provides guidelines for KM implementation but focuses only on knowledge sharing.
- The Knowledge Management Process Model by Botha et al (2008) presents KM as three overlapping categories - technology, people, and processes - and includes knowledge creation, but like the other models it lacks strategic context.
The document discusses designing an enterprise knowledge management system to share knowledge across two business units. The system would be capable of creating, capturing, categorizing, managing, and sharing knowledge. It would include features like a portal, communities, collaboration tools, problem solving capabilities, customization options, and publishing and subscribing to knowledge. The goals are to more quickly spread key knowledge, reduce costs through increased reuse, and increase innovation through expert identification and expertise sharing.
The document provides an introduction to the topic of knowledge management (KM) through several presentations. It discusses the history and definitions of KM, elements of a KM initiative including people, processes and technology, and the importance of KM for competitive advantage. It also covers the evolution of KM, the differences between information management and KM, and addresses explicit and tacit knowledge as well as ethics in KM.
The document discusses knowledge management (KM) and its benefits. KM is defined as enabling individuals and teams to collectively create, share, and apply knowledge to achieve objectives. Benefits include reduced time-to-market, increased revenue and profit margins. Examples show companies saving billions through KM. Knowledge is formed from data and information, and can be explicit or tacit. Tacit knowledge is stored in people's minds while explicit knowledge is written down. KM tools and communities of practice help capture and share knowledge.
Business Process Management PowerPoint Presentation Slides SlideTeam
If you are planning to create a stunning presentation to showcase the concept of business process management, then we recommend you download, our ready to use business process management PowerPoint presentation slides. Our content ready presentation will save your time and efforts. With the help of this predesigned business operations management PPT presentation, you will be able to represent the numerous techniques to discover, model, examine, measure, refine, optimize, and automate organization processes. This business quality improvement presentation PPT has been designed using a slide on various essential subtopics such as introduction, functional area overview, ERP system architecture, task categories of ERP systems, ERP project progress, implementation process overview, planning and selection phase, implementation phase, enterprise resource planning funnel, tuning of concept, situational analysis-basic target concept, software selection process, and software selection criteria. It also covers a template on software selection criteria, realization and implements, v model for implementation of ERP system, tips for selecting ERP system, ERP criteria list-technical requirement, and ERP implementation-selection phase. Do not delay, quickly download these predesigned business project management presentation slides. Bring down the amount of friction existing with our Business Process Management PowerPoint Presentation Slides. Halt the further build up of differences.
ISO 30401 - The KM Management Systems StandardSIKM
This document provides an overview of ISO 30401, the international standard for knowledge management systems. It discusses the development process for the standard, which took input from experts over 3 years to reach publication. The standard adopts the new Annex SL format, which provides a common structure for all ISO management system standards. It outlines the main clauses of the standard, including leadership commitment, risk management, objectives, resource allocation, process definition, performance evaluation, and continual improvement of the knowledge management system. Annexes provide additional context on knowledge types and boundaries with related fields. The document closes by discussing potential implementations of the standard through compliance, certification, or use as a guiding framework.
Creating strong & passionate agile communities of practiceAllison Pollard
Everyone hits a challenge at some point in adopting agile and belonging to a larger community can help you overcome those challenges. Whether you call it a tribe, a user group, or a community of practice, having a group of people to share ideas with and learn from is a valuable tool to further your personal development and maintain your sanity. Learn about what communities of practice are, how to start them, and why they’re an important part of growing agile.
Architecting Next Generatio IT Operating Models Using IT4IT and SFIASukumar Daniel
The document summarizes an architecture initiative undertaken by Action Research Foundation to transform an organization's IT operating model. The initiative involved applying TOGAF and IT4IT frameworks to architect the next generation service provider organization. Key aspects included establishing an architecture capability, governance processes, and iteratively developing visions and architectures. The delivered solution established function and people management services to improve alignment and establish an innovation ecosystem needed for the target operating model of a customization studio.
Making KM Clickable: The Rapidly Changing State of Knowledge ManagementEnterprise Knowledge
Initially delivered for the Bangalore K-Community Zoom Meetup: “The Digital Edge: Tech Roadmaps and Impacts on KM on June 15th, this deck covers the key takeaways from the leading Knowledge Management book, 'Making Knowledge Management Clickable,' by Zach Wahl and Joe Hilger of Enterprise Knowledge. The presentation covers definitions and value of KM, offers best practices on KM systems, details key types of KM technologies, and discusses some of the common types of KM solutions such as KM Portals and Knowledge Graphs.
Organisation Change, Management Development & Communications Consulting and T...journal72
Its services include organization analysis, strategy analysis, people analysis, systems analysis, and transformation programs to drive successful organization changes.
A well-designed IT Service Delivery Model is critical to achieving success in IT management and operations. Many IT organizations focus on optimizing their technology assets -- the infrastructure and applications. However, in our experience, business value is achieved most effectively when technology assets and the IT service delivery model are integrated and work together seamlessly.
This presentation is tailored for organizational leaders who are interested in using digital to gain competitive advantage. It provides a systematic approach for steering the course of your digital transformation journey--from assessing your starting point to framing your digital challenge, focusing investment, mobilizing the organization and finally sustaining the digital transition.
What this guide will focus is not technology implementation, but a company-wide approach to digital transformation. It includes a step-by-step practical guidance for leaders to digitally transform their organizations by showing where to invest in digital capabilities and how to lead the transformation.
The digital transformation framework presented consists of four key phases and twelve detailed steps as well as practical tips to fundamentally improve business performance.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Acquire knowledge and the key concepts of digital transformation
2. Describe the digital transformation framework, phases and step-by-step process
3. Conduct a self-assessment of your digital mastery
CONTENTS
1. Introduction and Key Concepts of Digital Transformation
2. Digital Transformation Framework, Phases and Step-by-step Process
3. Digital Mastery Self-Assessment
To download this complete presentation, visit:
https://www.oeconsulting.com.sg/ppt-digital-transformation-implementation-guide
The document discusses digital transformation and digital marketing at scale. It introduces 6 trends that are redefining digital marketing: products as services, experience as content, now as everything, location as engagement, virtual as reality, and real-web as communication. It then discusses the challenges of digital transformation and what it really means to transform digitally. The rest of the document focuses on digital marketing at scale, outlining 5 phases and 6 digital capabilities that companies need to embrace to achieve digital transformation. It provides examples of how Philips is undertaking a worldwide multi-year transformation program called "Accelerate!" that includes the Digital@Scale initiative.
Gems of Knowledge Management success storiesEnamul Haque
In these budget-constrained, uncertain economic times, KM practitioners need to be able to show the business value that knowledge sharing and reuse bring to their organizations.
Most businesses use measures to develop metrics that show performance or effort.
Measures outline the information or data a company or person wants to gather (for example, customer satisfaction, productivity of workers, or cost savings).
Many organizations have turned to storytelling and circumstantial success stories to show the value of the investments made in KM
What is Digital Transformation? What are the friction points and the mental challenge? How is the mindset around disruption managed and what is Manchester Metropolitan University doing about this?
Agile leadership to address the challenges of the VUCA worldChristian Mies
Project Management today has to deal with increasing complexity and various challenges. Many of the issues we see result from the often chaotic environment of these projects. This environment can best be characterized by the term VUCA. The principle of self-organization provides one approach to reduce the complexity to a level we can manage. Adequate leadership methodologies are a key driver for this change.
The main goal of this presentation is to draw the roadmap of the methodology of implementing the Knowledge Management at the HCL’s prospective customersTaking advantage of longexperience and HCL developed KM tools .
This describes a generalised and structured approach to defining a strategy for collecting (near or actual) real time, high volume data. The appproach can be applied to areas such as Telemetry, Big Data, Smart Metering and Internet of Things implementations and operations. This proposed structured approach is intended to ensure that complexity is understood and can be appropriately addressed at an early stage before problems become to embedded to be solved. Real time situational data gives rise to situational awareness and understanding which in turn presents opportunities for effective and rapid situational decisions. Real time situational data enables greater situational visibility which means increased operational intelligence.
This document provides an overview of the team development process and key aspects of effective team management. It discusses types of teams, how teams are formed, Belbin's team roles theory, analyzing team experiences, and reflecting on teams within an organization. The conclusion reiterates that coming together, keeping together, and working together are essential for a team's success.
Km Implementation Strategies Case Studies V2 1 March2011Afolabi Adesola
This document summarizes a presentation on knowledge management implementation strategies and case studies. It discusses key concepts in knowledge management like defining knowledge and different approaches. It then presents an integrated knowledge management model with three elements - learning organization, innovating, and intellectual capital. The document analyzes six case studies of organizations that have implemented knowledge management strategies. It examines their projects, approaches, implementation processes, and measurements of success. The analysis found most projects focused on sharing best practices, with few truly innovative projects. The case studies provided lessons on common and unique implementation strategies among practitioners.
The document discusses knowledge management (KM) and its benefits. KM is defined as enabling individuals and teams to collectively create, share, and apply knowledge to achieve objectives. Benefits include reduced time-to-market, increased revenue and profit margins. Examples show companies saving billions through KM. Knowledge is formed from data and information, and can be explicit or tacit. Tacit knowledge is stored in people's minds while explicit knowledge is written down. KM tools and communities of practice help capture and share knowledge.
Business Process Management PowerPoint Presentation Slides SlideTeam
If you are planning to create a stunning presentation to showcase the concept of business process management, then we recommend you download, our ready to use business process management PowerPoint presentation slides. Our content ready presentation will save your time and efforts. With the help of this predesigned business operations management PPT presentation, you will be able to represent the numerous techniques to discover, model, examine, measure, refine, optimize, and automate organization processes. This business quality improvement presentation PPT has been designed using a slide on various essential subtopics such as introduction, functional area overview, ERP system architecture, task categories of ERP systems, ERP project progress, implementation process overview, planning and selection phase, implementation phase, enterprise resource planning funnel, tuning of concept, situational analysis-basic target concept, software selection process, and software selection criteria. It also covers a template on software selection criteria, realization and implements, v model for implementation of ERP system, tips for selecting ERP system, ERP criteria list-technical requirement, and ERP implementation-selection phase. Do not delay, quickly download these predesigned business project management presentation slides. Bring down the amount of friction existing with our Business Process Management PowerPoint Presentation Slides. Halt the further build up of differences.
ISO 30401 - The KM Management Systems StandardSIKM
This document provides an overview of ISO 30401, the international standard for knowledge management systems. It discusses the development process for the standard, which took input from experts over 3 years to reach publication. The standard adopts the new Annex SL format, which provides a common structure for all ISO management system standards. It outlines the main clauses of the standard, including leadership commitment, risk management, objectives, resource allocation, process definition, performance evaluation, and continual improvement of the knowledge management system. Annexes provide additional context on knowledge types and boundaries with related fields. The document closes by discussing potential implementations of the standard through compliance, certification, or use as a guiding framework.
Creating strong & passionate agile communities of practiceAllison Pollard
Everyone hits a challenge at some point in adopting agile and belonging to a larger community can help you overcome those challenges. Whether you call it a tribe, a user group, or a community of practice, having a group of people to share ideas with and learn from is a valuable tool to further your personal development and maintain your sanity. Learn about what communities of practice are, how to start them, and why they’re an important part of growing agile.
Architecting Next Generatio IT Operating Models Using IT4IT and SFIASukumar Daniel
The document summarizes an architecture initiative undertaken by Action Research Foundation to transform an organization's IT operating model. The initiative involved applying TOGAF and IT4IT frameworks to architect the next generation service provider organization. Key aspects included establishing an architecture capability, governance processes, and iteratively developing visions and architectures. The delivered solution established function and people management services to improve alignment and establish an innovation ecosystem needed for the target operating model of a customization studio.
Making KM Clickable: The Rapidly Changing State of Knowledge ManagementEnterprise Knowledge
Initially delivered for the Bangalore K-Community Zoom Meetup: “The Digital Edge: Tech Roadmaps and Impacts on KM on June 15th, this deck covers the key takeaways from the leading Knowledge Management book, 'Making Knowledge Management Clickable,' by Zach Wahl and Joe Hilger of Enterprise Knowledge. The presentation covers definitions and value of KM, offers best practices on KM systems, details key types of KM technologies, and discusses some of the common types of KM solutions such as KM Portals and Knowledge Graphs.
Organisation Change, Management Development & Communications Consulting and T...journal72
Its services include organization analysis, strategy analysis, people analysis, systems analysis, and transformation programs to drive successful organization changes.
A well-designed IT Service Delivery Model is critical to achieving success in IT management and operations. Many IT organizations focus on optimizing their technology assets -- the infrastructure and applications. However, in our experience, business value is achieved most effectively when technology assets and the IT service delivery model are integrated and work together seamlessly.
This presentation is tailored for organizational leaders who are interested in using digital to gain competitive advantage. It provides a systematic approach for steering the course of your digital transformation journey--from assessing your starting point to framing your digital challenge, focusing investment, mobilizing the organization and finally sustaining the digital transition.
What this guide will focus is not technology implementation, but a company-wide approach to digital transformation. It includes a step-by-step practical guidance for leaders to digitally transform their organizations by showing where to invest in digital capabilities and how to lead the transformation.
The digital transformation framework presented consists of four key phases and twelve detailed steps as well as practical tips to fundamentally improve business performance.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Acquire knowledge and the key concepts of digital transformation
2. Describe the digital transformation framework, phases and step-by-step process
3. Conduct a self-assessment of your digital mastery
CONTENTS
1. Introduction and Key Concepts of Digital Transformation
2. Digital Transformation Framework, Phases and Step-by-step Process
3. Digital Mastery Self-Assessment
To download this complete presentation, visit:
https://www.oeconsulting.com.sg/ppt-digital-transformation-implementation-guide
The document discusses digital transformation and digital marketing at scale. It introduces 6 trends that are redefining digital marketing: products as services, experience as content, now as everything, location as engagement, virtual as reality, and real-web as communication. It then discusses the challenges of digital transformation and what it really means to transform digitally. The rest of the document focuses on digital marketing at scale, outlining 5 phases and 6 digital capabilities that companies need to embrace to achieve digital transformation. It provides examples of how Philips is undertaking a worldwide multi-year transformation program called "Accelerate!" that includes the Digital@Scale initiative.
Gems of Knowledge Management success storiesEnamul Haque
In these budget-constrained, uncertain economic times, KM practitioners need to be able to show the business value that knowledge sharing and reuse bring to their organizations.
Most businesses use measures to develop metrics that show performance or effort.
Measures outline the information or data a company or person wants to gather (for example, customer satisfaction, productivity of workers, or cost savings).
Many organizations have turned to storytelling and circumstantial success stories to show the value of the investments made in KM
What is Digital Transformation? What are the friction points and the mental challenge? How is the mindset around disruption managed and what is Manchester Metropolitan University doing about this?
Agile leadership to address the challenges of the VUCA worldChristian Mies
Project Management today has to deal with increasing complexity and various challenges. Many of the issues we see result from the often chaotic environment of these projects. This environment can best be characterized by the term VUCA. The principle of self-organization provides one approach to reduce the complexity to a level we can manage. Adequate leadership methodologies are a key driver for this change.
The main goal of this presentation is to draw the roadmap of the methodology of implementing the Knowledge Management at the HCL’s prospective customersTaking advantage of longexperience and HCL developed KM tools .
This describes a generalised and structured approach to defining a strategy for collecting (near or actual) real time, high volume data. The appproach can be applied to areas such as Telemetry, Big Data, Smart Metering and Internet of Things implementations and operations. This proposed structured approach is intended to ensure that complexity is understood and can be appropriately addressed at an early stage before problems become to embedded to be solved. Real time situational data gives rise to situational awareness and understanding which in turn presents opportunities for effective and rapid situational decisions. Real time situational data enables greater situational visibility which means increased operational intelligence.
This document provides an overview of the team development process and key aspects of effective team management. It discusses types of teams, how teams are formed, Belbin's team roles theory, analyzing team experiences, and reflecting on teams within an organization. The conclusion reiterates that coming together, keeping together, and working together are essential for a team's success.
Km Implementation Strategies Case Studies V2 1 March2011Afolabi Adesola
This document summarizes a presentation on knowledge management implementation strategies and case studies. It discusses key concepts in knowledge management like defining knowledge and different approaches. It then presents an integrated knowledge management model with three elements - learning organization, innovating, and intellectual capital. The document analyzes six case studies of organizations that have implemented knowledge management strategies. It examines their projects, approaches, implementation processes, and measurements of success. The analysis found most projects focused on sharing best practices, with few truly innovative projects. The case studies provided lessons on common and unique implementation strategies among practitioners.
This document provides information about a Business Analytics and Intelligence certificate program offered by IIM Bangalore beginning on July 8, 2013. The program consists of 6 modules covering topics such as business statistics, predictive analytics, optimization, stochastic models, and advanced analytics. An optional SAS module is also available. The program is designed to provide in-depth knowledge of analytical techniques and tools for fact-based decision making. Participants will learn how to analyze data, use various models and software, and apply analytics across different business functions and industries. The fee for the residential program is Rs. 3,92,500 and for the non-residential program is Rs. 3,70,000.
Report on strategic rules of Information System for changing the bases of com...Md. Khukan Miah
Achieving advantages requires broad IS management and user dialogue plus imagination. The process is complicated by the fact that many IS products are strategic though the potential benefits are very subjective and not easily verified. Often a strict ROI focus by senior management may turn attention toward narrow, well-defined targets as opposed to broader strategic opportunities that are harder to analyze.
This document summarizes a journal article about the linkages between knowledge management and productivity in auto ancillary industries. It discusses how knowledge management can help organizations develop capabilities to support sustainability. The article presents a framework that identifies how promoting sustainability through effective knowledge management and productivity measurement. It also outlines the objectives of studying how innovation and productivity can be attained through knowledge management in auto ancillary industries.
Example – Bigger, Better, Faster and Stronger .docxcravennichole326
Example – Bigger, Better, Faster and Stronger
Student 1
Walden University
WMBA-6990-6, Capstone
Instructor: Dr. Ed Dixon
Table of Contents
Executive Summary .........................................................................................................................1
Summary ....................................................................................................................................1
Recommendations ......................................................................................................................1
Risk and Mitigation Strategies ...................................................................................................2
Strategy Map ....................................................................................................................................3
References ........................................................................................................................................4
Appendix ..........................................................................................................................................5
Company Selection ....................................................................................................................6
Mission, Vision, and Values ......................................................................................................6
Internal Strategy Analysis Tools ................................................................................................8
P.E.S.T. and Stakeholder Strategy Analysis ............................................................................11
Competitive Strategy Analysis ................................................................................................14
Key Success Factor Strategy Analysis .....................................................................................16
Company-Wide Strategy ..........................................................................................................19
Executive Summary
Summary
Example is service provider to the Health and Human Services industries of government
entities (Example, 2014). Domestically, the growth of the industry is very slow. Internationally,
the growth of the industry is increasing. One of the challenges of working in the industry is the
lack of product differentiation. The services required by the government are tightly controlled
and, therefore, competitors tend to provide the services in a very similar manner. The similarity
of the services provided to governments gives a great deal of leverage to the clients and promotes
competition primarily on price. Through competition on price, the margins continually decrease
for the competitive field. Example needs to grow the value of the firm. Achieving an increase in
value requires differentiation of product and service and growth of the target market. .
Page 1 of 2 MARK901 Digital Marketing AUTUMN 2022 .docxLacieKlineeb
Page 1 of 2
MARK901
Digital Marketing
AUTUMN 2022
MIDTERM EXAMINATION
Time Allowed: 48 hours.
Total Number of Questions: 3
DIRECTIONS TO CANDIDATES
1. Answer ALL questions. The marks for each question are shown next to each question.
2. Total marks: 100. This Exam is worth 30% of your final marks for MARK901.
INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS (FURTHER TO INSTRUCTIONS POSTED ON MOODLE SITE)
• Download the provided Answer Booklet and start typing your answers in the Answer Booklet (word
document). Keep saving your work on your desktop regularly.
• If your answer requires a diagram or calculation that cannot be created in the word document, use A4
size paper(s) to capture the diagram or calculation. Take a photo or scan of the paper (s), upload to
your computer and attach with the Answer Booklet word document in order to form one single file that
has to be uploaded.
• Upload the answer booklet as one file in Turnitin through the subject Moodle site. You have only one
attempt to upload the document - no changes can be made.
• If you are unable to upload the answer booklet in Turnitin before the due time, DO NOT PANIC. Email
it to the lecturer at [email protected] immediately within time limit as specified for
the Turnitin upload. Resubmit via Turnitin later.
• The Lecturer will have the discretion to conduct viva on the submission made, if needed.
Student Number………………………….
…………………………. First Name
Family Name ………………................
1
mailto:[email protected]
Page 2 of 2
Based on the given study, answer all of the following questions [Max 900 words each]:
Q1.
The study discusses the use of a number of different channels in Digital Marketing
a) List and explain the usage of each of these channels as mentioned in the study
b) Categorize these channels into the 3 types of digital marketing media or trifecta (as
discussed in class).
[30 Marks]
Q2.
a) Discuss the enablers of and the barriers to digital marketing usage in the SMEs of Finland,
as discussed in the study.
b) Speculate the applicabilty of each of the above in the case of SMEs in the UAE,
particularly Dubai. [30 Marks]
Q3.
Imagine you are the marketing manager of a mid-scale global fast food chain, and going to
open a flagship outlet in Dubai, UAE:
a) Perform the Segmentation,Targeting and Positioning process for your organization.
b) Determine and describe how you will implement the 7Ps (Product, Price, Place,
Promotion, People, Process, Physical Evidence) of the Digital Marketing Mix for your
chosen target market. [40 Marks]
Notes:
• Answers must be clearly organized into headings and sub-headings.
• Use bullet lists where suitable.
• Use diagrams where suitable.
• This exam will assess your synthesis,analysis and critical thinking skills among others.
This is an electronic reprint of the original article.
This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail.
Author(s):
Title:
Year:
Version:
Please cite the.
Here is a revised version of the proposal letter with minor edits:
September 22, 2003
To: Leslie Bickford
From: Diana Ferry DF
RE: Proposal for Final Project
I am writing to request that you accept my topic for the Writing 465 final project. I believe this project has the potential to help alleviate the current parking problem at Winthrop University. Both Jack Allen from Campus Police and Walter Hardin, Associate Vice President for Facilities Management, have expressed interest in my proposed research.
BACKGROUND
Winthrop University is a small public university with an undergraduate enrollment of approximately 5,065 students in the fall of 2002. While the university has a well-organized parking system, it is no
This document provides an overview of new product development (NPD) strategies and processes. It discusses the importance of NPD for organizational sustainability and competitive advantage in a changing global market. The document outlines the typical stages of the NPD process, including planning, analysis, development, testing, and commercialization. It also identifies several issues in NPD, such as the importance of NPD across the product lifecycle, managing customer needs and preferences, utilizing cross-functional teams and management support, and developing new products quickly while maintaining quality. The goal of the document is to analyze factors for successful NPD and discuss if implementing NPD can be an effective strategy for organizational growth.
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS AFTER YOU PAPER BELOWQUESTIONS.docxYASHU40
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS AFTER YOU PAPER BELOW
QUESTIONS
1. Was there a clear and concise thesis statement? Explain.
2. Was there a clear and concise problem statement?
3. Was the problem statement supported by evidence? Explain.
4. Was there a clear and concise research question(s)? Explain.
5. Was the body of research organized and easy to understand? Explain.
6. Did the author answer the research question(s) clearly in the discussion section? Explain.
7. Were inferences drawn from the body of research? Explain.
8. Did the paper use proper APA formatting? Explain.
9. Did the author support assertions with in-text citations and references? Explain.
10. What areas need improvement? Explain. What areas were strongest? Explain.
11. Do you have any other constructive feedback or recommendations to help your peer improve? Explain.
12. How did reviewing this paper help you with your own research paper? Explain.
Economic Benefits of Knowledge Management
Database Management and Communications are two fields of study that can be taken at a lot of higher learning institutions today. These fields play a major role in business and its sustainability. The developments in information and communications technologies which have made knowledge production and exchange easier and further enhanced the methodologies of knowledge discovery are the major factors for the amount of scientific knowledge produced in the last 30 years and continues to grow rapidly.(Kaniki & Mphahlele, 2002) The practice of Knowledge Management as a field is relatively new in the U.S but has been in use by European companies for quite some time.
Human capital as an asset is slowly being realized by companies as a major contributor to maintaining the accounting bottom line and even remaining relevant. There has been a recent boom in technological tools that promote knowledge shares such as Microsoft SharePoint. Coupled with the new field of Knowledge Management, is this a viable resource to improve a company's productivity and profitability? Businesses should adopt a knowledge management process and collaborative technologies to be innovative and competitive in today’s market.
Statement of the Problem
It has become important in today’s workplace to take inventory of a business’s knowledge assets to include both tacit and explicit to increase equity, innovation and competitiveness. In today's free market and ever-changing economy, businesses understand the need to manage proprietary knowledge or “in house” knowledge to maintain competitiveness. How this is done and fostered in a way that it is embraced by the employees is the challenge realized by those who understand the need for knowledge management. For this reason, many business managers are seeking a solution. (Carlucci, 2006)
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to research different methods of knowledge management strategies to inform on how business can become more competit.
The document discusses the key findings of a survey of over 200 European process excellence professionals. It found that 69% plan to invest in operational excellence in the next year. Operations was identified as needing the most process improvement work. Improving customer satisfaction through efficiency and quality was seen as the top benefit of process excellence initiatives. The most used methodologies were found to be business process management, Lean, Lean Six Sigma, and Agile. Artificial intelligence use was still low.
This audit report summarizes the key knowledge management practices (KMPs) of scientific instrument companies in Ambala Cantt, India. It discusses how these companies utilize KMPs related to information management, human resource management, research and development, strategy, and intellectual property management. The report provides an analysis of Porter's 5 forces in the scientific instruments industry and details the audit conducted, which involved interviews with 5 local scientific instrument companies. Overall findings and conclusions from the audit are presented along with limitations of the study.
Information Technology (IT) Development Strategy of STIE INABA in the Perspec...AJHSSR Journal
Strategic planning is a relatively new concept for non-profit organizations (Bryson (1995) and
Nawawi (2000)). Strategic planning is needed in order that organizations can offer better service quality for their
customers and for the sustainability of their organizations. Nonprofit organizations have people who are focused
on achieving specific goals of their organizations (Ireland: 1999: 96-99). Their activities are indeed limited to
the budget and a constant need to raise funds through donations and assistance. When discussing about quality,
the first thing to consider is to get rid of the notions1) that nonprofit organizations cannot work like business
organizations, 2) that non-profit organizations cannot measure their performance, and 3) that quality
improvement techniques cannot be applied to non-profit organizations.
This research was in the form of a case study with Sekolah Tinggi Indonesia Membangun (STIE INABA) as the
research subject. The research method used was research and development. Research and development can be
defined as a process or steps to develop a new product or improve existing products that are accountable.
Based on the results of the analysis of the data collected, it can be concluded that the performance measurements
that had been applied produced less information and less effective strategic planning. IT Balance Scorecard was
used to analyze the relevance of the performance measurement indicators that had been established with the
Vision, Mission, and strategic objectives of STIE INABA. STIE INABA needs to build an information system
in the form of E-learning to support teaching and learning activities
MIST.601 Management Information SystemsResearch Project Proposal.docxannandleola
MIST.601 Management Information Systems
Research Project Proposal
Name
Ryan Schwalbe
Title
Robot Lawyers – The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Law
Synopsis
(Briefly describe your research proposal with the following criteria.)
Purpose
The purpose of this project is to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI), also referred to as machine based learning, is currently being used in the legal industry. Furthermore, the project intends to discuss the benefits of this technology in addition to the challenges clients and attorneys face both working with and against it.
Problems & Issues
One of the various issues the industry is facing with AI technology is the general adoption and implementation into traditional document review models. Many clients and senior attorneys are still hesitant to rely on computers for document review calls without the validation by human lawyers. The technology also requires a technical understanding of computer science and statistical methodologies used in machine based workflows, which many lawyers do not have experience in. AI methods can also reduce the number of human attorneys necessary to facilitate electronic document reviews. As the technology continues to evolve this could potentially create a drought for attorneys that would have otherwise been needed for the review work.
Organizational Impacts
It’s already been proven that large scale document reviews leveraging AI software can significantly reduce the legal spend when compared to traditional search term and linear based human review models. Courts are now more accepting of this approach due mostly to the controversy surrounding e-discovery related costs proportional to the financial damage merits of many law suits. The technology has also been proven to increase the accuracy and consistency of document reviews which reduce the associated risks of missing key documents and producing sensitive privilege materials inadvertently.
Suggestions
Companies, law firms and governing bodies alike need to continue evaluating the needs and uses of this learning technology for practical legal applications. Currently, there are many private vendor companies with expertise in this area but the lack of standardizations in the industry has created a diverse range of AI software and practices which has in turn has caused confusion through complexity. Industry standard practices should be developed so that training can be standardized, implemented and adopted across the legal community more rapidly.
Future Implications & Directions
As the AI technology in legal review continues to develop the need for human review and even second level validation will continue to decrease. Courts will become more accepting of the process and corporate clients will be less tolerant of expensive, bloated document review costs. Attorneys will need to be armed with both the legal and technical knowledge necessary in order to stay relevant in next generation law firms.
Other ...
This is the short version of the MaFI 2013 Work Plan. If you do not have much time to read the details, here’s a summary of objectives and modules:
Objectives:
- To continue influencing the principles, rules and practices of international development to promote facilitation approaches in inclusive market development using the MaFI-festo as a general guideline.
- To further the practice and thinking of inclusive market development facilitation through a systematic process of learning and action-research between market facilitators and M&E and complexity experts, mainly through the Complexity Dialogues and the Systemic M&E Initiative.
- To produce knowledge products based on MaFI’s learning agenda and processes (e.g. online discussions, webinars and in-person meetings) that inform and build the capacity of field practitioners and are relevant and interesting to other decision-makers such as donors and lead firms.
- To promote in-person interactions and local-global dialogue, learning and coordination through formal and informal initiatives such as Local Learning Groups, MaFI Ambassadors, workshops and conferences.
- To continue improving the efficiency and effectiveness of MaFI’s back-end operations (e.g. guidance to members, processing and selection of requests to join, MaFI introductions, selection of Top Influencer of the Month, etc.)
Modules:
- M&E of MaFI: To build better theories of change and indicators to monitor how learning and collaboration processes change in MaFI and to assess MaFI’s impacts on its members
- MaFI “Instructions Manual”: To codify the operational principles and the lessons learned by the facilitator of MaFI since its beginnings in 2007-8 and to provide tips and instructions about how to manage the back-end processes that keep MaFI running efficiently.
- Systemic M&E, Phase II: To illustrate the practical application, implications and impacts of the principles proposed in the Systemic M&E synthesis document in the context of inclusive market development initiatives.
- Complexity Dialogues: To build a learning agenda that will help MaFI to interact in a more systematic way with complexity experts to improve the application of complexity science in inclusive market development practice and policy-making.
- Capacity Building: To build global convergence and consensus around the basic skills and attitudes that effective and efficient facilitators of inclusive market development initiatives should have.
- Knowledge Production System: To convert the best discussions ever produced by MaFI into knowledge products that are easy to read and can reach large numbers of practitioners globally, both for information and training purposes.
- Local Learning and collaboration: To promote locally contextualised learning and collaboration between key development actors such as field practitioners, policy-makers and donors around issues related to facilitation of inclusive market development
Report- A knowledge based view of analytics capability in PSM.pptxRimarkInhambre
The document discusses a study on developing analytics capabilities in purchasing and supply management from a knowledge-based view. It first establishes the relevance and importance of analytics given changing business environments that require adaptation. It then discusses how the study contributes to literature by applying a knowledge-based view and examining how firms integrate analytics capabilities. The study uses a qualitative case study methodology to examine how different industries develop analytics capabilities in their purchasing and supply management functions. Key findings include that firms develop capabilities differently and the importance of making analytics accessible to decision-makers. The conclusion discusses how analytics can provide competitive advantage by allowing firms to adapt to changing industry dynamics.
Knowledge Management Strategies and Their Contribution to Small and Medium En...inventionjournals
Despite the many individual case studies on various knowledge management initiatives in large organisations, the perception of knowledge management practices and developments in Small and Medium enterprises suffers certain drawbacks. As such, there is paucity of information on the effects of different knowledge management strategies used by small firms in the hospitality industry in Kenya. The study sought to determine the contribution of knowledge management strategies on sales growth in the hospitality industry. Objective was to determine the contributions of knowledge management strategies on small and medium business sales growth. A cross-sectional survey research design was used for this study and a census was conducted on 39 businesses. A questionnaire with structured and unstructured questions was used to collect primary data from all the 39 top managers and supervisors of selected hospitality businesses since they are the key decision makers. Descriptive and regression analysis were used to analyze the data with the help of Statistical package for social sciences computer software. The findings from this study indicate that, though knowledge management strategies were used to a greater extent among the businesses, they did not significantly contribute to sales growth in the hospitality industry. This implies that the relationship was not significant because the use of the knowledge management strategies did not fully actualize the intended sales growth in the hospitality businesses. The results of this study have implications in enhancing the growth of Small and medium enterprises in Kenya.
This dissertation examines the factors that affect knowledge transfer about resources among assignment managers in a medium-sized management consultancy. The author conducted a literature review on knowledge transfer and competitive advantage. He then interviewed eight senior consultants to evaluate the applicability of the literature. The interviews found support for social networks being important for knowledge sharing and that electronic systems cannot fully convey contextual knowledge. The author was able to offer recommendations to improve knowledge sharing and identify areas for further study.
The document discusses a case study on evaluating the elements of the marketing mix. It begins with an introduction to the marketing mix and its key elements - product, price, place, and promotion.
It then describes the methodology, which involved distributing questionnaires to customers and employees of Al-Saaeda Company for Medical Equipment Technologies to measure the impact of promotion on marketing their Glucocard 01-mini plus product.
The main findings were that promotion had a very high level of impact in increasing product sales, good distribution positively affected customer satisfaction, and the company's promotional policies reflected well in boosting sales. The researchers recommended strengthening promotional activities and increasing sales points to enhance distribution policies.
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How does Knowledge Management Improve Service Industry
1. J Ö N K Ö P I N G I N T E R N A T I O N A L B U S I N E S S S C H O O L
JÖNKÖPING UNIVERSITY
How does Knowledge Management
improve the Service Industry?
Author: Paween Pusaksrikit
Tutor: Jörgen Lindh
Jönköping: June 2006
2. i
Table of Contents
1 Introduction ................................................................................4
1.1 Problem Discussion................................................................................4
1.2 Purpose..................................................................................................5
1.3 Research Questions...............................................................................5
1.4 Keywords................................................................................................5
2 Methodology...............................................................................6
2.1 Qualitative research................................................................................6
2.2 Case study: definition .............................................................................6
2.3 Single-case vs. multiple-case designs....................................................7
2.4 Reliability and validity .............................................................................7
2.5 Data collection methods .........................................................................8
2.6 Data analysis and exposition..................................................................8
3. Theoretical frame of reference...................................................9
3.1 Service Industry .....................................................................................9
3.2 The concept "Knowledge" ......................................................................9
3.2.1 Knowledge creation..............................................................................10
3.2.2 Knowledge codification.........................................................................11
3.2.3 Knowledge transfer...............................................................................11
3.2.4 Knowledge work ...................................................................................12
3.2.5 Some possible problems in Knowledge Management .........................12
3.2.6 Knowledge management sharing .........................................................14
3.2.7 The Importance of Sharing Knowledge ................................................14
3.2.8 Barriers of Knowledge Sharing.............................................................15
3.3 The concept "Culture"...........................................................................16
3.3.1 Culture Definition..................................................................................16
3.3.2 Corporate Culture.................................................................................16
3.3.3 Knowledge Management and the role of culture .................................17
3.3.4 Creating a knowledge sharing culture ..................................................18
3.3.5 Motivating and Rewarding Knowledge Sharing ...................................18
4 Analysis/Results ......................................................................19
4.1 Summary of the case studies ...............................................................19
4.1.1 Case study 1: The WISECARE Project ................................................19
4.1.2 Case study 2: HSBC.............................................................................20
4.2 Data analysis........................................................................................22
4.2.1 The importance of knowledge management in service
companies ...........................................................................................22
4.2.2 The utilization of knowledge management to gain competitive
advantage.............................................................................................24
4.2.3 The problems that service companies might anticipate during
the knowledge management implementation.......................................26
5 Conclusions and reflections...................................................28
5.1 Conclusion............................................................................................28
5.2 Reflections over this thesis work ..........................................................28
4. iii
Abstract
In twenty-first century, the industry competes heavily. Entrepreneurs try to use technology
to develop their business. However, using technology generates high costs. So companies
need to find a new way to survive by using the existing resources to gain maximum benefit.
Knowledge management is one of interesting alternatives as it can deliver competitive
advantage such as greater competencies and synergy, more balanced decisions and less
errors, more creativity and innovation, broader collaboration and knowledge sharing, and
easier links to expertise and deeper understanding.
This paper deals with various aspects of knowledge management particularly concentrating
on knowledge sharing in service industry. Issues in the context of different data sources
and the research with qualitative methodology create the in-depth knowledge to understand
how to do knowledge work for gaining competitive advantage. The emphasis is placed on
analysis and evaluation of problems and barriers of both cases as applied from all data
collection.
In the paper, each chapter has the following set-up. Chapter 2 highlights methodology.
The qualitative approach has been used to obtain information and provide data analysis. A
complete analysis of knowledge management has been developed by using a case study
method with secondary data to analyze how service industry uses knowledge management
to manage in its sector. Chapter 3 gives theoretical frame of reference. The definitions of
knowledge and culture are explained. Problems and barriers of knowledge sharing are also
presented. Chapter 4 gives analysis. Conclusion is presented in the final chapter. The
findings show that to improve service and customer satisfaction, the industry has to find
out and use knowledge management appropriately. Knowledge management helps reducing
time to find information and sharing decision making. For the last part, the discussion and
recommendation from culture and knowledge affecting knowledge management in the
companies has been reported.
Because of the time limitation of the study, the paper focuses only on the section of service
industry. An area for further study would be using other research methods such as
interview to gain more in-depth understanding and survey to increase reliability and validity
of this topic.
5. 4
1. Introduction
Competitive advantage is important for a company’s performance in emerging markets.
Many companies lost sight of competitive advantage to grow and compete with domestic
and global competitors. Thus, many companies try to gain it from managing knowledge.
However, while the companies have to leverage their knowledge internally and externally
to create and sustain a competitive advantage, they have to face many problems to
manage knowledge.
This thesis takes a critical look at problems and barriers of managing knowledge as well
as how the service companies use knowledge management to improve their efficiency.
1.1 Problem Discussion
At the present, many companies have to face high competition. Some struggle to
implement corporate strategies to response to existing markets. To gain high benefit,
these companies use knowledge management to compete with other companies.
Knowledge management is very important for all kinds of business because it can help
the companies improve their service, increase quality of product, reduce cost and faster
response to their customers. However, the major challenge of managing knowledge in
the companies is capturing and integrating knowledge to share among all organizational
members (Grant, 1996). The successful company has to gain the ability to collect, store,
and distribute specialized knowledge to create and sustain competitive advantage
(Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Grant 1996).
As markets and organizations become more global, the traditional knowledge creation
and transfer such as face-to-face contact, job rotation, and staff training program may
prove to be too slow and less effective (Alavi and Leidner, 1999). The need to develop
more efficient means has led to implementing information systems that are designed
specifically to facilitate coding, combining, and applying of organizational knowledge
(Alavi and Leidner, 1999).
Knowledge management has been used in most product-based companies and it has also
extended to use in service sector. However, there are not many studies looking closely to
explain the situation in the service industry while service sector is continuously growing.
Thus, it is necessary to understand the situation and how the service sector develops
knowledge management strategy. Knowledge management can play an important role to
make companies compete productively.
This thesis has attempted to explain why knowledge management is essential for service
companies and show how the service companies use knowledge management to gain
competitive advantage. The main problems and barriers that service companies might
anticipate during the knowledge management implementation will be discussed.
6. 5
1.2 Purpose
There are three main objectives for this thesis:
1. The study presents which aspects help create and sustain successful managing
knowledge work.
2. The study focuses on the utilization of knowledge management for the company
in service sector.
3. Further aim is to analyze problems and how the company in service castor
handles these problems.
1.3 Research Questions
1. Why is knowledge management important for companies in service industry?
2. How do the companies in service industry use knowledge management to gain
competitive advantage?
3. What are problems and barriers that service companies anticipate during
implementing knowledge management?
1.4 Keywords
Culture, Corporate culture, Service industry, Knowledge Management, Knowledge
Sharing, Knowledge Work
7. 6
2. Methodology
2.1 Qualitative research
Qualitative research approach is one of the main approaches of research methodology. It
studies about experiences, behaviors and attitudes from the respondents. Qualitative
methods include interview, participant observation, case study, ethnography, content
analysis and so on. Opposite to quantitative research approach, it does not use
mathematical and statistical methods. However, qualitative research method uses logic to
interpret gathered data. When compared to quantitative research, it has weak points
which are more expensive and difficult to measure. The qualitative methods are based on
smaller sample sizes and are often not representative of the population, which makes it
difficult to achieve reliability and validity (Wikipedia, 2006). Although qualitative method
usually cannot be replicated or repeated, which gives it low reliability; the research is
more intensive and more flexible, allowing the researcher to search since he or she has
greater latitude to do so (Joppe, 2000). Moreover, it can give in-depth detail in some
more specific issues than quantitative method. Due to my research questions asking
“Why” and “How”, using qualitative methods will be the best solution to define the
answers.
2.2 Case study: definition
A case study is one type of qualitative research method. Case study method involves an
in-depth examination of a single event: rather than using large examples and following a
rigid protocol to examine a limited number of variables. It uses many methods to collect
information from one or a few units such as people or organizations. The borders of the
event are not obviously clear at the beginning of the research and no experimental
control or management is used (Wikipedia, 2006).
Many researchers have mentioned that each research approach has advantages and
disadvantages. There is no approach that is more suitable than all others for all purposes.
Case study is particularly suitable for certain kinds of problems.
These are main characteristics of case studies categorized by Myers and Avison (2003).
- Event is observed in a natural setting.
- Data are collected by many ways.
- One or few units are tested.
- The complication of the unit is examined seriously.
- Case studies are more appropriate for the exploration, classification and
hypothesis development phases.
- The researcher should have an open attitude for exploration.
- No experimental controls or management are concerned.
- The researcher may not identify the set of dependent and independent variables
before.
- The derived outcomes rely on the combined powers of the researcher.
8. 7
- Data collection methods can be changed when the researcher develops new
hypothesis.
- Case study research is suitable for ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions
- The researchers want to focus on current events.
2.3 Single-case vs. multiple-case designs
For aim of case study design, researchers have to decide to choose one or many cases in
the project. Most researchers try to use multiple cases, but single-case is suitable in
specific case. Yin (1984) advises single-case designs are appropriate when:
1. It is a case that cannot previously access to scientific investigation.
2. It shows a critical case for testing a well-formulated theory.
3. It is a great or unique case.
Researchers use a single-case study at the beginning of theory generation and late in
theory testing. A single case is used for exploration after that may be followed by a
multiple-case study. A single-case design may be used to test the limitations of theory
Myers and Avison (2003).
For multiple-case designs, Myers and Avison (2003) mention that the multiple cases are
useful when the goal of the research is description, theory building, or theory testing.
Multiple-case designs allow researchers do comparative case analysis and the extension of
theory. And multiple-case also brings more general research outcomes.
In this thesis, I have chosen to analyze two cases that represent some parts of service
industry because they are the examples of the service companies that use knowledge
management. One is in health care sector that uses knowledge management to improve
its service. And the other one is in financial sector, a large bank that uses knowledge
management to compete with other banks in its service industry. Deploying the multiple
cases will help to compare how the companies manage knowledge sharing to gain
competitive advantage.
2.4 Reliability and validity
Reliability refers to the consistency of a measure. A test is considered reliable if the
researcher can get the same result repeatedly and an accurate representation of the total
population. If the results of the study can be reproduced under a similar methodology
and will not fail to perform within specified limits in a given time while working in a
stated environment, the research instrument is considered to be reliable (Van Wagner,
2006; THCU, 2005; Kwaliteg Management Services)
Validity is the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. It is vital for a
test to be valid in order for the results to be accurately applied and interpreted. Validity is
not determined by a single statistic, but by a body of research that demonstrates the
relationship between the test and the behavior it is intended to measure. (Van Wagner,
2006).
Reliability and validity are mostly found from conducting quantitative method. To
measure reliability and validity in qualitative method, it is important not to seek only for
frequencies but to focus on meanings or interpretation as well (Kirk and Miller, 1985).
9. 8
In this study, the reliability and validity will be obtained through acquiring and analyzing
data from many sources. The data from different sources can help crosschecking the
information. If all sources from two case studies provide the same findings, this study
will gain the validity. At the same time, the reliability will gain during the analysis part
when those proved information can be interpreted in the consistent manner.
2.5 Data collection methods
There are many methods of data collection usually used in case research studies. Data
from two or more sources will help to support the research answers. Yin (1984) gives the
ways to find sources of data that work suitably for case research.
- Documentation
- Archival records
- Interviews
- Direct observation
- Physical artifacts
The goal of data collection is to gain rich data that suit for the research. Collected
specific data depends on the research questions and the part of analysis. Myers and
Avison (2003) suggest that the researchers should plan what data they will collect. For
example, they should list resources to be gathered such as documentation or they plan
for questions to interview. These plans will help researchers when they have to work
with other researchers. The goals of this stage are to ensure that researchers can collect
data that they want and spend time appropriately.
Most information in this thesis is from secondary data which are collected from
textbooks, web sites of knowledge management and corporate culture, and documents
that related with the research topic. Also, using multiple-case design can help me gather
various information and examples to analyze and compare different companies in service
industry.
2.6 Data analysis and exposition
Myers and Avison (2003) state that the main parts of data analysis are important to the
outcomes of case research. The richness of data of the research should be presented. The
reasoning of researchers should be clearly stated and defended in establishing
hypotheses. The research should begin from purposes and questions, to assumptions and
design choices, then to specific data discovered, and to results and conclusions. These
stages make readers can follow easily.
There are many ways to analyze the data including using templates, grounded theory and
discourse analysis. Secondary data analysis is also one of qualitative data analysis. Due to
my time limitation, I have chosen to use the secondary data analysis because this
approach is the reanalysis of data. The concept of this approach is that the present
researcher has intended to use the data that was originally compiled by another
researcher for other purposes. Secondary analysis will often involve adding another
variable to an existing dataset. This variable will be something that the researcher collects
on their own, from another dataset, or from a common source of information.
Secondary data analysis is only limited by the researcher's imagination (O'Connor, 2006).
10. 9
3. Theoretical frame of reference
3.1 Service industry
Service industry is the one sector of industry involves the provision of services to
other businesses as well as to final consumers. Activities are mainly concerned with
providing services rather than tangible objects for the benefit of the end users and/or
other industries. It includes insurance banking and finance, provision of gas and
electricity and water, health care, transport, communications, entertainment, retailing and
wholesaling, and central and local government. (London Borough of Richmond upon
Thames, 2005; the Geographical Association Fieldwork Code of Practice, 2006;
WordNet; Wikipedia).
The economy is developing rapidly and the significant change on economic structure is
progressing. Therefore, the importance of service industry in economic system has been
increasing steadily so to become one of principal drivers for most developed countries’
economy.
As I recognize that the services sector is now of central importance to advanced
economies, studying in knowledge management to enhance the understanding of this
sector would be necessary.
3.2 The concept “Knowledge”
Knowledge is quite different from data and information in nature, although sometimes
people use the three terms interchangeably. (Becerra-Fernandez, Gonzalez & Sabherwal,
2004).
Data
Data consists of facts, results from observations and explorations and doing
experiments. For alone data, it just shows raw numbers or claims so it does not have
meaning by its own. However, data is still needed for any organization. It is
important for workers and companies because it is the raw material for analysis to
create information. For example, sales order is just data; it does not have meaning for
anyone if it is not transformed to other things that have meanings. Although data
does not have meaning or goal, it is easy to be captured, stored, transferred and
communicated by using electronic or other media (Davenport & Prusak, 1998;
Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2004).
Information
Information is a part of data. It generally involves about transforming, sorting and
organizing raw data to gain a more meaningful indication of patterns in the data that
information has an impact on people’s decision or behavior (Becerra-Fernandez et
al., 2004). For example, after transforming sales order into daily sales, daily sales
report can be used to give meaning for manager to make a decision what to do next.
11. 10
Knowledge
Becerra-Fernandez et al. (2004) judge knowledge to be at the highest level in a
hierarchy with information at the middle level, and data to be at the lowest level.
According to this view, knowledge cites to information that enables action and
decisions, or information with direction. Davenport and Prusak (1998, p.5) give
another definition of knowledge.
“Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information,
and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new
experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In
organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but
also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms.”
Knowledge helps producing information from data or more valuable information
from less valuable information. Thus, knowledge is basically similar to information
and data, although it is the richest and deepest of the three, and is consequently also
the most valuable. This aspect of the relationship between data, information, and
knowledge is represented in Figure 1 (Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2004).
Figure 1 Data, Information, and Knowledge Source: Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2004
3.2.1 Knowledge creation
All strong companies create and use knowledge. When these companies have to interact
with their environments, they get information, transform into knowledge, and use to
make a decision based on their experiences, values, and internal rules. If a company does
not have knowledge, it cannot manage itself to be a strong company. To create
knowledge, Davenport and Prusak (1998) give five ways of knowledge creation;
acquisition; dedicated resources; fusion; adaptation; and knowledge networking.
- Acquisition: The most effective way to get knowledge is to buy it. A company
can buy from another company or hire individuals that have knowledge.
- Rental: Some companies can have knowledge by renting it. It means renting a
knowledge source.
- Dedicated resources: Some companies generate knowledge by establish units
for specific purpose.
- Fusion: Fusion is a method to create new synergy by bringing people from
different departments to work together on a project.
Value
Zero Low Medium High Very High
Knowledge
Data Information
12. 11
- Adaptation: Due to new products, new technologies, and social and economic
changes drive company to change and adapt to survive in business.
- Networks: Informal networking among people can create knowledge.
- Common factors: space and time.
When a company creates knowledge, it has to concern about interactive teamworking
process. This process involves different backgrounds, cutting across organizational
boundaries, and combing skills, artifacts, knowledge and experiences in new ways. There
is an assumption that when people work together, they can produce more creative results
than they work individual. It is hard to establish effective teamwork because people come
from different backgrounds and have different knowledge bases.
Teamworking is a key factor to create knowledge with mutual understanding of deep
tacit knowledge based on shared experiences together for a long time. Tacit knowledge is
knowledge that is in people’s heads and it is hard to explain or communicate with other
people. For explicit knowledge, it is knowledge that can be expressed in text form or by
speaking. Explicit knowledge is easy to explain and communicate. Good personal
relations are necessary for the sharing of tacit knowledge (Newell et al., 2002).
Although different knowledge from various sources tends to make a conflict of ideas,
this conflict can create creativity. This creativity will be built when the individuals work
together and communicate each other. It is not only just social skills that make people
understand each other, but it also depends on cognitive skills that make them can
comprehend each other Leonard-Barton (1995).
3.2.2 Knowledge codification
This method is about making knowledge accessible for whoever wants it. This process
will transform knowledge into a code to make it as structured, explicit, transferable, and
easy to understand as possible. Each of these codes has its own particular set of values
and limitations, and they can be used single or in combination. New technologies have a
vital role to codify knowledge and make the prospects for these activities (Davenport &
Prusak, 1998). Davenport and Prusak (1998) also give four rules for companies to follow
when they want to codify knowledge.
1. Managers have to identify what business goal that the codified knowledge will
supply.
2. Managers can specify knowledge that exists in many forms to achieve those goals.
3. Value and suitability of knowledge must be evaluated by knowledge managers.
4. A proper medium must be identified for codification and distribution. In the
companies.
3.2.3 Knowledge transfer
Knowledge is naturally transferred in every organization whether or not the process has
been managed at all. For example, when a practitioner asks the senior employee about
13. 12
the needs of a particular customer, they are exchanging knowledge. (Davenport &
Prusak, 1998).
It is difficult to transfer tacit knowledge from the resource that creates it to other parts of
the company. The company should use knowledge transfer that suits the organizational
culture.
Davenport and Prusak (1998) recommend that the company should encourage
knowledge sharing among business units by creating places and giving opportunities for
employees to interact formally. Knowledge transfer should be supported in personal
meetings in addition to more structured forms mentioned above.
Normally, to transfer tacit knowledge, it requires strong personal contact. Suitable
knowledge should be stored in procedures or described in papers and databases and
transferred accurately.
3.2.4 Knowledge work
Naturally, knowledge is needed for all works in every occupation, even simple work.
However, the term ‘knowledge work’ tends to be applied to refer to specific occupations
exploiting theoretical knowledge, creativity and social skills (Newell et al., 2002).
Knowledge work is used to refer to as professional work, such as accountancy, scientific
and legal work. This type of knowledge work depends on the application of both tacit
and explicit knowledge. Employees who involve this type of work need to make their
decision by themselves about what and how to do their work. So these knowledge
workers should have high education and specialist skills. (Newell et al., 2002: p.18)
3.2.5 Some possible problems in Knowledge Management
Space and time limitations
While advance computer and technology have helped people to link with each other,
people also concern about geography affecting them in the new knowledge economy.
The emergence of virtual space does not decrease significance of physical space (Kimble
et al, 2000). Even though people have the fast pace of technology to communicate and
the ability to transfer data across distances, they still want to contact with others in
person by gathering together for events, hand shaking and hugging (Sherron and
Boettcher, 1997).
Time is another factor that needs to be considered because virtual communities or online
societies make people work with their colleagues anytime and anywhere. For example, an
employee can work at four o’clock in the morning with other employees from other
continents (Kimble et al, 2000).
Another aspect of time is obsolete knowledge. Although sharing knowledge over time is
seen as important, people should not overestimate past knowledge. Knowledge from the
past cannot always serve as a basis for the work of today; things can change quickly and
radically in innovating industries (Barnard, 2005).
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The lack of face-to-face communication
In any cultures the face-to-face meeting is the perfect example for the meeting of minds.
When people meet physically each other, communication is smooth and sound.
However, the space and time limitations in online society make face-to-face
communication impossible. Knowledge Management researchers support the presence
of other members in the community which is the important key for knowledge creation
and sharing.
Today people have a lot of activities to do, such as working and learning, from other part
of the world. In order to solve the problems, they can use technologies such as video
conferencing to create a telepresence that they can communicate anywhere and anytime.
They can create virtual teams to work efficiently when having the face-to-face
communication where they can overcome the issue of trust and ambiguity surrounding in
the virtual world (Hildreth et al, 1998; Kimble et al, 2000).
Language and cultural barriers
Not only the physical distance and time difference limitations problems that members in
online society have to confront, but also they may face other obstacles to communicate
each other, such as language and cultural barriers. They have to meet that language that
can hinder to interact in online society where the companies can find people from
different countries and different languages. Although people normally use English to
communicate or do business worldwide, many people do not have the ability to
understand and communicate in English (Van den Branden, 2001). Therefore, language
can be a cause of barriers that hinder people in online society to transfer and share their
knowledge to others. When people have to share knowledge with someone from another
culture, they have to use additional effort (Barnard, 2005).
Culture may also hinder people in online society to create and share knowledge each
other. People who come from different parts of the world may have different cultures,
behaviors, goals, and motivation that make it difficult for them to communicate and get
knowledge from what other people try to explain.
The problem with trust
Trust has played an important role in knowledge sharing. It plays a more essential role
when it has to be created in an online or virtual environment. Handy (1995) has
emphasized the importance of trust in an online society. He considers that trust can
occur when people are not complete strangers to one another. He also maintains that
establishing trust is hard if people have not worked together before, or they have no
face-to-face contacts. People increase the sense of trust that allows them to create new
knowledge and share that knowledge to other people in the community through good
relationships.
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Low level of teamwork
Online communication in virtual communities differs from face-to-face communication.
As mentioned above, due to the space and time limitations, the lack of face-to-face
communication may result in the problem with trust, identity and commitment in online
societies. These can make people feel reluctant to share their knowledge and work
together. Knowledge that is not shared will loose its relation quite quickly. There is an
evidence that the environment that supports trust, care, and personal networks among
employees is one of the most important conditions for high level of collaboration,
knowledge creation and knowledge sharing (Nonaka, Von Krogh and Ichijo, 2000;
Kimble et al, 2000).
Lack of time and heavy workload
One of the barriers to knowledge sharing is that people are too busy to share their
knowledge and to answer the questions they are asked. Many people cannot deal with
overloaded information from many sources such as e-mails. When some people are too
busy to answer the questions, others who ask the questions will feel suffer from
inadequate knowledge (Barnard, 2005).
3.2.6 Knowledge management sharing
Knowledge has become one of the important parts of any companies. The companies
face the challenge about using and creating knowledge. When the technology that has
been used to manage knowledge growing fast, it means that the knowledge can be
collected, stored and accessed to improve the job. While human knowledge may be an
organization's most valuable asset, much of this knowledge has never been shared.
Harnessing critical knowledge and using it to create a common vision and objectives can
move an organization closer to high performance workplace. Many researchers maintain
that it is essential to create a knowledge sharing culture as part of a Knowledge
Management (Harris, 2006).
3.2.7 The Importance of Sharing Knowledge
Nowadays the creation and application of new knowledge is essential to the survival of
most companies. There are many reasons why knowledge sharing is important as follows:
(Gurteen, 1999):
- Intangible products - ideas, processes, and information - are growing in the share
of global trade from the traditional, tangible goods of the manufacturing
economy.
- The application of new knowledge is increasingly important in the society. The
continuous innovation process will sustain the competitive advantage.
- Increasing in turnover of staff. People do not take a job for life any more. When
they leave an organization their knowledge is gone with them.
16. 15
- Large global or even small geographically dispersed organizations do not
understand what they know in the whole picture. Expertise learnt and applied in
one part of the organization is not leveraged in another.
- Fast changing in technology, business and society can cause the obsolete
knowledge. As things change so quickly, in some companies, their knowledge
base declines. As much of 50 per cent of what the staff knew five years ago is
probably obsolete today.
3.2.8 Barriers of knowledge sharing
These are some barriers that obstruct companies to transfer knowledge in their
companies Davenport and Prusak (1998) give barriers affecting knowledge transfer in
companies and they also give possible solutions for each barrier.
Knowledge sharing barriers Possible solutions
- Lack of trust
- Different cultures, language and frames
of reference
- Lack of time and meeting places;
narrow idea of productive work
- Status and rewards go to knowledge
owners
- Lack of absorptive capacity in recipients
- Belief that knowledge relates to specific
groups
- Intolerance for mistakes and lack of
help
- Build relationships and trust through
balancing between virtual and face-to-
face meeting
- Confirm that the communication’s
approaches supports knowledge
transfer
- Create common ground through team
work, job rotation and other types of
collaborative working
- Establish time and places for formal
and informal knowledge sharing
- Evaluate performance and provide
rewards those who share and reuse
knowledge
- Educate people on the advantages of
flexibility; employ for openness to ideas
- Establish an environment where quality
of ideas are more important than status
of source
- Tolerate and reward errors from
creative collaboration and help a person
learn from these
Table 3.1 Barriers of knowledge sharing Davenport and Prusak (1998)
17. 16
3.3 The concept “Culture”
3.3.1 Culture definition
Many researchers have given different definitions of culture from past to present.
Tylor (1871) cited about culture in his book, Primitive Culture that culture is "that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
Matthews (2001) defines culture as the system of shared beliefs, values, customs,
behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and
with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through
learning
Unesco (2002) defines culture as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and
emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art
and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and belief.”
3.3.2 Corporate Culture
Jackson (1995) states that corporate culture is a phenomenon of a different order from
national cultures, if only because membership of an organization is usually partial and
voluntary, while the membership of a nation is permanent and involuntary. His research
describes about national cultures differ mostly at the level of basic values while corporate
cultures differ mostly at the level of the superficial practices: symbols, heroes, and rituals.
Corporate cultures consist of practices rather than values, they are somewhat
manageable: they can be managed by changing the practices. The values of employees
cannot be changed by an employer, because they were acquired when the employees
were children. However, sometimes an employer can activate values which employees
were not allowed to show earlier, like a desire for initiative and creativity, by allowing
practices which before were forbidden.
Buellens, Kreitner and Kinicki (2001) argue that corporate culture is, in fact, a byproduct
of national or societal culture. They also state that while culture has an impact on
organizational behavior through employees' customs and language, at the same time,
corporate culture effects on each individual's attitudes, values and expectations.
A good corporate culture is important to succeed in managing knowledge. A company
that is lack of trust and fails to reward or promote the cooperation and teamwork will
suffer its bureaucratic culture. Moreover, the company that cannot gain trust from its
workforce will have troubles to share knowledge among workers within the company
Zand (1997).
Corporate cultures are hard to change and manage because these cultures have developed
into general habits. The task to change these cultures belongs to top management. The
top managers have choices to select either accept and use the existing culture or try to
change it. If the top managers would like to change corporate culture, they have to assure
that they receive sufficient support from key persons from different levels in the
company. The process of changing corporate culture has to continually be monitored. It
takes the top manager for several years to maintain the attention and assess the culture
(Jackson, 1995). The lack of culture awareness will be one of the key factors that made
knowledge management fail.
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3.3.3 Knowledge Management and the Role of Culture
Knowledge management is a new branch of management for the company to gain
competitive advantage by combining people, processes, information, and technology
together. It focuses mainly on the management of change, uncertainty, and complexity
(http://www.brint.com/km/). The companies can obtain knowledge by identifying,
extracting and capturing the knowledge so that the companies can utilize it effectively.
Malhotra (1997) describes "Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of
organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous
environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek
synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information
technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings."
Sveiby (2001) identifies two broad categories of knowledge management: the first is how
to use information and technology, another one focuses on how to manage people. The
first approach which is the management of information considers knowledge as objects
that can be managed by information management systems. The main goal of this
approach is to increase access of information through improved methods of access and
reuse of resources such as database, hypertext linking. The key solutions are new
developments in IT. This approach will work by using technology to control
information. The second approach is the management of people which considers
knowledge as a process - a complex set of dynamic skills and know-how that is
constantly changing. This approach focuses on assessing, changing and improving
human individual skills and/or behavior. The goal of this approach is to make people
share their knowledge.
Newell et al (2002) also divide the approaches to manage knowledge into two ways. One
is the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) -based approach or the
cognitive model and another one is the ICT-led approach or the community model.
These two approaches are quite similar to that of Sveiby mentioned above. The
followings are characteristics of these two approaches by Newell et al (2002):
The Characteristics of ICT- based approach
- Knowledge is equal to objectively defined concepts and facts.
- Knowledge can be codified and transferred through text: information systems
have a important role.
- Gains from Knowledge Management include utilization through the recycling of
existing knowledge.
- The main function of Knowledge Management is to codify and capture
knowledge.
- The critical success factor is technology.
- The dominant metaphors are the human memory and the fitting pieces of
knowledge together to produce a bigger picture in predictable ways.
19. 18
The characteristics of ICT- led approach
- Knowledge is socially created and based on experience.
- Knowledge can be tacit and is transferred through interactive social networking
processes.
- Gains from Knowledge Management include discovery through the sharing of
knowledge among different functional and/or cultural backgrounds.
- The main function of Knowledge Management is to encourage people to share
their knowledge through networking.
- The critical success factor is trust and collaboration.
- The dominant metaphors are the human community and the interaction to
produce new knowledge in sometimes unpredictable ways.
Many studies support that not only managing information is one of the success factors,
but social factor is also another key factor that the companies have to concern. Managers
need to acknowledge and accept the differentiation of their employees and recognize that
they are only in a position to loosely manage organizational culture. So the company will
be a good place to work which will aid retention and promote responsible autonomy
within the company.
3.3.4 Creating a Knowledge Sharing Culture
To create a Knowledge Sharing Culture, it is about making knowledge sharing the norm.
The company which wants to create a knowledge sharing culture needs to encourage its
staffs to work together more effectively, to collaborate and to share - lastly to make
organizational knowledge more productive. However, Gurteen (1999) comments on a
few issues which need to be concerned:
- Sharing knowledge is not just sharing information.
- The purpose of knowledge sharing is to help a whole organization to reach its
business goals. It is not sharing for only the benefit of one department.
- Sharing knowledge is as significant as learning to make knowledge productive.
- It is hard to change a culture.
3.3.5 Motivating and Rewarding Knowledge Sharing
Direct and indirect rewards must be put in place to encourage knowledge sharing.
Knowledge workers might be financially or admirably rewarded for contributing to
knowledge work. However, it might not be true in all cases because it is not possible to
make people share their knowledge by only rewarding them. Some employees are
motivated by more than just money such as more experiences and knowledge they can
gain by themselves during doing knowledge work. Hence it needs to ensure that
appropriate rewards are in place.
Behavior of knowledge sharing can be encouraged when the employees realize that
knowledge-sharing is valuable for them. Sharing knowledge helps employee do their jobs
more effectively. Moreover, it helps them keep their jobs; helps them in their personal
development and career progression; rewards them for getting things done (Newell et al.,
2002).
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4. Analysis
4.1 Summary of the case studies
4.1.1 Case study 1
The WISECARE Project
(From http://wisecare.nurs.uoa.gr/)
The WISECARE, a European Commission funded project, was created by many
European partners including the Glasgow Caledonian University, Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven, Teallach Limited, the University of Kuopio, HISCOM from the Netherlands,
the University of Athens, and Arthur Andersen Inc. This joint venture was named from
"Work flow Information Systems for European nursing CARE".
The project began in January 1997 and ended in June 1999. The main purpose of
WISECARE was to develop the systematic use of electronic patient records for clinical
nursing data and to improve cancer nursing practice across Europe through the
utilization of state of the art information technology. Cancer nurses from 10 countries
and 17 units (in-patient, out-patient, ambulatory care, medical and surgical oncology)
were participated in the project. These European partners tried to pool information
together and share among them. This has led to the development of knowledge-based
"best practices" in nursing care. It also allowed partners to compare and measure their
performances against the best practices of other institutions.
WISECARE is an information technology tool. Benefits that associated with information
technology are higher efficiency, error reduction, better communication and easy
documentation. The real potential was not only found in the information technology
systems, but in its benefits to organise nursing in new and creative ways that has never
been done before. Three ways that have been changed from utilizing WISECARE are as
follows:
1. The change from knowledge dissemination to knowledge sharing.
2. The change from individual knowledge to organizational knowledge.
3. The change from deductive prescriptive knowledge to inductive experience-based
knowledge.
In WISECARE, tools will be developed for the exploitation of clinical databases to
support clinical decision making.
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Figure 2: Wisecare project developed by Paween.
4.1.2 Case study 2
HSBC
(From http://www.ikmagazine.com)
HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world. Its
Headquarter is in London, UK. HSBC's international network consists of over 9,500
offices in 76 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas,
the Middle East and Africa.
Through an international network linked by advanced information technology and the
rapid growth in e-commerce, HSBC provides a comprehensive range of financial services
including personal financial services; commercial banking; corporate, investment banking
and markets; private banking; and other activities.
With a highly successful tradition dating back over 150 years, the firm is now ranked the
number two after Citigroup. In 2002, HSBC created a small specialist KM unit. It is
located within a new reorganized human resources function.
WISECARE Project
Nurse Managers & Nurse Staffs
Practice Policies
Organizations
Nurse
Practice
Policies
The shift from
knowledge
dissemination to
knowledge sharing
The shift from individual
knowledge to org. knowledge
The shift from deductive
prescriptive knowledge
to inductive experience-
based knowledge
22. 21
HSBC is not an organization in crisis to use KM for solving problem. Knowledge
management is brought to improve an already very well-functioned business that
delivered $6bn pre-tax profit at the last count. The size and power of HSBC should have
had potential to use the collective wisdom. Moreover, the ability of its global workforce
is an area where KM should be able to have a key contribution.
One year later, the strategy of driving KM through an autonomous unit disappeared.
There is no KM unit. However, the organization did not stop working on knowledge
management.
The short-termed KM unit was launched to introduce an electronic expertise-location
tool and the development of the e-directory. The unit also conducted the first ever
knowledge audit, and introduced several knowledge-acquisition projects to reduce
business risks and capture expertise. The knowledge-audit process was involved
knowledge mapping and filled key knowledge gaps in a particular business unit. These
activities increased the recognition of KM issues.
Knowledge-acquisition projects (Kaps) continue to be used to download experience and
wisdom from existing staff before they leave the business into an accessible database
format so that their organizational memory remains current. The benefit is twofold. It
made the senior staff feel valued during their outstanding careers. It also helped
newcomers in the organization to learn faster.
However, the unit was unable to manage the KM tools and techniques successfully
because most managers believed that they had enough to handle already. In addition, the
time limitation for most commercial organizations to deliver beneficial results within one
quarter is a pressure to the project as the utilizing time can take up to three to five years.
There is a range of restricting factors to be dealt with by the pioneering KM practitioner
as follows:
The first problem came from the lack of understanding on the non-KM senior managers.
In the early stage, the unit had to spend most of its time explaining what it is before it
can get on and do it. The unit later published a KM brochure to solve this problem. This
helped raising awareness.
The second problem is the investments in KM programs fail to meet the criteria of the
requirement to show a positive return on investment in short-term perspective in many
commercial organizations.
The final obstacle for KM in large organizations is the culture. In traditional
organizations, organizational culture still depends on the established and highly respected
hierarchy and procedures still dominates.
23. 22
4.2 Data analysis
The analysis has divided into three main parts to answer three research questions.
4.2.1 The importance of knowledge management in service
companies
Service industry is complex, and involves highly specialized professional knowledge
(Nah, Siau and Tian, 2005). In the case of WISECARE, it is categorized in the health
care service sector. The project utilized knowledge management by allowing nurses to
communicate and compare their current practices and patient outcomes across Europe.
Knowledge management is brought into the health care service industry with two major
goals:
1) Increased productivity
Kearney et al. (2000) stated that adopting knowledge management in health care services
allows complicated issues such as patient care problems to be addressed. Collaboration in
information of many hospitals like WISECARE project helps to gain access to larger
groups of nursing staff with varying skills and abilities. The pooling of human resources
in this way can expand nursing knowledge that will impact on better patient care. In
addition, acquiring larger patient sample sizes with diverse locations and several care
procedures also prevents the delay in replicating the studies. The resource sharing
prevents unnecessary work that can produce considerable cost which leads to the gain in
financial benefits (Kearney et al., 1998).
WISECARE project was brought state-of-the-art information technology systems to
assist knowledge transfer. The fast communication has impacted on improving
managerial decision making and launching new nursing practice (Kearney et al, 2000).
2) Mutual learning and support
Involvement in the collaborative project like WISECARE offered not only the chances
for nurses to learn but also the opportunity for nursing profession to develop (Kearney
et al., 2000). As participants came from different educational backgrounds and acquire
diverse working experience, mutual learning and sharing is often an outcome of
knowledge sharing.
The WISECARE project collaborated through the use of a supportive network that
allowed all participants to support each other. They can discuss their clinical concerns
and find solutions to solve the problems via email. The flexibility of this medium suited
for nurses in multiple sites as they can communicate at a time convenient for them (Alavi
and Leidner, 1999). In addition, supportive links allowed them to build strong working
relationships. The combined skills of the nurse team also build the complementary
viewpoints to be explored within the project.
Knowledge management has initiated the new way of learning. The traditional ways of
learning is through didactically driven educational program and through personal
experience. This has moved away to the notion of life-long learning (Kearney et al.,
1998). Via communication network, the experiences of everyday clinical practice were
24. 23
shared. This enabled nurses in different health-care settings to examine their own
practice and that of others and at the same time integrate their findings into their clinical
practice. WISECARE project also tried to establish a knowledge database which can be
accessed by all participants. This database will be updated as practice changes to ensure
the similarity in care delivery.
According to Nah, Siau and Tian (2005), knowledge management is very essential for the
financial service industry. In fact, the need of knowledge management in this industry
might be even greater than other industries due to its heavy reliance on information
systems and customer contact.
There are two main purposes of developing knowledge management in financial service
companies:
1) Communication improvement
Many financial service companies including HSBC utilize knowledge management as the
way to improvement their communication with their customers and among their staff.
They adopted online knowledge-sharing activities such as creating virtual community
which involve both customers and company’s staff to contact in an interactive way.
HSBC managers expressed a desire to obtain competitive advantage from information
itself. Even though the vast amount of information flow and intense customer contact
are received daily, it will not make a strong impact for the service companies, unless
knowledge-sharing activities are developed. HSBC recognized about this issue. The
company designed the state of the art information technologies to help managerial and
professional workers to process the information. The infrastructure helps reducing the
overload of information by filtering only the necessary information (Alavi and Leidner,
1999). In addition, developing knowledge management in the organization will help
eliminating old or wrong data that is no longer recognized as valid knowledge (Alavi and
Leidner, 1999).
Knowledge management can help saving time for client engagements and problem
solving, enhancing staff participation, making the opinions of staff and customers more
visible, and better serving customers (Alavi and Leidner, 1999).
2) Efficiency gains
Knowledge management has led to cost reduction, increased sales, personnel reduction,
higher profitability, ensuring consistent proposal terms for worldwide clients. For
example, the financial service companies now offer service transaction via the Internet.
HSBC is successfully developing this method. The firm benefits as it is faster, cheaper,
and easier to customize than traditional methods. Moreover, HSBC realizes that
acquiring knowledge about customers, including their demographics, preferences, and
behavior patterns is useful for developing marketing campaigns as well as new
promotions to maintain existing customers and reach new target markets (Nah, Siau,
Tian, 2005).
To increase customer loyalty, many studies suggest the need to build a strong virtual
community. This is indicated as another way of obtaining good knowledge-sharing
mechanisms. In the financial service industry, this makes a strong case for developing the
systematic customer services.
25. 24
4.2.2 The utilization of knowledge management to gain competitive
advantage
Based on Behrmann (2005), the service companies develop Knowledge Management
concepts into practice tasks as follows:
1) Recruiting and retaining top people
Generally, the service-based organizations often compete in their sectors based on their
ability to solve complicated problems and provide solutions for customers. These
companies tend to organize themselves by attracting and retaining knowledgeable
employees. Sustaining professional employees is very crucial for achieving competitive
advantage in the long term.
From the first case, participants in WISECARE project are nurse staffs and many nurse
managers in Europe who are well-educated and professional in their career paths. While
vast amounts of health-related knowledge and information are generated from them,
keeping up with this developing knowledge is their full-time job. Thus, sharing
information relevant to clinical practice could give clinicians the opportunity to have a
working knowledge of the recent developments necessary to inform their practice.
2) Creating structures that allow continuously enhancing and broadening
capabilities
Within the WISECARE projects, the participants realize that if the nature of the
collaborative relationship is not supportive of individual group members expressing their
fears and uncertainties, both the project and the individual will suffer. It is essential that
team members reflect on why they feel the way they do and discuss these feelings with
the team. The concepts of mutual respect and acknowledging cultural differences are
integral to the project and these have allowed management teams to deal with any
sensitive cultural issues.
In the case of HSBC, it created a small specialist KM unit located within a re-organized
human resources department. Successes achieved in the short time that the knowledge-
management unit was fully up and running included the introduction and development
of a group-wide e-directory, pioneering the introduction of an electronic expertise-
location tool. They also conducted the knowledge audit, and introduced several
knowledge-acquisition projects to decrease business risks and capture proficiency. All of
which led to significantly raising the profile of KM issues.
3) Requiring external sources
The WISECARE website contains links to reputable cancer-related websites that are
relevant for cancer nurses. Thus, it is saving valuable time when searching for
information. Nurses visiting these sites are able to share the information that they found
with colleagues. Moreover, the nurses from the clinical sites have shared their nursing
protocols and guidelines for specific patient problems with others by using the
communication via internet, email, and projects’ data collection tool.
To benchmark, HSBC look at other companies that are considered to be knowledge-
management leaders in their industry and copy their system. They also try to imitate KM
of other leaders in other industries. From this point, competitors are also their external
knowledge sources.
26. 25
4) Acquiring leadership
Shared vision
Not only does Knowledge management have a major impact on the knowledge base of
clinical nurses across Europe, it also remarks the ways the management team of
WISECARE project changing their process of decision making from isolating to sharing
among groups. As the nurses chat and share information among others about their
experiences of the every day work and practices and therefore identify the most effective
interventions. This increased knowledge has influenced clinical practice and resulted in
an improvement in patients’ symptom outcomes. This demonstrates the process and
value of nursing.
At HSBC, while it found a good supply of people who were willing to help answer
questions, many people do not want to ask the questions that would actually save a hard-
pressed executive real time and effort. This situation always happens especially in large
organizations where people have ego themselves and do not want to ask for help. Thus,
the culture has to support people to admit failure and ask for help when they need it.
Empowerment
From WISECARE case, nurses value the opportunity and advantages of participation in
the knowledge management project brought to them. They report a sense of
empowerment and a vision for the future.
Human Resources rewards can help empower people at HSBC when HR rewards are
tied into knowledge-management activities, such as sharing and building knowledge. It
can help encouraging and motivating people to share their knowledge.
Trust, ownership
Trust is consisted of: transparency and openness. It helps creating sense of involvement
and participation. In addition, it comprises fairness and transparent evaluation.
From WISECARE project, Knowledge sharing means that the experiences of the every
day work are shared among others and are explicitly available for others. In traditional
organizations, knowledge sharing is often done locally when teams are working together.
Information technology will extend these kinds of experiences across boundaries of
nursing units, hospitals and even countries. While taking care of patients, all nurses in the
network can evaluate their work and results, can give some advise and can use others
experience for their own work. Working and learning becomes the same experience
because of their immediate transparency. When some of the partners are integrating
research results that prove to be effective, these can be easily adopted by the others in
the network.
As WISECARE expands in Europe, two barriers to knowledge sharing are culture and
language. However, these barriers have not been impossible to solve. In the absence of a
common European language, English was the language of the project. It should be
recognized that this is the second language for many nurses participating in the
WISECARE projects. This has necessitated local translation of nursing protocols and
this task has fallen to the nurses involved in the projects to ensure that the meaning has
been reconstructed appropriately. Culture also has been considered. Within the
WISECARE projects, demonstrating mutual respect and value through open discussion
27. 26
and acknowledgement of cultural differences has often helped to ameliorate tensions and
anxieties. Discussions with members of the research team from all sites have allowed
anxieties to be viewed and frustrations to be expressed, and so managed sensitively and
appropriately.
Those clinical sites participating in the project were committed to the theory of
knowledge sharing. Thus, there were few problems associated with obtaining support
from colleagues about the process of knowledge sharing. It took some encouragement
for the nursing staff to put the theory into practice. As WISECARE is an IT initiative, it
primarily used e-mail communication. The clinical nurses preferred this as it allowed
them to communicate with each other at a time suitable for them, which was dependent
on their clinical commitments, and gave those who were speaking English as a second
language the opportunity and time to compose their thoughts. Initially, project support
staff had to encourage support nurses to question each other about local clinical practice
in relation to patient outcomes. However, this process became much more fluid as
clinical staff built relationships with one another and became more confident in the
process of knowledge sharing.
On the contrary, at HSBC it surrounds high degrees of suspicion and even a lack of
understanding on the part of non-KM-literate senior managers. Any new knowledge-
management function will have to spend most of its energy in the early stages explaining
what it is and does before it can get on and do it in order to create trust/ownership. To
solve this problem, they published an internal KM brochure which was a big success in
raising awareness.
4.2.3 The problems that service companies might anticipate during
the knowledge management implementation
WISECARE and HSBC faced three major problems as follows:
1) Handling information management
It is essential for the companies to ensure that they have standardized information that
obtained from the same method throughout the companies (Kearney et al. 2000). The
big organization like HSBC and WISECARE need information that is comparable with
other branches or other sites so that all the information can be measured in the same
way.
As the geographical distance between branches or sites made frequent meetings for all
those involved impossible, email has become the effective tool for communication,
particularly for the group of people with the difference in their native languages.
However, depending only on a main medium such as email can cause a problem when
the system is down. The variety of communication methods available to the staff such as
electronic mail, telephone, facsimile and post appears to ensure adequate
communication.
28. 27
2) Cultural difference
In most large multicultural organizations such as HSBC the culture within and between
subsidiaries will be varied. Each subsidiary may manage their organization differently.
For example, in WISECARE project, health care services in France, Italy, Greece, and
Belgium have high formalization, hierarchy with overall control held by one person,
whereas Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have another
management style. Their leaders have considerably less control as hierarchy, power and
status are downplayed and the focus is on tasks, merits and business (Kearney et al.,
1998). This has implications for conducting a meeting and organizational culture.
To cope with the difference in culture of each department or subsidiary, the company
will need to ensure that the understanding of managing knowledge is the same in all
departments and subsidiaries. In the case of WISECARE, the top management needed
to understand how to utilize it more effective and allow the time for their staff to
become familiar with the new system because the staff had to gain access to all resources
in organization, which led them to make the right decision at the right time.
Before applying knowledge management, the managers and staff, especially in the IT
department, need to be certain that they are ready to take part in the program; otherwise
the organization will face some problems. IT department of HSBC spent time and
energy to support the rest of the staff in the company to teach how importance of the
knowledge management. In addition, the differing expectations of individuals within the
companies can cause conflict of interest. The mutual concept needs to be addressed
since the first stage.
3) The availability of facilities
The availability of facilities such as access to computers and the ability to operate
advanced IT equipment was a requirement for both cases to involve in the knowledge
management process. Some companies need to invest the enormous amount of money
for their staff not only for the infrastructure but also for campaigning and encouraging
their staff to use it. Moreover, the support program needs to be invested in the early
stage so that the system can process continuously. However, access alone is not enough
to develop the knowledge management. The staff needs time to learn and to be trained
for this new process.
29. 28
5. Conclusions and reflections
5.1 Conclusion
Traditionally, management consulting and professional services firms have been
considered knowledge-intensive firms and therefore interested in knowledge
management (Alavi and Leidner, 1999). However, knowledge management is not just for
consulting and professional services firms. Knowledge has currently been recognized
from other industries as the company’s main asset. In cases of WISECARE project and
HSBC, the advancement of information technology gives new ways to create knowledge
and opportunities to improve the ability to manage and utilize knowledge. Via the
Internet, information about company can be revealed to the public and information
about customers, suppliers, and markets can be gathered easily (Nah, Siau, and Tian,
2005). However, these advantages may cause some challenges to the company as it may
become overwhelmed by the volume of information and may not know how to use it for
the company’s advantage (Alavi and Leidner, 1999).
The thesis highlights the importance of developing knowledge management, which are
increasing in productivity, creating new way of learning, improving communication and
gaining efficiency. The thesis also focuses on how the service companies applying the
knowledge management. However, some problems such as difference in culture, the
availability of facilities, and the standardized information can occur during the
implementation. Both WISECARE and HSBC recognized, evaluated and tried to
confront their problems in different ways. In general, this thesis concludes that the
advantages of developing knowledge management outweigh the disadvantages. The
thesis has gained reliability from using many sources related to the case studies including
web sites, journals, and books to crosscheck the data. It has also acquired the validity
from finding the same common problems and barriers between the two cases.
I believe that recognizing the potential of knowledge management will encourage other
companies to develop this system. However, the difference in applying the knowledge
management depending on type of employees, history, structure and culture of company.
The key is making sure that people, particularly in top management, understand the
advantages of knowledge management and what makes it useful. The future research
should determine the ways to overcome these problems and should examine how
knowledge management benefits other service sectors such as education, traveling and
transportation to understand the whole picture of the service industry.
5.2 Reflections over this thesis work
In this thesis, I have conducted the comprehensive literature of knowledge management
and culture. The information is very useful for others’ reviewing as I have covered all
related concepts. Besides, using comparative case studies, one kind of qualitative method,
has showed the difference and the similarity of two service sectors. This can be the
overview for others to understand knowledge management in practice. In addition, the
notion of my analysis can help filling some gaps in knowledge management and service
industry.
30. 29
Developing this thesis, I have gained the in-depth knowledge of this topic and
understood how to conduct the research. There are many methodologies to choose from
qualitative and quantitative methods. Due to time limitation and working independently,
it may not be possible to conduct the thesis by deploying many research methods. Using
survey or interview needs time and access to the sample, especially if they are big
companies, the chance to gain access to the data will be much lower.
One of the difficulties that I anticipate is selecting the sample from all kinds of
businesses in service industry. The hospital and bank were chosen because these sectors
are becoming the main players of knowledge management. However, they are only a part
of representatives of service industry. There are still more interesting representatives that
should be studied. I believe that collecting the information from various companies in
the same industry can provide some similar patterns.
However, my thesis has some flaws. Using other people’s data made it much more
difficult for analysis as I could not have all the information I needed. The analysis is not
completely satisfied as I could cover only the basic theoretical part. Should I have more
time and resources, I will choose the method that I can collect the data by myself.
Moreover, I will deploy both qualitative and quantitative research by interviewing,
observation and pilot study in some small companies. Quantitative method can help
measure some concepts that individuals give different meanings to become more
objectivity. For example, “improvement” in some cases mean higher customer
satisfaction rate, but others probably refer to achieve beneficial results within short
period. Under this circumstance, doing both methods will provide more concreted result.
31. 30
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Appendix
Case study 1
The WISECARE Project
(From http://wisecare.nurs.uoa.gr/)
In September 1995, the European Commission DG XIII launched a call for telematics
projects for resource management in hospitals. The WISECARE project, meaning
"Work flow Information Systems for European nursing CARE", is submitted by several
European partners and is retained for funding. The project has started in January 1997
and lasted until June 1999. The goal of WISECARE is to systematically use clinical
nursing data stored in electronic patient records. Electronic patient records have been
used for communication purposes and individual patient care. In the WISECARE
project, they are further exploited for clinical and resource management.
The project uses a work flow information model. In WISECARE the diversity of the
patient population, the variability of care, patient outcomes and nursing resources are
recorded. Pooling of information among partners has led to the development of a
knowledge base of "best practices" in nursing care. This allows participants to compare
and measure their performances against best practices of other institutions. Networking
will be supported by top of the line telematics. WISECARE meets the needs of many
nurse managers in Europe dealing with questions of nursing workload and nurse staffing
to ensure better quality care.
The validation and demonstration of WISECARE focus on oncology care. The Centre
of Health Services & Nursing Research, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, will serve as co-
ordinating partner for this project. The European Oncology Nursing Society (EONS) is
actively involved and represents the users in all stages of the project.
The Glasgow Caledonian University is involved in the Data Warehousing. They are
involved in data definitions, training and data collection. The Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven will analyse the data and build the information feedback model in collaboration
with An Teallach Limited, an innovative software firm in Scotland. The University of
Kuopio is taking care of measuring patient outcomes. Patient outcomes will be defined
according to self care abilities, quality of life and patient comfort. HISCOM, The
Netherlands is evaluating the WISECARE model in relation to changed professional
behaviour and better patient outcomes and resource use. The University of Athens will
take care of the project networking. Arthur Andersen Inc. do the project management.
The WISECARE model will be built and tested in 5 validation oncology sites in various
EU-countries. It will be demonstrated in another 5 oncology sites.
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Impact of information technology on nursing knowledge
WISECARE is an information technology tool. It means that processes that traditionally
have been performed by pen and pencil, classroom teaching methods and verbal
communication are supported and even taken over by information technology. Benefits
that often have been seen associated with information technology are higher efficiency,
reduction of errors, more qualitative communication and better documentation. It is
likely that the same benefits will be gained from WISECARE.
The real impact of information technology is, however, not in the automation of existing
processes but on the discovery of new ways of organisation and living. It let people do
important things that they couldn't do before. The difficulty is that because the new
possibilities are beyond the scope of reference of most people, it is difficult to convince
them of their possible use.
The real power lies not in the information technology itself, but in its potential to
organise nursing in new and creative ways that couldn't be imagined before. Three shifts
that are supported with WISECARE are as follows:
1. The shift from knowledge dissemination to knowledge sharing.
2. The shift from individual knowledge to organisational knowledge.
3. The shift from deductive prescriptive knowledge to inductive experience-based
knowledge.
Shift from knowledge dissemination to knowledge sharing
The traditional way of acquiring knowledge is through education. Young people go to
school and learn to read and write. They learn about history, mathematics, languages,
culture. Another way of learning is by own experience. When they are babies their
mothers teach them what is good and bad, what is cold and hot. Experiences are used to
strengthen what they have learned. When they grow up they are learning by experience
and trial and error. That is also the way it is going in real professional live. Nurses are
educated and trained in nursing schools. In their professional lives, they are learning by
experience. Because the body of knowledge in all domains of professional live, including
nursing, is growing exponentially, emphasis has been put more and more on continuing
education or "lifelong learning". The decline in the proportion of young workers means
that the skills of the adult workforce will become more important: over 80% of the
workforce in the year 2005 is already in the labour market. Thus, the useful knowledge
has a half-life time as long as ten years, the intellectual capital is then depreciating at 7%
per year with a corresponding reduction in effectiveness of the workforce. This is much
higher than the 2% annual entry of young people. In the domain of information
technology, knowledge is doubling every 2.5 to 3 years. So 10 years after graduation, a 32
year old engineer is working where 80% of the knowledge he is using has been
discovered since he graduated. Only 2% of the active workforce is renewed every year by
the annual entry of young people. All these evolutions put much weight on continuing
education. Some countries, such as Belgium, even decided to reduce the duration of basic
professional education to put more weight on continuing education.
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Continuing education is traditionally organised in the same way as basic training. It is
based on traditional knowledge dissemination techniques. Courses are organised by
universities and professional bodies lead by experts in the field. Nowadays adult learning
techniques are introduced giving less weight on teaching and more weight on experience
based learning by interactive learning methods, project work etc.
Even when these most advanced teaching methods are used, it is still a traditional way of
learning. It means that roles of teachers and learners are still kept separately. Secondly, it
means that education is a process that stands beside the normal process of working and
building on working experience.
Knowledge sharing is an obvious paradigm shift in continuing education. Knowledge
sharing means that the experiences of the every day work are shared among others.
Making these experiences explicitly available for others, make them learning experiences
beyond the individual learning experience. In traditional organisations, knowledge
sharing is often done locally when teams are working together. Information technology
will extend these kinds of experiences across boundaries of nursing units, hospitals and
even countries. While taking care of patients, all nurses in the network can evaluate their
work and results, can give some advise and can use others experience for their own work.
Working and learning become the same experience because of their immediate
transparency. When some of the partners are integrating research results that prove to be
effective, these can be easily adopted by the others in the network, when they show to be
effective.
WISECARE provides a knowledge sharing environment by using network software such
as Lotus Notes and Internet. The local data are stored locally but continuously
exchanged on the network within a commonly agreed framework.
Shift from individual knowledge to organisational knowledge
Knowledge traditionally has been seen as something that is individual. There is some
theoretical 'body of knowledge' as the collection of the scientific literature on a certain
domain. This body of knowledge can be summarised in handbooks and articles. The
problem however is that the volume of information out of which knowledge is derived,
is changing extremely quickly. The volume of new written material has long been far
beyond any one person's capacity to read, learn and apply. Even for experts, it becomes
impossible to have a state-of-the-art overview of the domain of interest. It leads to a
wide variety of knowledge of the professionals. It has been shown that this heterogeneity
in individual knowledge of healthcare workers is a key problem in health care.
Knowledge has become a key resource in the health care sector and has to be managed
as a strategic resource and not left to the individual initiative of health practitioners.
Individual knowledge is very vulnerable. When an experienced individual practitioner
becomes sick or is leaving his job, there is a big loss in knowledge for the organisation.
Knowledge comes about when a person considers, understands and uses information in
combination with his or her own experience and perception. The primary instruments
for knowledge management are leadership, culture, technology and measurement.
Leadership means that the management of organisational knowledge is recognised as
being central in the organisation's strategy. An example can be that individuals are
appointed, evaluated and even paid on the basis of the contribution they make to
developing the organisation's knowledge. Culture means that the organisation encourages
and enables the learning process and knowledge sharing. Technology means that all
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individuals of the organisation are connected and a knowledge bank is created that is
accessible to the entire organisation. Knowledge sharing seems to be very effective to
induce collective knowledge acquisition of the whole network. Measurement means that
indicators for knowledge management are developed.
One of the purposes of WISECARE is to build organisational knowledge. By making use
of information technology, the every day experience of the each nurse is captured. By
measuring interventions as well as outcomes, successful interventions will be
documented. This will make it possible, even when a nurse is leaving her job, that her
expertise, her successes are still available in the database and can be shared among health
care workers, other institutions. Experiences become contributions to the organisational
knowledge bank.
Shift from deductive prescriptive knowledge to inductive experience based
knowledge.
Knowledge in health care is for centuries being shared by practice policies. These are
recommendations for the purpose of influencing decisions about health interventions.
The basic problem addressed by practice policies is that most health decisions are too
complicated to be made on a one-by-one, day-to-day basis. For example, if a nurse is
confronted with a pressure sore problem, hundreds of questions can raise for the
treatment of this problem. Ideally, doing a research will take a few months. In practice
however, this patient is here and is waiting for an answer now. The hypothetical nurse
may have seen ten similar pressure sores before. Maybe she knows a handful of
anecdotes, but also knows that they can be very misleading.
Fortunately, the answer exists in using practical guidelines. Practical guidelines are written
in textbooks, journal articles, speeches, conversations in hospital cafeterias. The problem
is that practice policies are mostly not designed. Their main role is to summarise
information regarding standard and accepted practices. Because a policy is based on
aggregate behaviour, it pools the knowledge, judgements and preferences of thousands
of professionals.
Practice policies provide a natural pathway to convey the information about appropriate
practices to practitioners. They are the central nervous system of health care practice. A
well designed policy - such as washing hands between deliveries - can improve the quality
of hundreds of thousands of patients. A shift in a single policy - such as screening
women younger than 50 years for breast cancer - can shift a billion dollars a year.
Practice policies are extremely versatile. In addition to support individual decision
making, they are used to specify who should perform a practice (accreditation), where it
should be performed (inpatient/ outpatient), to whom it should be performed (patient
indications). Because the approach requires no formal research or analysis, policies can
be determined in minutes. A statement by a single practitioner in 1916 that "once a
caesarean, always a caesarean" is still dominating decision making in child birth.
Practice policies have 2 major drawbacks. The first is that it rests on a dangerous
tautology that what people should do (policies) is based on what some people are doing
(the standard practice). A good example is the policy for the prevention of pressure
sores. Lacking any better basis for a decision, most nurses, when reading in the textbook
that a pressure sore prevention programme should be indicated when reaching a Norton
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score lower than 12, will tend to follow that policy. This will reinforce the
recommendation in the next edition of that textbook.
The second drawback is that the consequences of a policy is just determined subjectively
without explicitly examining its outcomes, benefits, harms, costs. Pick up any nursing or
medical textbook, it is unlikely to find an explicit description on how this practice will
affect the most important health outcomes. E.g. what is the risk on developing a pressure
sores when a Norton score of 11 is assessed? Are the risks for developing a pressure sore
on the tail-bone or on the heels identical? The tradition in health care holds that
decisions can be made and policies can be written without this information.
Whatever the validity of this assumption in the past, it is seriously threatened today. New
interventions are appearing at an increasing rate, increasing the number and complexity
of choices. The evaluation of evidence is becoming more and more complicated, given
patient preferences, quality-of-life, patient satisfaction. There is a higher sensitivity for
costs, risks. It is unrealistic to think that individual nurses and medical doctors can
synthesise in their heads scores of pieces of evidence, accurately estimate the outcomes
of different options and accurately judge the desirability of those outcomes for patients.
Wide variations in actual practices and wide variations in beliefs among experts confirm
that the complexity of health care exceeds the inherent limitations of the unaided human
mind.
In the last decade, several new approaches to designing policies have begun to develop.
Four main methodological approaches can be distinguished: global subjective judgement,
evidence based, outcomes based and preference based. Global subjective judgement is in
line with the traditional method. The only real difference is that it is organised in global
consensus meetings rather that in undefined local staff discussions. Evidence based
methods will check explicitly the outcomes and consequences of a certain practice.
Outcome based methods are similar but differ because they would evaluate alternatives
to the practice. Preference based methods include the assessment of patients' preferences
for outcomes in their evaluation. All four methods have in common that the research
process and writing up a practice policy is explicitly separated from the real practice for
which these policies are designed.
So far, the existence of electronic records have not changed this practice. Most of the
electronic patient records systems do not go further than the communicative clinical
level. It means that all care for one patient is documented, communicated and stored for
some time e.g. nursing records for about 6 months. Data are stored for 2 main reasons.
The first reason is that the file can be reopened when the patient is readmitted. Secondly,
the records are used for research purposes to investigate the effect of a certain
intervention. In WISECARE the approach is somewhat different. The main goal is to go
beyond the interactive level and exploit the formalised experience and knowledge in the
database. When databases are linked up in the network, the body of knowledge that was
in earlier stage intangible for practitioners, will become available in a complete other way.
Practice policies which result out of scientific research, can be evaluated on their merits.
The unquestionable 'what if' questions will be answered by simulation. Cut-off points on
which value treatment is indicated, will be more refined. Risks can be evaluated on real
figures.
In WISECARE, tools will be developed for the exploitation of clinical databases to
support clinical decision making.