Putting theory into practice to build knowledge management systems

Abstract

This article describes our process for putting theory into practice to build knowledge management systems. We begin by discussing our de®nition of knowledge management and describe our theoretical foundation for developing systemic solutions for organizations to manage their knowledge. Next, we describe our process for creating a knowledge management strategy and how we design the technological aspects of a knowledge management system that will enable organizations to achieve their knowledge management strategy. We also describe how we provide training on the completed system and the organizational development interventions necessary to ensure that management and the members of the organization support the strategy. We conclude by providing an example scenario to illustrate how the resulting knowledge management system would operate in an organization's work environment.

User Interface Design as a Catalyst for Organisation Change

“…As the bespoke reporting toolkit used within the company had been in existence for nearly 20 years, there was a clear need to not only determine the required changes within processes to meet evolving company needs but also to drive these changes through the systems to ensure that analysts would follow the re-engineered workflows [11]. Indeed, the alignment be-tween re-engineering the technical and organizational processes was critical in gaining a successful outcome for the project [12]. There was also an identified need to integrate the company training procedures into the workflows, facilitating the adoption of past cases as training exercises for new analysts.…”

“…Therefore there existed challenges to both realign the technical and organizational approaches [12] and to integrate training features to facilitate cognitive collaboration [13] as critical developments to ensure success of the project. Initial investigations met with a level of resistance from the established members of the analysis teams.…”

A Framework for Reusing and Repurposing Knowledge Work in Organisations

“…The follow-on to this effort was the development of a collaboration application that fed the dissemination and application system for the DOE laboratories and facilities. The resulting system managed the life cycle -creation, preservation, dissemination and application of organisational knowledge (Salisbury, 2003). Recent work has focussed on extending the theoretical foundation for reusing and repurposing knowledge work.…”

Virtual Knowledge Sharing in Crowdsourcing: Measurement Dilemmas

“…It may contribute to increasing the efficiency of a given group of employees, coordination of other processes in a given organization (Alavi & Leidner, 1999;Salisbury, 2003), competitive advantage, cost reduction, accelerating realization of new product development projects, innovative potential, sales and income growth from new products and…”