Knowledge Management Cases in Asia

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Contents 1 Introduction to Knowledge Management Cases in Asia 2 Implementation of Knowledge Management in Asia's Beverage Industry 2.1 Abstract 2.2 Introduction 2.3 Literature Review 2.4 Research Methods 2.5 Case Study: Develop an E-Learning Portal for Company B 2.5.1 Introduction 2.5.2 Planning and Design 2.5.3 Implementation 2.5.4 Maintenance 2.5.5 Evaluation 2.6 Findings and Analysis of the Company B Case Study 2.6.1 KM Tools 2.6.2 KM Strategies 2.7 Conclusions 2.8 Acknowledgements 2.9 References 3 Knowledge Management in a Law Enforcement Unit 3.1 Abstract 3.2 Introduction 3.3 Literature Review 3.4 Research Methods 3.5 Case Study 3.6 Conclusions 3.7 Acknowledgements 3.8 Appendixes 3.9 References 4 A Case Study on the Effects of Implementing a Customer Knowledge Management System to a Public Transport Corporation 4.1 Abstract 4.2 Introduction 4.3 Literature Review 4.4 Research Methods 4.5 Case Study from Dr. Leung 4.6 Findings & Analysis of the Public Transport Corporation 4.7 Conclusion 4.8 Acknowledgements 4.9 References 5 Knowledge Management Practice in Telecommunication Industry 5.1 Abstract 5.2 Introduction 5.2.1 Role of Knowledge Management in the Telecommunication Industry 5.2.1.1 Serve as important business intelligence 5.2.1.2 Keep along as good practice captured 5.2.1.3 Manage relationships with key customers 5.2.1.4 Build up as valuable organization assets 5.3 Literature Review 5.3.1 Knowledge Management in Telecommunications Industry 5.3.2 Knowledge Management Tools and Strategies in Telecommunications Industry 5.3.3 Problems have been solved by employing KM practices 5.3.4 Future trends of Knowledge Management in Telecommunication Industry 5.4 Research Methods 5.5 Case Study 5.5.1 Purpose of KM implementation in P & W 5.5.2 Knowledge Management Pilot Project 5.5.3 Knowledge Management Real Practice 5.5.4 Knowledge Management Cycle 5.5.5 Knowledge Management Tools and Applications 5.5.6 Purpose of KM implementation in H&C 5.5.7 Knowledge Management Pilot Project 5.5.8 Knowledge Management Tools and Applications 5.6 Findings & Analysis of the Case Study 5.6.1 Success factor of Knowledge Management 5.6.1.1 Bring abstract to practical 5.6.1.2 Patience, Passion and Persistence of Management 5.6.1.3 Develop the Knowledge Share culture 5.7 Conclusions 5.8 Acknowledgements 5.9 References 5.10 Appendix 6 Knowledge Management Pioneer of Non Government Organization (NGO) in Asia(Group E) 6.1 Abstract 6.2 Introduction 6.3 Literature Review 6.4 Research Methods 6.5 The Case Study of NGO in C&Y 6.5.1 Background of C&Y 6.6 Findings & Analysis of the Case Study 6.6.1 The reasons of KM is needed 6.6.2 Implementation of the KM programme 6.6.3 KM strategies and tools in C&Y 6.6.4 Evaluation 6.6.5 The obstacles of C&Y in implementing KM 6.6.6 The benefits of C&Y in implementing KM 6.6.7 Suggestions 6.7 Conclusions 6.7.1 The importance of KM to NGOs & private sectors 6.8 Acknowledgements 6.9 References 7 Implementation of Knowledge Management in Telecommunication Industry 7.1 Abstract 7.2 Introduction 7.3 Literature Review 7.3.1 What is Knowledge Management ? 7.3.2 Knowledge Management Strategies and Tools 7.3.2.1 Customer Relationship Management 7.3.2.2 Service Management and Complaint Management 7.3.2.3 Taxonomies and document classification 7.3.2.4 Key Performance Indicator 7.3.2.5 After Action Review 7.3.3 Knowledge Management in Telecommunication Industry 7.3.4 Challenges of Knowledge Management in China 7.3.5 Future Development of Knowledge Management 7.4 Research Methods 7.5 Case Study 7.6 Findings & Analysis of the XYZ Case Study 7.6.1 Goals 7.6.2 KM tools and strategies 7.6.2.1 Knowledge Creation and Capture Phase 7.6.2.2 Knowledge Sharing and Dissemination Phase 7.6.2.3 Knowledge Acquisition and Application Phase 7.6.3 Results 7.6.4 Future Development of KM in the organization 7.7 Conclusions 7.8 Acknowledgements 7.9 References 8 A case study of how knowledge management be applied in a school environment in Hong Kong 8.1 Abstract 8.2 Introduction 8.3 Literature Review 8.4 Research Methods 8.5 Case Study on a secondary school in Hong Kong 8.5.1 Background of the school 8.6 Findings & Analysis of the Case Study 8.6.1 Knowledge Management Tools 8.6.1.1 Resource Bank 8.6.1.2 Assessment Server 8.6.1.3 Students' Server 8.6.2 Benefits noted by our interviewee of KM in school 8.6.3 The Barriers 8.6.4 Future development for KM in the school 8.7 Conclusions 8.8 Acknowledgements 8.9 References 9 Knowledge Management of a Chinese Dining Corporation in Hong Kong 9.1 Abstract 9.2 Introduction 9.3 Literature Review 9.4 Research Methods 9.5 The Chinese Dining Corporation Case Study 9.6 Findings & Analysis of the Chinese Dining Corporation Case Study 9.7 Conclusion 9.8 Acknowledgments 9.9 References

[edit] Introduction to Knowledge Management Cases in Asia

This e-book is created by forty-one education students at The University of Hong Kong. It contains actual cases of KM application in various Asian organizations, which includes the beverage industry, a law enforcement unit, a public transport corporation, the telecommunication industry, a non-government organization, a school, and a Chinese dining corporation.

In this e-book, the reason for KM implementation in the industries, strategies employed, problems encountered and some suggestions for future development are recorded. Some of the names and facts pertaining to the organizations may have been modified in order to protect the privacy of the people involved.

Sam Chu, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Programme Director, Bsc in Information Management
Division of Information & Technology Studies
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
International Conference on Knowledge Management , 6th [ ICKM 2009 http://ickm2009.pbwiki.com/] , Dec. 3-4, 2009, Hong Kong
Tentative Topics for ICKM 2009 (http://ickm2009.pbwiki.com/Tentative-Topics-for-the-Conference)
Submission Guidelines for ICKM 2009 (http://ickm2009.pbwiki.com/Submission-Guidelines)

[edit] Implementation of Knowledge Management in Asia's Beverage Industry

Chan Ying Wai, Andrea; Ma Kwong Kei, Coley; Tam Man Ying, Tammy; Wong Ka Wing, Karina; Yu Ching Yin, Jas

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[edit] Abstract

This chapter focus on the implementation of knowledge management (KM) in beverage industry in Asia. Various KM tools and strategies employed by food and beverage organizations are discussed in worldwide aspect. It can help getting an overview of the environment of the industry. Problems solved by those tools and strategies are mentioned too. A real case of e-learning portal establishment in an Asian-based beverage company are investigated to get deeper understanding on the planning, implementation, maintenance and evaluation of KM project. Future development trend of KM on an industry-wide base are covered as well.

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[edit] Introduction

This chapter will focus on knowledge management (KM) in beverage industry. In the literature review section, we provide an in-depth study on various organizations in the industry, and the KM tools and strategies employed by the organizations as well as the problems have been solved by employing such. In the last part of the review, we turn the focus on discussing the development trend of KM in the beverage industry.

In the core part of the chapter, we study a real case on KM. We have interviewed a consulting firm (Consultancy A) to collect information on one of their KM projects. In that KM project, Consultancy A works as a consultant and later a cooperator with one of the beverage companies (Company B) in Asia. Our study is focus on what KM tools and strategies are employed by the company, and how such can be used to improve its knowledge retention as well as the impacts may bring to the company.

Finally, through the literature review and the case study, we can see how the enhancement of KM concepts influences the organizations and their business. Moreover, the chapter also provides an important insight into the development trend of the industry.

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[edit] Literature Review

There is not a standard definition for knowledge management (KM). Kwahk, Kim, & Chan (2007) defined KM as the uncovering and managing of various level of knowledge within individuals and teams and within an organization and it aims to improve organizational performance. Sporleder and Moss (2002) defined KM with more details as an integrated approach to identifying, creating, managing, sharing, and exploiting all information and knowledge assets of an organization. Soo and his colleagues viewed KM in a simpler way; they think KM is a process of knowledge creation and the organizational performance outcomes that result from that knowledge (Soo et al., 2002) Although there is not a clear definition of KM, researchers believe that KM is an important source to maintain organizations’ competitive advantage (Brannback & Wiklund, 2001; Hagen, 2002; Sporleder & Moss, 2002; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

Hagen stated that the food supply chains are under increasing competitive and regulatory pressure to develop and maintain knowledge management systems that facilitate assurance of quality standards in food products (Hagen, 2002). The advance in biotechnology in food industry is a factor which led to intense competition and urge for quality assurance. Since some events came out in food supply chain, including the application of biotechnology on agricultural products and food processing, food safety has been users’ concern (Brannback & Wiklund, 2001; Hagen, 2002; Sporleder & Moss, 2002). The accountability and traceability of food ingredients (Hagen, 2002), handling process (Hagen, 2002), preservation (Sporleder & Moss, 2002), and labelling (Sporleder & Moss, 2002) has become more important. They are especially important for those food firms who want to enter European market, because TTA (traceability, transparency, and assurance) protocols have been launched. In current food supply chain, both customers and producers requires more information and knowledge (Brannback & Wiklund, 2001), and the need for enhanced flow of information from upstream suppliers to downstream customers are increasing (Sporleder & Moss, 2002). The competition among competitors in food industry has been changed from tangible assets to value added and wealth creation through KM (Sporleder, 2001). And the information and knowledge management of firm includes brands, reputations, and customer and supplier relationship (Sporleder & Moss, 2002). Due to the globalization of industrial market and technological advancement, the competition in food industrial market is intense. It is important for organizations to identify new knowledge to maintain their competitiveness. The change in dominant logic affects business processes and knowledge management processes. KM has been essential for success in food chains and companies need to develop social capital and good networks to facilitate their knowledge management needs (Sporleder & Moss, 2002).

• KM tools and strategies

There are varies KM tools and strategies in the food and beverage industry. Voelker viewed the enterprise content management (ECM) as KM tool which associates with document management, document imaging, web content management, real-time collaboration, e-learning tools, e-mail management or archiving, collaboration workspaces, work flow or work process automation, records management, digital asset management and report management (Voelker, 2005). Voelker suggested that beside XML-based management, content integration can provide a management layer above multiple content repositories and allow content reuse (Voelker, 2005).

A fast food leading company who offer food and beverages, the Mc Donald’s, established “AccessMCD” as a part portal and part content integration layer to give access to the core document repositories. The tool has improved the organization’s digital asset management capabilities and has provided a single source of corporate information. Before the establishment of central repositories, Mc Donald’s was facing problem of content replication. It was because the content and the platform were developed separately by independent franchisees and business partners from different countries and locations. It caused many problems to Mc Donald’s, including different version of documents and images for same products, competing platforms which reduce efficiency, and heavy burden on network bandwidth due to large amount of communication. Thus, core repository was developed to improve content consistence and platform consistence. (Voelker, 2005).

Mc Donald’s not only enhanced the content management, but also improved KM process. As Mc Donald’s is a multinational corporation, there were regional language variations for same product which caused communication inefficiency. Therefore, a global taxonomy has been built and information has been categorized in detailed level to solve the problem. Two-level search are provided to allow user perform searches in core document repositories and microsites. Moreover, some level of workflow automation is available with the system. If corporate authors indicate that the documents need translation, those documents will be automatically routed to translators. The time and labour cost are saved. (Voelker, 2005).

Another case discussed by Shein, Frito-Lay, a US snack food company, had built a KM portal on the corporate intranet. The portal not only acts as a single access point of information, but also acts as a collaboration workspace, an e-learning tool and communication channel. The portal has provided a space for knowledge sharing. Different content-including research abstract (performance scorecards) are given to different staff teams and customer communities. Staff can share summary of researches, latest news about customers, best practices or effective presentation on the platform. Before the occurrence of KM portal project, information was scattered in disparate systems, it was difficult for staff to capture useful information. There was not place for brainstorming and collaboration online. Support staff needed to response to same queries over and over. Salespersons from different offices had to send faxes to share documents, and they had to travel physically to meet retail customer. More important, turnover rate of salespeople was high as salespeople felt frustrated and disconnected. It was because there was not efficient way to collaborate salespeople due to geographic constraints.

The establishment of KM portal has improved the situation. It greatly reduced manipulation of large amount of data and faxes across different offices. Physical traveling has also be reduced. Besides, customers can access information through the Customer Community Portal (CCP) and the communication with customer has been improved. Besides, the CCP is successful in fostering communication and building relationship. Individual members feel connected with the rest of team and thus the turnover rate has been reduced (Shein, 2001).

Expertise profiles are also valuable KM tools in food processing industry. In the case of Frito-Lay, expertise profiles were created in the portal. Staff’s strengths and areas of expertise are catalogued and their contact information is provided. Before the existence of KM portal, new staff had to spend lots of time to learn skills and take up the work. The expertise profiles not only can improve knowledge sharing, but also an effective tool to assess gaps in employee’s skills and an important tool for maintaining knowledge during turnover of staff (Shein, 2001).

The above tools and strategies focus on identifying, storing and sharing knowledge for efficient and effective transaction processing. However, unlike most researchers, Alavi and Leidner believe that knowledge application is more important than knowledge itself in resulting competitive advantage (Alavi and Leidner, 2001). Kwahk, Kim and Chan agreed with Alavi, they suggested that knowledge application at top-level core business management tasks influence organizational performance more than KM in transactions processing. Therefore, their study focused more on knowledge integration across organizational units to support business decision making (Kwahk, Kim, & Chan, 2007). The study showed that a decision support loop is valid and useful for a beverage company. The decision support loop works by integrating individual knowledge into organizational knowledge to capture and define problems. Then, the loop formulates and tests knowledge model and finally generate decisions. In the study, a beverage company with $600 million annual sales volume needed to identify core factors and core activities which are at leverage points in decision making for increasing profit. For example, the company found that increasing ordering time and delivery time could be led by increasing market share. By using decision support loop with cognitive model, top management can estimate strength of the impact between causal factors and can target business problems (Kwahk, Kim, & Chan, 2007).

• Problems solved by applying KM tools and strategy

Companies in the beverage industry are able to make their assets available online by applying new KM tools to their business. In 2001, the coca cola company worked with IBM to create a KM system allowing its staff to make access to the marketing and advertising information by searching the digital media system of the company. According to M2 Presswire, the system consisted of still images, videos and documents for staff to retrieve and look for relevant information as reference and resources bank. The system functioned as a business tool enabling the company staff from 200 countries to work collaboratively on new projects at the same time as well as launching projects globally. Problems in the past including communication errors, limited working efficiencies and a lack of knowledge to the assets of the company were solved with the help of this system. It helped the company transfer its tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge while the company staff could work efficiently with this powerful system and the system allowed the company staff from all over the world to work together at the same time on developing new projects without the limitation of geographical barriers.

The use of KM theories helped beverage companies reduce their costs and make it a competitive advantage for their business. One case about the dairy industry in Australia involved some food poisoning incidents caused by dairy products. At that time, it was commented that there is “lack of enforcement of food standards by the states and territories.”(Soliman,2000) Therefore, the use of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) has been suggested to deal with the food safety problems. The HACCP system put the causes of food poisoning, the use of food ingredients, the involved procedures during the food production into consideration so as to detect errors and make corrections. According to Soliman, Dairy companies using the HACCP were able to make the quality of their products more transparent while the food safety issues become more tangible to manage. As a result, this KM tool helped dairy companies improve the quality of their products while they could improve their customers’ satisfaction as well as business performance.

Organizations often found themselves in a difficult position to improve staff relationships as well as equipping their staff with suitable skills for changes. Learning organizations that are willing to adopt KM technologies are able to deal with these problems. In a case mentioned by Fuyuno, a Japanese food processing company practiced a KM system to improve the internal communications among the staff. A drastic change in the company’s culture took place as the staff became more involved in the companies affairs. An atmosphere that staff were willing to share their knowledge was created while their staff were active in discussing the ways to improve the quality of their product and customer services. Apart from the sense of belonging brought by the KM system, the situation in Nestle made KM an even more vital component in its business. Although problems existed during the application of KM due to the differences in culture, language, individual learning needs and styles among the staff in different geographical division, Mr Dawn Waldron, the learning and training manager of Nestle, pointed out that staff were their greatest asset while the organization aimed to make sure its staff were equipped with important skills in order to excel in the workplace. Therefore, e-learning solution was used to make it possible for staff to develop skills from anywhere. Open learning courses or vital skills learning were provided while staff could learn what they have to learn according to their preference. Competitive in the business were maintained and intellectual capital could be developed through this continual learning system while costs could be saved through this one-stop-system for staff from different countries.

• Further development trend of KM on an industry-wide basis

KM in the beverage industry may still be in a developing stage but according to the Chan and Yao’s research paper (2007), the KM gap among the Asian and Western Companies is getting close. It means more companies in Asia may take the opportunities to apply KM strategies to their business. Chan and Yao’s research paper (2007) pointed out that organizations in Hong Kong are not aware of the importance of KM. They suggested that KM in Hong Kong is hindered by the effects of Chinese culture leading to a lack of willingness to share knowledge. So, in Hong Kong, trend for developing KM in the beverage industry could be adopting ways to motivate people’s incentive to share their knowledge in the system and encourage their active participation in the KM system. Possible measures may include reward system that gives prizes to staff based on their contribution to the system. Therefore, KM in Asia may focus more on culture instead of technology in order to achieve greater user involvement.

According to Buckman, trends for KM include connectivity and communication. In brief, connectivity is about the numbers of users on the network and quality of the network. Communication is about how people could communicate more efficient and unhindered by the limitations of language. The trend of KM in Asia is similar because companies may have to follow these two aspects to develop new directions to maximize usability of their KM system. Apart from establishing a virtual community, beverage companies in Asia may make use of mobile technology for its network users to access the system for sharing and retrieving knowledge. With the use of WiFi, connectivity issue of KM could be enhanced. Communication aspect could be improved through virtual discussion conference and forum. Besides, e-learning could be used by companies to arrange virtual training for new recruits and provide chances for their staff to practice their ability under different situation in virtual scenarios.

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[edit] Research Methods

• Literature Reviews

To know more about the environment, KM behaviour in the industry, we have gathered journal opinions about KM in food and beverage industry. In addition, cases from different multinational companies are studied to see what problems they faced and how they solved them when applying KM projects.

• Interviews

To gather information of Company B's KM project, we have conducted two interviews with Mr. Cheung, the consultant from Consultancy A, who is responsible for this project. Both interviews have lasted for an hour.

In the first interview, we obtained preliminary information of the background of Consultancy A and Company B. We also knew more about the environment and trend on applying KM in the industry.

In the second interview, we focus more on the KM project that will be implemented in Company B such as the details of the phases, the application of KM tools and strategies as well as change management.

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[edit] Case Study: Develop an E-Learning Portal for Company B

[edit] Introduction

Recently, we have conducted an interview with a consultancy company (hereafter Consultancy A) to find out how Knowledge Management (KM) is implemented in Asia’s beverage industry. Here, we would like to demonstrate Company B’s project and share our findings and analysis in the case.

• About Company B

Company B is a beverage company that has branches over several Asian countries and has over 10,000 employees. It mainly manufactures, markets and distributes drinks.

Recently, it has evaluated staffs’ performance. The statistics shown that their employees always committed repeating errors on their routine tasks and these kinds of errors caused over 35% drop in its business. Instead of mobilizing the salesperson to increase profit, Company B would like to avoid repeated mistakes by designing an IT platform for e-learning purpose. Therefore, it sought for advices from Consultancy A in order to increase profit as well as market share by enhancing the staffs’ performance.

• About Consultancy A

Consultancy A is a consultancy firm that is experienced on launching KM project in different size for different types of companies. After reviewing the Company B’s situations and requirements, it suggested that Company B hold a KM project rather than only an IT platform. It is because KM project can foster the culture of sharing that new knowledge can be built up to benefit most of staff members while IT platform can only provide staff the existed knowledge. Futhermore, tacit knowledge of staff can be captured and stored within the organisation.

Consultancy A acts as a consulatant at the begining of the project and later cooperates with Company B to hold the KM project. And that is the project we demonstrate here.

• About the KM Project

The project is for business purpose and the aim of it is to increase the market share and profit of Company B. Since Company B believes that the KM project is feasible to achieve that goal, the investment on the project is quite large. The whole project will last for almost 3 years and there are totally 4 phases. The first two phases are trial period and the last two will focus on evaluation and maintenance of the project and also the system. Ideally, the final product will be sold to other companies to reduce the development cost. The project is now on its second stage so there are still many possibilities for both sides to improve the KM project.

[edit] Planning and Design

• Project Outline

To start the project, Consultancy A had assessed the Company B’s needs, identified the problems of the existing system and planned what should be developed in detail. After that, Consultancy A decided to divide the project into four phases. Each of the first two phases will be held for about one year while each of the remaining phases will be held for half year. It is expected that around 80% of staff has used the system for 10 times or above by the end of the project.

File:KM groupA1.jpg

Phase 1

It includes the planning and the design of the KM system. Consultancy A first decides the details of the KM system according to Company B’s needs, for example, the functions and the contents of the KM system, the hardware and software needed and the schedule time. After planning, Consultancy A determines to develop the KM system in-house instead of purchasing outside because Company B wants the system to be more detailed and well fit to their requirements. By the end of Phase 1, an e-learning portal with over 80 virtual scenarios (i.e. the contents of the system) will be developed and started to implement.

Phase 2

It involves the implementation of the KM system. The whole system will be launched to the whole organization simultaneously. During this phase, the system will be reviewed continuously and the contents of it will be increased.

Phases 3 & 4

Both of them are about the maintenance and the evaluation of the system, but Phase 4 will focus more on the maintenance because the project is nearly finished that only some minor problems needed to be fixed at Phase 4.

• User Groups

It is not surprised that there are over 10,000 staff in a large-sized organization, but the important point is how to better manage the knowledge sharing in such a large-sized company. Different staff would have different knowledge needs. If they are not well categorized, they will hardly find what they want and they may obtain some unnecessary things. Consultancy A understood this point, so they had divided the staff of Company B into 3 groups- Generals, Administrators and Principals. The staff in different groups will have different contents and different interface design so as to avoid the above problem. The groups are:

1. Generals

• • Learners

The learners with different grades from different departments can access different contents. It is because the knowledge needs is varied with different grades and different departments that the learners belonged to. For example, the learners from the Account Department need the knowledge about recording the expenditure and revenue while those from the Sales Department need the knowledge about communications with customers. Besides, since the lower-graded(i.e. junior) learners need more practices and trainings to enhance their performance in various aspects, contents provided in the KM system for them will be more than that for the higher-graded (i.e. senior) learners. On the other hand, it is assumed that higher-graded staffs are interested in more specific contents since they are all experienced in dealing with general tasks. Therefore, contents for higher-graded will be relatively lesser and harder that are not suitable for junior-graded staffs.

• • Trainers

Similarly, trainers will be categorized by the subjects they taught. They will have several rights in the system. For example, they can edit the materials for the learners, post some questions and add some courses for the learners. Between the trainers, they can also share their questions for learners in the Question Pool (i.e. one of the KM strategies) and share their experiences and strategies on teaching different kinds of learners.

2. Administrators

The users of this group are responsible to monitor the order of the system and manage the knowledge in the system. They need to divide different users into different groups in order to set different access rights for them. They also need to develop some instructions to guide the users to use the system properly. With the Administrators, the system can be kept systematic and tidy, and so the users can enjoy a comfortable e-learning platform.

3. Principals

The users belonged to this group have the highest authority of the system. They can view everything in the system including the teaching materials, the results of the learners as well as the statistics that collected and analysed by the system. These users are mainly the top managements of Company B such as the Director of the factory and the CEO that concern most on the business gains led by the training results of the learners and their improvements made. It is assumed that the most frequent viewed design view of them is the statistics since it can present an overall picture of their staff performance.

File:KM groupA2.jpg

• KM Tools

In Company B’s project, Consultancy A indicated that to develop an electronic learning (e-learning) environment, the initial step is to develop a learning management system (LMS). The LMS is a software package, and it supports the back-end process of management and delivery of online contents to learners. It captures and stores all the data about learners, the data is an invaluable information source for future improvement and development.

There are three ways to obtain a LMS: outsourcing from product vendors, designing by internal staff (Company B) or designing by contractor (Consultancy A). In this project, the LMS was finally designed by the contractor and part of the system was internally designed by the company itself. This decision was based on several considerations:

1. User's Requirements

Company B requires a system that has detailed structure and is able to provide a wholly support in collecting, managing and storing learner's data. It is not available from the existing vendor’s general designed product. Therefore, they believe that only a tailor-made system could comprehensively suit their specific industry needs. Moreover, Company B could play a proactive role to maintain the quality of the contents in a tailor-made system.

2. Technology and Resources Availability

Compared with Company B, Consultancy A is an experienced company on holding KM projects. It has sufficient support in technology and resources (e.g. human resources) than Company B has. Therefore, Company B decided to pay for Consultancy A to develop the main stream of the KM system for them. It is more cost-effective than developing the whole system by Company B itself.

3. Company Confidentiality

There are different kinds of contents stored in the LMS and some of them are treated as strictly confidential information because they are business secrets and intellectual capital, such as sales strategies and products formulas. So, part of the system was designed by the company internal staff rather than Consultancy A in order to ensure the confidentiality.

4. Cost for System Development

Usually, system acquired from product vendors is the most economical way. However, the cost for system development is the least concern in this case and Company B has relatively high concern on the system competence.

In addition, the design of LMS and its contents should follow the software development model and international standard like [[1][AICC]] and [[2][SCORM®]]. It is easier to monitor the quality if it is self-developed.

• KM Strategies

An e-Learning Portal is designed as the front-end of the KM system supported by the LMS which let users (learners and trainers) interact directly. There are three functions supported by the e-Learning Portal:

1. Community of Practice (CoP)

CoP- formation of learning communities and providing space for knowledge sharing- is one of the KM strategies employed by Company B. Based on different natures and common interests of users, three communities would be formed in the sharing space, which are between trainers, between learners, and between trainers and learners. The trainers take responsibilities on one or more subject area(s) according to their departments and positions and the learners are also further divided by their departments and positions. In the sharing space, the trainers have the rights to add courses and raise questions to particular group of learners. All participators could share (upload) and get (retrieve) the information from the sharing space.

In addition, there is a filing system monitored by the Administrators to categorize files/topics in order to provide better information retrieval, users could also conduct file search in the system.

2. Question Pool

Question pool, also known as question bank, is a storage pool for users to share and exchange questions after training and e-learning lessons. Since the users have to supply a question to the pool for getting a question from the pool, the pool will be expanded after a period of time.

3. Virtual Scenario

Various scenarios were designed based on some actual cases provided by Company B. The scenarios are about users’ job nature, such as customer services, sales, system trainings as well as database management. For instance, a staff works in Sales department, and then he participates in a virtual scenario which is about promoting company goods to his potential customers in a convenience store. There are number of challenges set throughout the scenario, those challenges could be some common mistakes always made by the sales staff. He will attempt different challenges by directly typing in his responses to the client. The development of the scenario will be based on the staff reaction. Through the virtual reaction between the client and staff, data about the particular staff performance is collected.

Both existing and new staff will participate in the virtual environment to experience the scenarios as a kind of staff training. The virtual scenarios will be updated periodically in order to maintain users’ interests in the scenarios as well as meet their changing needs.

[edit] Implementation

• Change Management

Once the initial system is developed, it will be launched together in all branches of Comapny B in Asia. Consultancy A has pointed out that, like other kinds of projects, presenting a good change management in the implementation phase is very important. In Company B, user’s resistance to changes is considered as a major obstacle in the implementation phase and there are different variables should be concerned, prepared and solved throughout the implementation progress. Consultancy A mentioned that one should be done is to predict and prepare user’s concerns, which means to understand their worries and provide suitable action to comfort them. And the following is some methods to cope with the user’s resistance problem:

1. Form Focus Groups

Focus Group is considered as one of the most effective methods to collect quality data from users. Staff from different departments are selected to form focus groups. In the meeting, they could freely express their opinions (e.g. dissatisfaction about the system performance) and share their experiences (e.g. problems they are encountered) on the KM system. This kind of discussion could provide relatively factual and accurate information for Consultancy A to improve the existing system in the later phases.

2. Provide User Training

Users might have different levels of technical skill in using I.T. products. In order to reduce their resistance in attempting changes, training courses for the less computer-literate staff will be provided. On the other hand, the company internal I.T. staff might not have the skill to control and maintain the new system, therefore, special trainings are provided to them as well.

3. Provide Equipments and Other Supports

Cultural differences are another cause for user’s resistances to change. Since technology is not common in every region, some users may not have the opportunity to access to the Internet or use computers. To solve this problem, Consultancy A has suggested providing computers with Internet connected in workplace (e.g. activities rooms) for the staff, and arrange time for them to use the computers and access to the system. This helps presenting the system to the users as well as attracting them to use it. Consequently, it promotes the knowledge sharing process.

4. Launch the System Step by Step

The method used to launch the system will also affect user’s reaction. Consultancy A has pointed out that they will first implement the system in a small group of users, for example several departments or sections, and then enlarge the users group to the rest and finally to the whole. This step by step approach could avoid all problems raised simultaneously from users regarding the system , and provide sufficient time for the Consultancy A to solve the problems before promoting the system to other departments.

In addition, it could be seen as a promotion method which is the word-of-mouth marketing strategy. Good feedback from the primary user group could help spreading out goodwill of the system to the following user groups, as a result, a positive effect can be promoted and a trust can be built between users and the system.

• Promotion

Besides change management, promotion is another important issue that should be conducted in order to facilitate the implementation process of the KM system:

1. Top-down Approach

Encouragement from the top managements is very important when changes are in the company. Therefore, a ceremony for announcing the system implementation is hold by the top managements, in order to have a good start and increase staff’s morale.

2. Advertisements

Posters and official notices about the new system implementation are delivered to inform different user groups.

All these methods help to smooth the system implementation process, and also provide valuable data and information for system improvement in the later phases.

[edit] Maintenance

Due to the increase of the files and inovation of new technology, Company B paid Consultancy A for regular system maintenance. The maintenance includes system upgrade and debug. Besides, Consultancy A will also change the design of the system reports according to the requirements of Company B. Since the project is still in its phase 2 that no technical problem is found, the details of further maintenance measurement will base on the comments collected from users and develop mainly in phases 3 and 4. 

[edit] Evaluation

Evaluation is very important to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of a project. However, different evaluation methods have different advantages and disadvantages. For example, conducting questionnaire is easy to be analyzed and quantified while the data collected are relatively superficial. In Company B’s project, how Consultancy A eliminates the discrepancy between the data collected and the reality?

In phase 3 and 4, which are the two phases mainly focus on evaluation of the project, different forms of evaluation methods are going to be used to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency as well as the staff’s satisfactory level of the e-Learning Portal. They will be implemented in both phases.

1. Focus Groups

Some staff will be invited to attend to focus groups and they can have face-to-face conservations with the system developers to express their opinions. The system developers can also have a chance to respond to staff’s opinions directly and make customized advices.

Experienced staff are preferred to be selected since they usually fall in the group that is most resistant to adopt changes. If they can also adopt the changes, probably most of staff can work with the system. Therefore, their opinions are relatively more crucial than other groups' because everything will be better if their problems can be solved.

2. Evaluation Form

A standardized evaluation form will be distributed to those staff who attends to focus groups. It aims to collect their comments and feedbacks about the system. Since the form is standardized, the answers can be more focus on specific aspects of the system that can be analysed quantitatively.

3. Web Forum

To capture large number of comments and feedbacks from different levels of staff, a web forum will be launched to let staff express their opinions openly. Staff can post their opinions anytime and anywhere. In order to let staff focus on specific aspects of the system, the web forum will be managed by the system developers.

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[edit] Findings and Analysis of the Company B Case Study

Certainly, there is no perfect system that can tackle all of the problems occurred. After analyzing the case, we would like to point out some possible advantages and disadvantages of the KM tools and the KM strategies used or going to be used in the project.

[edit] KM Tools

In this project, Learning Management System (LMS) is used to capture data and those data will be used to analyzed then transformed to knowledge. In addition, for some highly confidential information such as details of the products or customers’ information, Company B will internally design a sub-system to store that kinds of information that will match with the LMS that is developed by Consultant A.

• Advantages

1. Tailor-made Information

One of the Company B’s requirements is to provide tailor-made information, such as the performance of staff on practicing virtual scenarios or actual skills they acquired from training courses. Thus, the LMS system is developed that can provide very detailed information for the company to check staff’s performance, skills as well as their competences. Unlike those systems brought from vendors, LMS can capture more detailed information and tacit knowledge can be captured or created after analyzing those detailed information that may be ignored by vendors’ systems.

Moreover, staff’s information like ranks’ competences, qualification can be also tracked as well. It is very useful when considering preferment.

Since the system is developed specially for Company B, it is suitable for the beverage industry that not vendors’ system can provide.

2. Secured Information

To ensure security of highly confidential information, Company B decided to internally design a sub-system. Information likes customers’ information, financial information, or details of products are unlikely to be disclosed carelessly.

• Disadvantages

1. Require More Budget

Because the system is not brought from vendors, extra resources are needed to develop the customized system. The cost is not only the money used to develop a system from the beginning but also labour force to develop it.

In addition, since the huge amount of data is kept in the LMS, lots of manpower as well as money are needed to maintain the system.

2. Require More Time

Same as the cost, to develop a new system that is customized to the company, more time is needed to achieve it. Also, requirements are needed to be well-defined at the begining of the whole project since things may different even there is only a little change, especially after the programming stage.

3. Affect Compatibility

The LMS developed by Consultancy A will combine with the sub-system designed by Company B, and that may have a risk that the two systems may not compatible. It is a serious problem that should be clearly defined before designing the system. Otherwise, delay of the project cannot be avoided, and that means an extra time and cost required.

To avoid it, adequate communication between project teams is very important. Moreover, all of the standards used to build the systems should be documented to ensure the compatibility of the two systems.

4. Affect System Performance

Since the information is so tailor-made and details, the amount of information stored in LMS may be so large that the speed of the system may be sacrificed. Besides the speed of loading data, retrieval of data may be affected as well. When building such kinds of system, project team should aware of them.

Regularly upgrade the system is a good way to maintain an effective and efficient system. Furthermore, classification system can be used to classify different topics posted by users. That can strengthen the power of search engines too.

[edit] KM Strategies

Without suitable KM strategies to embed KM process in staff's working process, excellent KM tools can mean nothing. To foster usage and popularity of the e-learning portal developed for the Company B's KM project, Consultancy A has designed a set of KM strategies to present the knowledge captured in the way that can suit different user groups. The KM strategies they used are Community of Practice (CoP), Question Pool and Virtual Scenario.

Here, we will discuss the possible advantages and disadvantages on applying those KM strategies.

• Advantages

Through embedding KM process into working process, KM strategies encourage users to share (upload) and get (retrieve) information from the e-learning portal interactively. The word-of-mouth marketing strategy helps to create and sustain the loop of knowledge sharing and increase the interaction between users in order to capture data about their activities on the portal.

1. Community of Practice (CoP)

• • More Interactive

CoP provides a common and multidirectional communication channel for users to share information, which encourages users who have the same interest (e.g. trainers and learners) or similar knowledge background (e.g. learners and learners) to interact with each other. Besides helping users to share information vertically and horizontally, the swap of information will become smooth and frequent once the users' sharing behaviour is cultivated.

• • More Accurate

Since the trainers and learners are divided into groups according to their department and position, therefore, they only own the right to access the information related to their jobs and duties. The systemic arrange of information (e.g. by trainer, subject or topic) also helps preventing information redundance. Consequently, it maintains the level of information accuracy in storage as well as retrieval.

• • More Accessible

The system provides search engine that helps in organizing information and providing file search function. This makes the information becomes more accessible to users.

2. Question Pool

• • Encourage Sharing

Question Pool stores staff, especially trainers' knowledge on setting questions. It encourages staff to share, as a result to expand the question pool. The information, such as learners' results on particular questions, are collected and stored for future reference, for example to examine learner’s performance.

Since staff is required to upload questions or other information related to the questions in order to get more questions uploaded by others, it motivates staff to interact and share their knowledge with others in order to create a positive working environment.

• • Help Capture Tacit Knowledge

Question Pool is a useful method to capture user’s tacit knowledge. Through collecting their question and the ideas or rationale behind, it can effectively capture the tacit knowledge of the staff. That's is very crucial when training new trainers. The tacit knowledge can be kept in Company B and that is the spirit of implementing every KM project.

3. Virtual Scenario

• • In Users' Views

i. Practices make Perfect

Virtual senario provides users a safe environment to experience actual scenario. Staff who always make the same mistake in actual situation can repeat the same scenario in a virtual environment, in order to improve their actual performance. On the other hand, it is especially helpful to newcomers who do not have such pervious experiences, and then they can experience the virtual one before coming to the actual one.

Through repeatedly practicing, users can realise their mistakes and later handle similar cases more confidently. This can bring them satisfatroy as well.

ii. Attractive Animations

Since those virtual scenarios are presented in animated graphics, it is very interactive and attractive to different levels of users. Using this kind of visual aids can stimulate them in memorising the working procedures, sales techiques or regulations of the company effectively.

Besides, the keep on changing of scenarios make the tasks become more attractive and interesting. This can let staff check if there are any updated scenarios regularly and increase talking point among staff.

iii. Access Anywhere Anytime

There is no restriction on time and location on accessing the e-learning portal. Therefore, users can flexibly arranges their time to visit and use it in their own pase.

• • In Management's Views

i. Save Time And Cost

From the management’s point of view, virtual scenario can save time, cost and even human resources on staff training since all the training lessons can be operated on the portal.

ii. Capture Tacit Knowledge Easily

It is a useful method to capture user’s tacit knowledge since data on staff's answers and other information like time used can be collected. Through analysizing those data, managment can have a vivid image on the staff's strenghens and weaknesses that help in assigning tasks to the most suitable staff. Suitable training emphasis can be identified as well.

iii. Capture Users' Behaviours

It is easy to capture data about user’s activities on the portal as well as their behaviours, such as time they access or duration. This kind of data helps management to understand staff's attitude on self-learning, and also provides an invaluable information sources for system improvement and future development.

iv. Increase Usage of the E-Learning Portal

The keep on changing of scenario helps to maintain users’ interests to the practice scenarios and the system usage can be increased. The larger sample of use, users from different grade, section and department, helps to increase the accuracy of the statistical analysis.

v. Promote Company's Goodwill

Staff’s performance is improved and the company’s goodwill is promoted consequently. It is the benefits other than profits.

• Disadvantages

It seems that the KM strategies bring a wide variety of benefits to the KM system. However, there are still some possible disadvantages. ‘People’ is the main cause of the possible obstacles. Some people may resist in using the KM system, or new technology, due to a lack of computer literacy or experiences in using the KM system; some people may be too traditional that they treat their knowledge and experience as their secrets, especially in Aisan countries. They are not willing to share since they want to keep these secrets and develop them to be their own competitive advantages. These are just the common obstacles that no matter which strategy is used in most of KM projects, the following will then introduce the possible disadvantages that are specific to the KM strategies used in Company B's project.

1. Community of Practice (CoP)

• • Difficult To Manage

It is difficult to be well-managed in the CoP because knowledge are easily duplicated while using CoP even there is a search engine. Ease of sharing knowledge in the CoP could be a convenience to users, but it can also be the inconvenience to users and the people who manage the CoP. It is because most of the users tend to share knowledge without searching whether the knowledge is already in the CoP. Duplication of knowledge will hence be occurred. The size of the CoP will be very large and the people who are responsible to manage the CoP will need more time and effort to tidy up the CoP.

• • Reluctant To Share

Most of the users lack concepts of KM. Some users may treat the process of sharing as a mandatory rule but not a helpful custom. They share the knowledge just because they are forced by the top management rather than they are willing to do so. Eventually, they will be reluctant to share knowledge with the CoP and do it perfunctorily, the concepts of KM and sharing culture will be more difficult to build up among users.

2. Question Pool

• • Repeated Questions

The questions may be repeated in the pool. Some trainers may not check whether the questions are already existed in the pool before posting up their questions since their intention is to get new questions from the pool.

3. Virtual Scenario

• • Many Resources Needed

The Virtual Scenario is needed to be updated frequently to increase the degree of entertainment and the degree of usefulness so as to attract more staff to use it for learning. If the scenario is interesting, practical and useful, users may enjoy it and then recommend to their colleagues, that is the power of word of mouth. However, in order to regularly update Virtual Scenarios, many resources such as labour force and time are needed. Besides, the size of the system will be increased since the number of scenarios is just increased continuously by updating the Virtual Scenario.

• • Less Possibilities On Answers

It cannot provide all the possibilities for the learners to choose since they are all multiple choice questions. This obstacle is commonly found in the cases that are related to the communication with customers such as sales. In some cases, the learners may feel difficult to choose the answer from the possibilities provided because their actual responses to the cases are not the same as any of the possibilities. Sometimes, their responses are also acceptable, but they haven’t been captured as any possibilities of the scenario.

Moreover, different people may have different responses to the same scenario; at the same time, customers may have different feedbacks to different responses. It is nearly impossible to capture all the responses and feedbacks since there are many variations of them.

• • Difficulties in Suiting Everyone's Learning Style

Different people may have different learning practices. Some people may like virtual scenario, a kind of visual stimulation, but some people may prefer to the real training. The outcomes will be greater if choosing the most suitable learning practices for the learners.

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[edit] Conclusions

KM project is involved in technology, process, as well as people of the organisation. Even the perfect system is built up, without embedding it into working process and the support from the top management and all users, or vice versa, KM project can not be successful.

From the literature review section and the case study, we can see that KM tools and strategies can be various to be used to implement KM in beverage industry. The consideration is that if they are suitable to particular company's requirements. Therefore, fully understanding of the industry, company as well as the users are very important before designing KM project. Otherwise, it is unquestionably self-defeating action on implementing or promoting KM concept to staff, especially in Asia that sharing is not a common norm.

Even it is still facing plenty of obstacles like reluctant in culture changes or behaviour changes, there are many experts in Asia, who have already realised the situation in Asia, devoted to promote KM and gain trust from lots of top management. With their support and promotion, we believe that KM concept in Asia beverage industry, or even other industrty, can be widely accepted from the top management to all levels of staff.

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[edit] Acknowledgements

We would like to give a special thanks to Mr. Cheung from Consultancy A for kindly sharing his experiences and knowledge with us in his comfortable office. We would also deeply appreciated Dr. Sam Chu, our professor and course lecturer, for contacting Mr. Cheung for us and advising us on writing the article.

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[edit] References

Alavi, M. & Leidner, D.E. (2001). Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: conceptual foundations and research issues. MIS Quarterly, 25(1), 107-136.

Brannback, M. & Wiklund, P. (2001). A new dominant logic and its implications on knowledge management: a study of the Finnish food industry. Knowledge and Process Management, 8(4), 197-206.

Buckman, R. H. (2005). The world is getting flatter - three future trends for km. Knowledge Management Review, 8, 4.

Fuyuno, I. (2004). Sour to Sweet. Far Eastern Economic Review, 167, 38.

Hagen, J.M. (2002). The knowledge management frontier in the global food system: discussion. American Agricultural Economics Association, 84(5), 1353-1354.

Knowledge Management Review, (2005). KM goes mobile: integrating handheld devices into the km loop. Knowledge Management Review, 8, 4.

Kwahk, K.Y., Kim, H.W., & Chan, H.C. (2007). A knowledge integration approach for organizational decision support. Journal of Database Management, 18(2), 41-61.

Lee, AuthorD. J., & Ahn, J. H. (2007). Reward systems for intra-organizational knowledge sharing. European Journal of Operational Research, 180, 938.

M2 Presswire. (2001). IBM: The Coca-Cola Company and IBM create unique digital media management system; Powerful knowledge management system gives Coca-Cola employees worldwide online access to a century of Coca-Cola Company marketing and advertising history . M2 Presswire, Retreived March 5, 2006, from ProQuest.

Nonaka, N. & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pollitt, D. (2004). Training is a never-ending process at Nestle. Human Resource Management International Digest. 12, 27.

Shein, E. (2001, May). The knowledge crunch. CIO, 14(14), 128.

Soliman, F. (2000). Application of knowledge management for hazard analysis in the Australian dairy industry. Journal of Knowledge Management, 4, 287.

Soo, C., Devinney, T., Midgley, D., & Deering, A. (2002). Knowledge management: philosophy, process, pitfalls, and performance. California Management Review, 44(4), 129-150.

Sporleder, T.L. & Goldsmith, P.D. (2001). Alternative firm strategies for signalling quality in the food system. Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 49, 591-604.

Sporleder, T.L. & Moss, L.E. (2002). Knowledge management in the global food system: network embeddedness and social capital. American Agricultural Economics Association, 84(5), 1345-1352.

Voelker, M.P. (2005, June). Reusing content without starting from scratch. Intelligent Enterprise, 8(6), 31-39.

Yao, L.J. , Kam, T.H.Y. , & Chan, S.H. (2007). Knowledge sharing in Asian public administration sector: the case of Hong Kong. Journal of Enterprise Information Management, 20, 51.

[edit] Knowledge Management in a Law Enforcement Unit

By Carol Wong, Pui-yin, Eugene Wong,Ting-fung, Irene Lee, Man Lui, Wayne Kwok, Yu-hin,Sammi Hung, Sau Man

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[edit] Abstract

Since starting on the road to Knowledge Management (KM) in June 2002, the law enforcement unit, that we are going to discuss in this chapter, has become a front-runner in the KM field. Many local companies and organizations have studied the experience and sought benchmarking with the unit. This is no doubt that without applicable strategies and tailor-made KM tools, the development of KM would not be success.

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[edit] Introduction

    “Knowledge is state of mind, knowledge is an object to be stored, knowledge is a process of applying expertise, knowledge is a condition of access to information and knowledge is the potential to influence action.” (Alavi and Leidner, 2001)

    Knowledge Management in the Asia Law Enforcement Unit discussed in this chapter is defined as “the discipline that promotes a systematic way of capturing, organizing, accessing and re-using of organizational knowledge”. As the knowledge management concept is relatively new in the public sector, it is not surprising to see that this concept is yet to be implemented in the law enforcement industry and the subject is ‘relatively unexplored’ (Colaprete, 2004). By nature, work of this industry is ‘dynamic, complex and stressful’ (Tan & Al-Hawamdeh, 2000), and covers almost every aspect of people’s lives. Officers of law enforcement industry, both at the frontline and at the management level in the command hierarchy, have to respond to fast-changing situations demanding urgent action. Officers have to be ‘proficient knowledge workers’ themselves (Tan & Al-Hawamdeh, 2000) in order to adequately cope with the vast expanse of their daily work, which for almost all law enforcement services comprises prevention and detection of crime, management of incidents, and community policing. For instance, the Asia Law Enforcement Unit discussed in this chapter is one of the pioneers in this field, and since 2002 it has implemented knowledge management to enhance the work efficiency and effectiveness, with the ultimate aim of turning into a learning organisation to better serve the city.

    The public sector is turning to knowledge management, having recognized that they are heavily facing competition in funding and from alternatives services. Increasingly, customers of the public sector are demanding higher service quality. According to Luen and Al-Hawamdeh (2001), knowledge management is thus a natural solution to improve operations and enhance customer service. Big corporation around the world have applied the knowledge management concept into their business. In 2001, the Law Enforcement Unit has included the knowledge management project in the Three Years' Strategic Action Plan.

    Knowledge is essential for all kinds of organizations. Unlike other inert organizational resources, the application of existing knowledge has the potential to generate new knowledge. Not only can knowledge be replenished in use, it can also be combined and recombined to generate new knowledge. Once created, knowledge can be articulated, shared, stored and recontextualized to yield options for the future. For all these reasons, knowledge has the potential to be applied across time and space to yield increasing returns (Garud & Kumaraswamy, 2005). Organizations are turning to knowledge management initiatives and technologies to leverage their knowledge resources. Knowledge management can be defined as a systematic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work (Kankanhalli et al., 2005).

    With the globalization of crime and the mounting global threat of terrorism, the Asia Law Enforcement Unit is facing much pressure than other government agencies before. In order to improve what they could or they should deliver to the communities, it is reasonable to say that the services provide must also embrace knowledge management in their attempt to outwit the criminals. Knowledge management is an increasingly important project with the service possibly involving substantial investment of resources, so it must be scrupulously examined to see how it can contribute to the overall efficiency and effectiveness of law enforcement activities.

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[edit] Literature Review

    In the knowledge economy, we see more knowledge firms emerging. And some existing knowledge firms redefining themselves to exploit and explore their knowledge resources. In public sector, law enforcement unit in many different countries has been already aware the significance of knowledge management in the past.

    Governments have become increasingly focused upon the setting of targets in efforts to improve the efficacy of law enforcement units’ performance. The primary mission of any law enforcement units in the world is to protect life and property, preserve law and order and prevent and detect crime (Luen & Al-Hawamdeh, 2001). Investigation units of a law enforcement unit represent a knowledge-intensive and time-critical environment (Chen et al., 2002). The activities and work carried out by law enforcement units are primarily in the areas of crime prevention, incident management, investigation and community policing. Crime prevention implies the detection, and hence prevention of crime. These activities can be carried out through both reactive and proactive means. Reactive measures such as roadblocks, spot-checks and showing police presence are routinely carried out by law enforcement officers as part of their investigation duties. Proactive measures include public education to help prevent crime. In Singapore, one of the law enforcement units’ officers also reach out to the community via grassroots and community agencies to educate the public on the latest crime trends and threats. Law enforcement officers performing both reactive and proactive measures effectively will need to know the latest legal and organisational directions regarding these functions as well as the latest information on crime trends and the corresponding knowledge about the detection and prevention of crime.

    Luen and Al-Hawamdeh (2001) find that the amount of information that law enforcement officers come into contact with in the course of their work is astounding. The needs of vast knowledge showed the growing importance for law enforcement officers to be a proficient knowledge worker, and they should able to access, assimilate and use knowledge effectively to discharge their duties. Presently, information and knowledge are captured within law enforcement units in various forms, ranging from computer records, to documented institutional orders, to the personal experiences of its officers. The crux of the issue is how to surface such knowledge and bring it to bear on the problems faced by law enforcement officers in a timely and effectively manner. This is where knowledge management principles and practices can help. It is thus imperative that law enforcement units such as the one in Singapore develops a coherent knowledge management strategy to ensure that such knowledge and information are made available to officers in a timely and effective manner, so as to enable them to perform their duties at an optimal level. In short, in such a complex and dynamic working environment information must be enhanced by an effective knowledge sharing system. (Luen and Al-Hawamdeh, 2001)

    With the increased adoption of information technology within law enforcement units and the increasing of overall quality and information technology competence of law enforcement officers, law enforcement units are well positioned to leverage knowledge management principles and practices. This complemented by the enhanced skills, equipment and empowerment given to the officers that will enable them to perform their duties at an optimal level. In discussing the scope of knowledge management in law enforcement units, Luen and Al-Hawamdeh (2001) mentioned two definitions of knowledge within the context of knowledge management. There are two types of knowledge that need to be managed within law enforcement units, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is used as guidance for law enforcement and decision-making. This type of knowledge is captured in the form of document (e.g. doctrines, law enforcement general orders and standard operating procedures) that have been verified and ascertained to be of value to law enforcement officers. The second type of knowledge is implicit or tacit knowledge. This includes the competence, experience and skills of law enforcement officers. Tacit knowledge is usually dynamic and fast changing as compared with documented knowledge. Regarding tacit knowledge, the scope of knowledge management in law enforcement units is primarily in the areas of creating and sharing knowledge and information. It has long been recognized that the most valued law enforcement knowledge has been acquired and organized around situational or street experience (Rubinstein, 1973). According to Luen and Al-Hawamdeh (2001), the more difficult issue to tackle is that of the willingness of law enforcement offices to create and share knowledge. There is a need for a culture characterized by openness, collaboration and sharing among law enforcement officers. This will require that law enforcement officers recognize the importance of collaboration and sharing knowledge with others. The responsibility to surface knowledge lies with everyone in the law enforcement units, as knowledge is generated in all phases of work.

    For example, in Norway, the Police Security Service replaced the Police Surveillance Service. In the U.S., a clearinghouse for foreign and domestic terrorism analysis – the Terrorist Threat Integration Center – was located at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) compound at Langley, Virginia, reporting directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. The center will fuse all appropriate information and send a summary report to the Department of Homeland Security. The reason behind these arrangements is that a special branch of police work, which seems extremely knowledge-intensive, is police intelligence. Lahneman (2004) suggests that intelligence agencies were the world’s first knowledge companies. Managing knowledge has always been the primary mission of the intelligence community’s leadership. Accordingly, the intelligence community can benefit substantially from knowledge management approaches. Several agencies have embarked on innovative, large-scale projects on upgrade their IT capabilities. The intelligence community has also experienced several high-level organizational changes and proposals for organizational changes.

    Knowledge collection activities require coordination to make sure that collected information gets to the right person at the right time. They also need oversight to ensure that each agency’s collection assets are so employed that the collection of potentially useful information is optimized. Optimized knowledge sharing where intelligence analysis is concerned can be more difficult. It is because unlike collection efforts, coordination is increasingly interagency in nature. Analysis related to terrorism and, in particular, terrorism against the U.S. homeland, is particularly dependent on fusing information from disparate sources. (Lahneman, 2004).

    According to Grover and Davenport (2001), most knowledge management projects in organizations involve the use of information technology. Identifying, nurturing and harvesting knowledge is a principal concern in the information society and the knowledge age. Effective use of knowledge-facilitating tools and techniques is critical, and a number of computational tools have been developed (Housel & Bell, 2001). While technology can be used with knowledge management initiatives, Ward and Peppard (2002) argue that it should never be the first step. Knowledge management is primarily a human and process issue. It has been argued that IT-based systems used to support knowledge management can only be of benefit if used to support the development and communication of human beings.

    Grover and Davenport (2001) found that by far the most common objective of knowledge management projects in Western organizations including law enforcement units involves some sort of knowledge repository. The objective of this type of project is to capture knowledge for later and broader access by others within the same organization. Common repository technologies include Lotus Notes, web-based intranets and Microsoft’s Exchange, supplemented by search engines, document management tools and other tools that allow editing and access. The repositories typically contain specific types of information to represent knowledge for a particular business function or process, such as:

  * “Best practices” information within a quality or business process management function;
  *  Lessons learned in projects or product development efforts;
  *  Information around the implementation of information systems;
  *  Competitive intelligence for strategy and planning function; and
  *  “Learning histories” or records of experience with a new corporate direction or approach.

    According to Davenport and Prusak (1998), more and more companies have instituted knowledge repositories, supporting such diverse types of knowledge as best practices, lessons learned etc. Moffett and McAdam (2003) illustrate the variety of knowledge management technology tools by distinguishing between collaborative tools, content management and business intelligence. Collaborative tool include groupware technology, meeting support systems, knowledge directories and intranets/extranets. Content management includes the internet, agents and filters, electronic publishing systems, document management systems and office automation systems. Business intelligence includes data warehousing, decision support systems, knowledge-based systems and workflow systems.

    With the aids of modern information technology (e.g. the internet, intranets, extranets, browsers, data warehouses, data filters, software agents and expert systems) knowledge creation, sharing and exchange in an organization and between organizations can be supported. Modern information technology can collect, systematize, structure, store, combine, distribute and present information of value to knowledge workers. (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998).

    Two examples of knowledge management technology in law enforcement units will be presented in the following. The first example is COPLINK described by Chen et al. (2002, 2003). COPLINK Connect is an application for information and knowledge sharing in law enforcement. The system uses a three-tiered architecture. The user access the system through a Web browser. The middle tier connects the user interface and the backend databases and implements the work logic. COPLINK Detect is targeted for detectives and crime analysts. The system shares the same incident record information as the Connect module and utilizes the database indexes it generates. However, the Detect system has a completely redesigned user interface, and employs a new set of intelligence analysis tools to meet its user needs.

    Much of crime analysis is concerned with creating associations or linkage among various aspects of a crime. COPLINK Detect uses a technique called concept space to identify such associations from existing crime data automatically. In general, a concept space is a network of terms and weighted associations within an underlying information space. COPLINK Detect uses statistical techniques such as co-occurrence analysis and clustering functions to weight relationships between all possible pairs of concepts. In COPLINK Detect, detailed criminal case reports are the underlying information space, and concepts are meaningful terms occurring in each case. These case reports contain both structured (for example, database fields for incidents containing the case number, names of people involved, address and date) and unstructured data (narratives written by officers commenting on an incident, for example, witness A said he saw suspect A run away in a whit truck).

    Several field user studies have been conducted to evaluate the COPLINK system. One of the studies is that a group of 52 law enforcement personnel from the Tucson Police Department representing number of different job classification and backgrounds were recruited to participate in a study to evaluate COPLINK Connect. Both interview-data and survey-data analyses support a conclusion that us of the application provided performance superior to using the legacy police records management system. In addition to the statistical data, these findings were supported by qualitative data colleted from participant interviews (Chen et al., 2003).

    The other application to be presented here is concerned with geocomputation for geodemographics (Ashby and Longley, 2005). Geodemoraphic profiles of the characteristics of individuals and small areas potentially offer significant breakthroughs in clarifying local policing needs in the same way they have become an integral part of many commercial and marketing ventures. Ashby and Longley (2005) conducted a case study of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. They found that geodemographic analyses of local policing environments, crime profiles and police performance provide a significantly increased level of community intelligence for police use. This was further enhanced by the use of penetration ranking reports where neighborhood types were ranked by standardized crime rates, and cumulative percentage of the crime was compared with the corresponding population at risk.

    Investigations of law enforcement units are complex undertaking that have both reactive and proactive dimensions to them. The knowledge required to effectively carry out an investigation is built upon “three pillars”, a team employed by the Singapore Police Force. These pillars are forensics, intelligence and interviews. A well-grounded forensic understanding of a crime scene is the foundation of any investigation. Intelligence gathering is a crucial activity for an investigation, particularly for proactive investigations into organized crime and/or terrorist related-operations. As regards interviews, the ability to derive relevant information from people through effective interviewing is seen by law enforcement units as an essential activity in any investigation.

    One of the research conducted by Adhami and Browne (1996) concluded that knowledge management systems are more important in problem solving than in  other primary activities of law enforcement units. Dean (2000) noted that knowledge management systems are more important in the thinking styles of method and skill than in the thinking styles of challenge and risk. And so Dean specified that law enforcement research efforts should be focused on developing knowledge management systems that concentrate on enhancing the activity of how “problem solving” takes place within investigations. A set of five basic procedural steps are proposed: collecting, checking, considering, connecting and constructing.

    According to Johnson and Scholes (2002), successful strategies are dependent on the organization having the strategic capability to perform at the level that is required for success. With different knowledge focus in the organization, different knowledge management strategies have to be adapted. Hansen (1999) mentioned knowledge strategies can be classified as: stock strategy, flow strategy and growth strategy. Stock strategy (efficiency- driven business) is used to solve known problems. The quality of the solution is found in fast and inexpensive application to meet customer needs. There is an accumulation of knowledge to improve efficiency. Competitive advantage is achieved in the ability to make small adjustments in existing goods and services at a low price it characterized by known problems and known methods for solution. Flow strategy (experience- driven business) solves large and complicated problems for customers, the problems are new, but they can be solved with existing methods in a specific context every time by effective adaptation. It is characterized by both new problems and existing methods for solutions. Growth strategy (expert-driven business) solves large, complex, risky, new and unusual problems for customers. There are continuous improvisation and innovation. Knowledge workers apply general high-level knowledge to understand, solve and learn. Learning from problem solving is important to be able to solve the next new and unknown problem for customers. So, knowledge of previous problems becomes obsolete. An expert-driven business is characterized by both new problems and new methods for solution.

    Knowledge is the most important strategic resource that law enforcement unit as a “firm” use to solve their particular crime problems. And the success of law enforcement work is positively related to stage of knowledge management technology and the extent of access to strategic knowledge resources.

    In response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, major government efforts to modernize federal law enforcement authorities’ intelligence collection and processing capabilities have been initiated worldwide. At the state and local levels in many countries, crime and law enforcement report data have rapidly migrated from paper to automated records management systems in recent years, making them increasingly accessible (Chen et al., 2003). Investigations of law enforcement units are often dependent upon information from abroad. For example, the intelligence communities of different countries cooperate and share their information and knowledge, such as the Mossad with the CIA (Kahana, 2001). According to Lahneman (2004), knowledge sharing in the intelligence communities after 9/11 has increased rapidly. Knowledge management as a field of study is concerned with simplifying and improving the process of sharing, distributing, creating, capturing and understanding knowledge, it has direct relevance to the work of law enforcement.

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[edit] Research Methods

With a view to get a better understanding of the knowledge management system in the Asia law Enforcement Unit, we conducted an interview to Mr. A, the former top official of the Unit, on the 20th of March, 2007. We mainly used qualitative approach to gather the information. A number of questions have been decided before the interview, with a set of follow up questions were asked in response to what Mr. A said. These questions were related to the tasks that we would engage in the following sections, and the interview lasted for about one hour long. We planned to separate the interview into two parts. The first half of the interview (around 15 minutes) was given to familiarize our group with the Unit, and the second half of the interview (the last 45 minutes) was given to understand the user needs of the key users, the KM strategies, tools as well as the communication plan of the Unit's knowledge management.

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[edit] Case Study

• i. Background

This study explores the development and implementation of knowledge management in the law enforcement industry, using an Asia Law Enforcement Unit (“The Unit” is used in the followings) as a case study. In November 2006, it has an establishment of 27,367 disciplined officers supported by 4,898 civilian officers.

The Unit operates under the mandate of the corresponding Law Enforcement Ordinance, which is under the Laws of the city. The Unit discharge the traditional constabulary duties of protecting life and property, preventing and detecting crime, and keeping the peace, with a strong emphasis on enlisting the assistance of public in achieving the vision that '…remains one of the safest and most stable societies in the world'.  

The department that responsible for the Knowledge Management project is Management Services (MS) Department.  Under the Management Services Department, they got the Information Systems Wing (ISW) and the Service Quality Wing (SQW), and each of them is commanded by a Top official.  The ISW is responsible for the development, operation and maintenance of The Unit's information technology systems whereas the SQW is entrusted with the responsibility of spearheading initiatives aimed at promoting customer-based culture of quality service in the Unit.

In the Knowledge Management project, the SQW is the architect of the whole project while the ISW provides technical supports. The reason is that the SQW aims to promote quality in all respects of the Unit, to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and economy, adherence to law enforcement standards & regulations, demonstration of integrity and compliance with the Unit’s values, and service orientation & culture.  

• ii. The Journey Through Knowledge Management

In fact, under the development of information technology, the Unit has accumulated a wealth of knowledge which is available to all members through electronic means. Over 500 databases and 200,000 WebPages were created to store the mentioned knowledge, such as manuals, orders, aide memories, action cards, policies, directives, strategies and other miscellaneous item. However, most of these documents are stored in a haphazard and disorganized manner, making it difficult to retrieve and update them.

In January 2001, one of the key projects under the Unit was 'to apply new advances in technology to enhance management efficiency, improved communication and development knowledge management'. Acting under this directive, the Efficiency Studies Bureau (ESB) of SQW, which in fact is the Knowledge Management Working Group, then formulated a business plan for implementing knowledge management by breaking down the project into five phases. As the architect of the KM, Mr. A stated: “the 5-phrase implementation plan with codification and personalization is the main strategies using in the Unit.” The Knowledge Management Working Group was formed by three officers, chaired by a middle manager, with a senior officer, and a specialist Knowledge Management Officer (KMO). In today’s knowledge economy, a new set of professional job titles – the knowledge manager, the chief knowledge officer (CKO), the knowledge coordinator, the knowledge-network facilitator and the knowledge management officer – affirms the widespread legitimacy that knowledge management has earned in the corporate world. As Mr. A mentioned “by the combination of our officers and knowledge management professional, it facilitates the whole development of KM in the Unit significantly.” The Knowledge Management Working Group advised and reported to the top official (Mr. A) on any matters related to KM development and maintenance and worked in partnership with ISW, which comprises a senior officer who is in charge of electronic matters and two information technology experts.

• iii. Knowledge Management Solutions

Knowledge management (KM) solutions refer to the variety of ways in that KM can be facilitated by, KM processes, KM systems, KM mechanisms and technologies and KM infrastructure.  Within the KM processes, the Unit captured knowledge from organizational level, regional level to individual level.  In the below table, we can see that the Unit created and captured the knowledge by implementing the first two phases.  After capturing both the tacit and explicit knowledge into the databases, the knowledge would be made available online and users can share the knowledge through the on-line facilities.  Mr. A mentioned that the objective of the knowledge portal is to let knowledge can be captured, retrieved and updated in the Unit. It is “a systematic way that to create, capture, share and use needed knowledge by the Unit.”  Hence, the KM strategy is the 5-phase implementation plan with codification and personalization.

File:Firststep.jpg*Phase 1* is to place organizational knowledge, such as the Unit's manuals, orders and policies in the KM system.

File:Secondstep.jpg*Phase 2* is to place readily available unit knowledge, such as regional orders, aide-memories, guidelines and action cards, in the KM system.

File:Thirdstep.jpg*Phase 3* is to make available less accessible unit knowledge such as legal advices, stated cases, frequently asked questions, causes of acquittal and commonly ,and mistakes on-line.

File:Fourthstep.jpg*Phase 4* is to encourage the Unit members to contribute wherever they see gaps, once substantial databases are created. And to share insights from overseas visits and private study which would be of benefit to the Unit.

File:Fifthstep.jpg*Phase 5* is to encourage units and teams to incorporate learning practices into their work, such as conducting and share lessons learnt as well as making use of the on-line facilitates for team project collaboration

   

Since June 2002, the first two phases of knowledge management have been implemented. At present, officers can have access to 500 databases created under the knowledge management portal in the Unit. The subsequent three phases are still in the design stage, though a number of initiatives have been undertaken.

In order to meet the requirements of each phase, KM initiatives have been implemented to enhance overall efficiency and effectiveness of the whole project. All of these have cumulated into the roll out of a new knowledge sharing system. The ESB of SQW and the Electronic-matters Division of ISW developed a new KM portal in May 2006. The KM portal acts with an aim to ease the uploading and updating process, and to provide a simple and effective way of retrieving information. To achieve this, there are four main pillars within the system, namely, Content Management, Navigation, Search Engine and MyBriefcase. In addition, other KM related initiatives, that’s the KM tools have been implemented, they are Practices and Experience Acquisition Kiosk (PEAK), Legal Advice Bulletin (LAB), and these are the people-based knowledge management initiatives in addition with the Peer Advisor Scheme (PAS), Collaboration Forum and KM Champion Scheme, which are the people-based knowledge management initiatives.  

*Content Management*

The Content Management System (CMS) has been set up to ensure that the contents stored at databases and WebPages are properly categorized and updated. The KM working group has been working to identify keywords from various manuals. Besides, the team members need to identify variations to keywords by applying law dictionary and other tools.  To make the system even comprehensive, related topics to keywords are also identified. The identification and selection of related topics is a joint effort between officers from departments. In addition, data migration also took place to move the contents stored at existing databases to the new databases via the database content management template.

Information is categorized and subcategorized before being stored within the new database structure. There are 10 categories and 66 cub-categories. A database content management templates were created to ensure that all officers can categorize, upload, store and update their information quickly and systematically. All databases are classified into Open Access Databases and Restricted Databases. For open access ones, users/readers do not need a email network account to get to the databases. They can, instead, go to the KM portal or any web interface to get to the information. But for restricted databases, only authorized users/readers can get access to them. They must have an email network account and must log into the account before they get the content. Both the content management of open and restricted databases requires efforts from Editor and Content Manager, and the content management process is achieved by a database content management template. Upon entering the information into the template, the new content will be directed to the new structured databases automatically. The template also acts a one-stop-shop for publishing information to the Unit Notice board. That is to say, the template is an integration of content management and news publication.

With regard to WebPages, the Electronic-matter Division has developed a Web Content Management System (WCMS), in the form of WebPages templates, with a view to enhance corporate image and to categorizing, storing, and updating information. Currently, all formation Web Pages will be consolidated into two tiers. Tier one WebPages include all Major Formations WebPages. And tire Two consists WebPages for Formations at senior official level.

*Navigation*

It is essential that the design of the navigation mechanism is to facilitate users to retrieve information via browsing with help of a user-friendly interface. The graphic presentation of the new KM portal is in the form of a hexagon network that displays navigation links (See appendix 1). A mind mapping approach was adopted to design two navigation flows, namely based on formations/units and topic. The most commonly used features on the new KM portal have direct links from the index pages of the Unit intranet. A Site Map is also included on the Unit intranet as an alternative tool to graphical browsing. With the new search engine, time can be saved and more informed decision could be made.

*Search Engine*

In addition to navigation, search engine can be used in the case that officers do not know which database information is stored at. All documents stored in the Unit intranet are properly categorized, with the help of the identified keywords, variations and related topics and data migration, together with a refines search engine, relevant and up-to-date information can be retrieved from search engine more effectively, efficiently and comprehensively, which are grouped into different topics and formations. The search results will be displayed together with search suggestions and related topics. With the new search engine, time can be saved and more informed decision could be made.

*MyBriefcase*

The development of MyBriefcase is still at the conceptual stage. The MyBriefcase is meant to provide a personalized workspace for officers to gather work-related knowledge. It has the ability to integrate with the search engine, enabling an officer to save the results of a search and share them with other officers. It can also capture and retain the most important work-related knowledge and documents for easy retrieval. Individual officers will be able, via MyBriefcase, to subscribe to certain types of information to keep them updated. The concept that underpins MyBriefcase is to prevent the loss of knowledge and experience when an officer transfers from a post or leaves the Unit, as knowledge are stored in MyBriefcase.

*Practices and Experience Acquisition Kiosk (PEAK)*

 Besides the new KM portal, PEAK is the second information-based knowledge management initiatives. The PEAK has been developed in order that good practices, area for improvements and lessons learnt are captured. Through PEAK, not only the good practices can be benchmarked to avoid reinventing the wheel, but also the lessons learnt can be shared to prevent mistakes from happening. Sources for the PEAK are recommendations of inspective reports, tips for Smart Cops, good practices uploaded by Formation Commanders and wash up notes. All practices and experiences are uploaded to the PEAK database for force-wide implementation after identification and assessment. This KM initiative provides efficient and effective means to upload the above captured knowledge to the PEAK database for searching and retrieval. Currently much of the subject material that has potential to make up the contents for PEAK is widely dispersed in various databases within the Unit.

*Legal advice Bulletin (LAB)*

Apart from the new KM portal and the PEAK, LAB is the third information-based knowledge management initiative. LAB, being one of the initiatives in the third phase of KM implementation plan, stored important legal advice that has been consolidated. At present, such legal advice, submitted from regions at a quarterly basis, is grouped into seven subjects, enabling officers to easily retrieve relevant legal advice for reference.

*Peer Adviser Scheme (PAS)*

In the Unit, knowledge management not only provides connection between people and documents, but also link people to people for sharing and transferring knowledge and experience. The PAS provides a formal but simple platform for users in need of advice on specific job related matters to be coupled with the right expert. It aims to promote 'person-to-person' contact between experienced officers with expert knowledge and the less experienced officers, by way of phone calls, email or even face-to-face discussion at the discretion of the advisers and advice-seekers. In making contact with a peer advisor, an officer can gather tacit knowledge such as understanding, judgment and know-how from the advisers. Such sharing of knowledge increases the value of personal experiences, repeated mistakes can be avoided and learning across the Force can be quicker and more effective. 

As of December 2006, five domain areas have been covered in the Scheme, including, Public Order of law enforcement, Deception, Crowd Management, Miscellaneous Enquiries etc. These five subject domains have been sub-divided into twelve subject areas. A total of 42 Peer Advisers have been appointed on a 12 month term since May 2006. Their contact details are obtainable through the new KM portal. The Scheme is more comprehensive than a directory and includes screening for quality advisers, an evaluation process in the form of a self-completed questionnaire and statistical tools on its usage. 

*Collaboration Forum*

 The second people-based KM initiative is Collaboration Forum. The Collaboration Forums aim to enable officers with similar responsibilities to liaise with each other so that ideas, questions, experience and knowledge can be shared. There are currently three forums, namely Learning and Development etc. In order to increase the likelihood of success of these networks, moderators and deputy moderators have been appointed.

*Knowledge Management Champion Scheme*

In order to accelerate the knowledge management development in the Unit and to ensure the sustainability of the various initiatives, the Knowledge Management Champion Scheme was introduced in early 2006 where four dedicated and capable knowledge management practitioners were appointed by the Directors of Management Service. Each of them are responsible for one of the KM initiatives namely, PAS, Collaboration Forum, PEAK (Lessons Learnt) and PEAK (Benchmarking of Practices).

• iv. Communication Plan

In order to enhance officer’ awareness of KM, a comprehensive communication plan has been formulated and is being implemented. The objectives can be summarized into one word, *SHARE*, which means to: 

•   *S* hare Knowledge through KM Portal, addressing elements of Technology and Knowledge Dissemination; 
•   *H* arvest and Generate Knowledge from processes, covering the aspects of Process and Knowledge Creation;
•   *A* ccess Organized the Unit Knowledge, focusing on Content part; 
•   *R* euse and Leverage Knowledge, emphasizing Knowledge Utilization; and
•   *E* mbrace a knowledge sharing culture, pointing out the aspect of People.

A structured communication plan has been developed to disseminate the benefits and the development of KM in the Unit. The communication plan basically involves "Identity", "Internal Communication", "Publicity materials" and "Events". Under each of the category, different activities targeting at different level of officers have been or will be launched. For "Identity", KM Slogan and Logo design competitions were organized. For "Internal Communication", a special corner in the internal communication paper named KM Infostation is used. Besides, we also set up help desk to answer questions about KM. The key element in the aspects of "Internal Communication" is the eLearning Package.

The eLearning package provides officers with an interactive and interesting way to understand more about the concepts of knowledge management, the features of the new KM portal and, most importantly, to learn how KM can help in daily work. In this package, the KM concepts and tools are introduced by six scenarios, three operational cases and three management cases. Video clips with both internal officers and external KM practitioners introducing KM are also provided at the package. Apart from these, frequently ask questions of KM, useful reference material and KM related quizzes can also be obtained in the package. It is recognized by the Hong Kong Productivity Council that the Unit eLearning package is the first of its kind in the city.

In addition, training days are also used to disseminate KM related news to officers. About "publicity materials", there are KM leaflet, KM VCD and KM Poster. “Events” take up a key role in the communication plan. KM roadshow, award presentation ceremony and management development programme are held to talk about KM. Personal KM seminar series are being held on a monthly basis and the response from officers are positive.

Through the communication exercise, it is expected to increase officers awareness of the Unit's KM development and the application of KM tools to achieve service excellence.

 

• v. Benefit and Obstacle of implementing KM

    At the launch of the knowledge management project, the major problem was that there was no efficient and systematic way of capturing much of the knowledge generated by and within the Unit. Officers were regularly transferred to new posts where they were inexperienced and prone to making mistakes whilst learning the ropes of their news posts. Secondly as knowledge had not been systematically captured and made available, many officers found that they had to 'reinvent the wheel' upon taking over a new post. The end results were that officers were continually learning from their own mistakes rather than from the past mistakes and success of others. A great deal of time and resources were being wasted on locating material or information which could otherwise have been readily available. Work was sometimes duplicated as individuals and units did not realize other units had been given, or already completed the same task and much valuable information and experiences were lost due to officers' transfer, resignation or retirement.

    However, with the successful implementation to the Unit, it brings significant benefits to the Unit. The perceived benefits for the launch of the knowledge management project were that it could lead to operational efficiency through personnel being afforded timely access to current and accurate information. The Content Management System enables officers to manage their own content by formally introducing the roles of editors, content managers, web administrators and approval officers. With their contribution, the content management can be enforced through authority and workflow. It avoids content duplication at various databases and WebPages. Decisions can be made based on relevant and up-to-date data.

    In addition, time will be focused on reading information rather than searching for it. It is effective for officers to learn from the mistakes and successes of others as insights and experiences of officers are captured and then incorporated into the Unit's knowledge. With the KM portal, the Unit successes in capitalizing on the capabilities of the Unit Intranet, information technology platforms and other manual systems to share knowledge within the Unit. With the result from the categorization exercise, information can be systematically categorized/subcategories resulting in a consistent classification of contents

    Furthermore, information will be available round the clock and it improved information sharing and internal communication. This encourages officers to incorporate use of this knowledge in their normal work routines. In the process of using templates in uploading/updating contents, information attributes can be tagged with the content, which in turn, improve information discovery at the new search engine.

    With all these benefits, the tailored-made knowledge management can achieve the objective of the Unit, which is to ‘improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the Unit '.

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[edit] Conclusions

    No system is perfect when it is being built. It is essential to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of locating information and leveraging knowledge. As t the Unit aim remains the development of people-based KM initiatives in the form of a knowledge-sharing network. This will involve the linking of people in a community to share knowledge and experience. Consequently, the movement of knowledge across individual and organizational boundaries, into and from repositories and into organizational routines and practices is ultimately dependent on employees’ knowledge-sharing behaviors (Bock et al., 2005).

    In the five-phase of knowledge management implementation, it is obvious that information technology can play an important role in successful knowledge  management initiatives. However, the computational power itself has little relevance to knowledge work, but the communication and storage capabilities of networked computers make computational power an important enabler of effective knowledge work. For example, electronic networks of practice are computer-mediated discussion forum, which are the PAS and Collaboration Forms focused on problems of practices that enable individuals to exchange advice and ideas with others based on common interest. Electronic networks make it possible to share information quickly, globally and with large numbers of individuals

    Knowledge management is a continuous process instead of a project to run in an organization. There is no completion and deadline on knowledge management. It is hoping that officers can contribute more and discard the concept of knowledge hoarding, so as to help the Unit to become a knowledge-based law enforcement service.

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[edit] Acknowledgements

    We would not have been able to complete this chapter without the dedication and enthusiasm of the interviewer, Mr.A. We would like to express our gratitude to Mr.A for giving us a valuable lecture and sharing with us. In addition, we also want to acknowledge Dr Sam Chu and Maggie Wang for teaching us, guiding us and support us.

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[edit] Appendixes

Appendix 1: A hexagon network that displays navigation links

Appendix 2: Interview Questions

1. What is your job title and job duty(s) related to knowledge management?

2. What are the objectives of the KM system of the Unit ?  So far, to what extent, do you think the implementation of KM in the Unit has achieved the goal?

3. What kinds of KM tools and /or strategies are being used by the Unit? Hansen mentioned knowledge strategies can be classified as :

a.Stock strategy (efficiency- driven business): solves known problems. The quality of the solution is found in fast and inexpensive application to meet customer needs. An accumulation of knowledge to improve efficiency. Competitive advantage is achieved in the ability to make small adjustments in existing goods and services at a low price it characterized by known problems and known methods for solution

b.Flow strategy (experience- driven business): solve large and complicated problems for customers, the problems are new, but they can be solved with existing methods in a specific context every time by effective adaptation. It is characterized by both new problems and existing methods for solution

c.Growth strategy (expert-driven business): solve large, complex, risky, new and unusual problems for customers. There are continuous improvisation and innovation. Knowledge workers apply general high-level knowledge to understand, solve and learn. Learning from problem solving is important to be able to solve the next new and unknown problem for customers. So, knowledge of previous problems becomes obsolete. An expert-driven business is characterized by both new problems and new methods for solution.

And How is these applied in the Force, a single strategy or multi strategies are applied?

4. Why information-based KM initiatives and people based initiatives have to be classified? and which initiatives do you think is most significant to the KM development?

5. What are the obstacles/challenges of such implementation? And how can you solve these problems?

6. Does the application of the KM tools and/or strategies generate positive result(s) to the following aspects in the Unit? - Different departments - Quality of services?

7. How do the KM systems support the daily operation of the Unit?

8. Which departments/group of users would apply the KM system in their department?

9. How would you organize knowledge sharing among officers who are working on the same criminal case?

10. Can the KM system help managers make better decisions? - If yes, would you please give some examples?

11. How the KM system be evaluated? Is there any performance indicators?

12. Does the Unit solve the problem of information overload by any KM tools and/or strategies?

13. Does the Unit have any best practice of applying KM in certain areas?  Which initiative do you think is the most success one?

14. What is the KM cycle of the Force?

General explanation: Knowledge creation: it involves developing new content or replacing existing content within the organization’s tacit and explicit knowledge. Through social and collaborative processes, as well as individual’s cognitive processes, such as reflection, knowledge is created.

Knowledge storage and retrieval: according to Alavi and Leidner, empirical studies have shown that while organizations create knowledge and learn, they also forget. Advanced computer storage technology and sophisticated retrieval techniques, such as content management, database management system can be effective tools in enhancing organizational memory. These tools increase the speed at which organizational memory can be accessed.

Knowledge transfer: knowledge transfer can be defined as the communication of knowledge from a source so that it is learned and applied by a recipient. It occurs at various levels in an organization; transfer o f knowledge between individuals, from individuals to explicit sources, from individual to groups, between groups, across groups and from the group to the organization.

Knowledge Application: how knowledge is applied in the organization

15. What do you think about the future development of KM in the Force?

Appendix 3: Summary of Interview

Date: 20, March 2007

Time: 18:30-19:15

Venue: University of Hong Kong

Interviewee: Mr. A (A)

Interviewer: Carol Wong (C), Eugene Wong (E), Wayne Kwok (W), Sammi Hung (S) and Irene Lee (I)

A: Good evening! We are so pleasant to interview you today. After your talk, we have a general idea on the KM of your organization. So, we would like to have an in depth understanding about the knowledge management of this Asia Law Enforcement Unit through this interview. Shall we start now?

A: Sure.

C: Thank you. As we all know you are the former top official and the architect of the KM project in the Unit. In the KM project, you are responsible for all decision-making regarding the development of KM. In fact, what are the objectives of the KM system of the Unit?

A: Our objective is to let knowledge can be captured, retrieved and updated in the Unit. That is “The systematic processes by which knowledge needed for the Unit to succeed is created, captured, shared and used.” Hence, our KM strategy is the 5-phase implementation plan with codification and personalization. From my power point slides, you can see that there are information-based KM initiatives and people-based KM initiatives adopt on the whole KM development.

C: According to Hansen, the knowledge strategies can be classified as Stock strategy (efficiency- driven business) that is to solve known problems by fast and economical solution, the flow strategy (experience- driven business) that is to solve large, new and complicated problems by existing methods, and the growth strategy (expert-driven business) is to solve large, complex, risky, new and unusual problems by innovative solution. So, among the strategies suggested by Hansen, do you think the KM of the Unit has the characteristics of one of these strategies?

A: I think the strategies are the same, but only in different approaches. For example, the codification maybe consists of three classifications, which is mentioned by Hansen. The codification is to code all the knowledge, which can be coded so it can exchange with other people more easily. It will be the stock strategy you have mentioned because all of the tactic knowledge will become explicit to store. For flow strategies, police officers can find the existing solution from PEAK or ask for senior officers’ advice to solve new problem by Peer Advisor Scheme. Finally, the growth strategy can be matched with our future plan that is CoP of senior management.

W: Which KM initiatives do you think is most significant to the KM development?

A: I think it should be Content Management System (CMS) and search engine. It is because CMS used the common language in the Unit to set up. And it meets the needs of the Unit, it is easy to understand and use by users. Also, it demands are ad-hoc driven so it can enhance the KM concept in the Unit. I do think this can be benchmarked by others.

I: What do you do to change officers’ minds that have a positive attitude to share knowledge with others?

A: Firstly, identification of the knowledgeable people who are already willing to share is very important. For example, members in study group who are willing to share knowledge about the current policies, issues as they have common of interest that is career promotion. Moreover, starting to introduce the benefits of KM and let them experience the convenience of knowledge sharing. Secondly, capturing know-how is not an easy job as people might think if they share the know-how knowledge they will lose the competitive advantages. Hence, management has to nurture the right behavior by reorganizations and rewards for knowledge sharing. For example, the West Kowloon District shares a package including videos about how to deal with late night violence to all EU. They are motivated to contribute next time by rewards.

W: So far, to what extent, do you think the implementation of KM in the Unit has achieved the goal?

A: Actually, the KM project can achieve some objective at this stage. As you know, the KM project only completed the first two stages at this moment. Therefore, the capture of organizational knowledge and team knowledge is completed. However, further developments have to be work on the PEAK, LAB and PAS. So that KM can be developed comprehensively in the Unit.

W: Can you talk more about the Peer Advisor Scheme?

A: This scheme seems to be “asking the homework on the phone”. The advisors include volunteer of senior experts and professional experts. All of them have proper expertise in their related field either academic or experiences. Also, they have high level of recognition within the Unit. It can ensure that their advisors are valid and useful. In fact, PAS already exists in the Unit for a long time. The officers are used to call their co-workers to find or discuss the issue in the Unit. For example, call the friends or colleagues in the Unit to ask about the details of how to apply the overseas training. Also, PAS creates a platform where they feel comfortable asking for and offering help. It is because all of them are familiar with this. So, the officers no need to learn a new system to know how to get the information or knowledge they want. Finally, we have focus group to discuss what subjects of advisor belongs to are needed to match with demand. It can avoid misunderstanding and expectation mismatch within this scheme.

C: Which departments/group of people should responsible for KM in the Unit?

A: I believe KM cut across all daily works and a full-time expert should be responsible for KM because they can have a full picture about what the KM in the Unit is. In the past, Service Quality Wing was responsible for this. In 1998, IBM was engaged as a consultant to review the Unit’s business environment, information strategy and analyze the needs of potential users. Also, we have a management research which about the future KM development and situation of the Unit by external consultant. Then some colleagues who are interested in IT field practiced the KM project. However, we discovered that the system do not fit the Unit. Due to the ad hoc situation, system like legal advisory system is built rather than a KM system. Therefore, I think that there should be some full-time technical staff and police officers to develop the KM project, so that they can focus on the KM development specifically. Therefore in 2003, a knowledge management officer was hired. And the Efficiency Studies Bureau has been formed in the combination of the KMO, a middle manager and senior officer.

E: What is the milestone of KM project?

A: As I said before, we have found IBM and external consultants to design a system for us. However, the result is not so good. Started from 2001, we do the research by our IT colleagues and outsource the system development parts to contractor. So the system can be matched with our actual environment. As a result of the insight gained from the pilot and also taken into account the scale of the project, a 5-phase approach has been adopted for the implementation of KM in the Unit since June 2002. So far, the first 2 phases are completed. The proposed way forward of the later three phases is to develop people-based KM initiatives in the form of Knowledge Sharing Network, which will be the inculcation of a knowledge sharing culture.

S: How the KM system is evaluated? Is there any performance indicators?

A: Up to this stage, there is no performance indicator. I have also thought about the evaluation of the effectiveness of the KM system at the design stage. However, I concern more about the stress of my colleagues. In other projects in the Unit, it is usual to conduct an evaluation but the paper workload would be increased by this. The colleagues need to pay more attention to not only the operation of the system but also the performance or effectiveness. So, they may not pay fully effort because they need to handle the paper work as well. Besides the increase in paper workload, how to measure the success in KM also is a problem. It is because there is no suitable measurement to show the actual performance of our KM system. Therefore, we only count the number of hits as a performance indicator in phase 1 and 2. However, it is surly not the accurate indicator to focus on.

I: What do you think about the future development of KM in the Unit?

A: Now KM on the Unit is information-based. All the knowledge is provided for search. E.g. content management system, PEAK provide information to user with less discussion. They have set a template to store all kind of information. It is a one-way method to transfer knowledge. In the future, the KM should be people-based. For example, CoP in the Unit, it can provide a platform to different level of co-workers to communicate with others. E.g. the officers can be link up in different regions to have discussion on specific matters. Also, their discussion can be based on the past resources from PEAK.

[edit] References

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Ashby, D. I., & Longley, P.A. (2005). Geocomputation, geodemographics and resource allocation for local policing. Transactions in GIS, 9 (1), 53-72

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Chen, H., et al. (2002), COPLINK Connect: information and knowledge management for law enforcement. Decision Support System, 34, 271-285.

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Colaprete, F. 2004, 'Knowledge Management', Law and Order, vol. 52, no. 10, pp. 82-86.

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Tan, W.L. and Al-Hawamdeh, S. 2000, Managing knowledge in the public sector: KM in the police service: 2nd Asia Pacific Conference on Knowledge Management, pp. 1-12, 28-30 November, Hong Kong.

Tan, W.L. and S., Al-Hawamdeh 2001, 'Knowledge management in the public sector: principles and practices in police work', Journal of Information Science, 27, (5), pp. 311-318.

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[edit] A Case Study on the Effects of Implementing a Customer Knowledge Management System to a Public Transport Corporation

Wong Man Chit,Chris Yuen Ching Yee,Christie Chan Yin Ling,Elza

Chan Yuk Lin,Samantha Cheng Leong, Leo

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[edit] Abstract

In this information age, Knowledge Management (KM) has become the main competitive strategy of a company. Especially Customer Knowledge Management (CKM), which emphasizes on knowledge management of their customers, is the main successful factor of current corporations. This chapter is based on an empirical investigation of customer knowledge sharing system from knowledge professional. Through interviewing the Customer Knowledge Management Officer, this chapter traces the interactive processes between knowledge management practices within the corporation and the general organizational context. Base on the case study, we summarize our finding relevant to Knowledge Management and Customers Knowledge Management. We conclude the KM management in our case study has played as a critical role in effective performance of knowledge management practice.

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[edit] Introduction

It cannot be denied that the collaboration and sharing of knowledge have clear benefits for people and enhance business performance. The 21st century is the age of knowledge pioneers. Many large organizations begin to realize that keeping data and information is not enough to maintain competitive advantage in the business world.

In response to this challenge, organizations have been experimenting ways for the utilization and transfer of assets so as to provide the expected products and services for the customers.

On the other hand, many organizations nowadays may only know their customers but not understand them. It is better to learn from customers their experiences in using your products and services. Without an increased awareness and use of organizational customer knowledge throughout the entire organization, the organization is expected to loss of competitive advantage and ability to provide the products and services meeting the customer needs.

In this chapter, we would like to investigate how the concepts of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) are implemented in the Asian public transport organization, and learn useful knowledge management concept from experts. Furthermore, we would like to illustrate the background information of CKM and corporation by reviewing a number of articles and journals. According that, number of KM tools and strategies will also be analyzed.

Besides that, we have interviewed a staff of one of the public transport corporation in order to investigate the particular industry deeply. For instance, strategies and benefit of the organization, whether the KM system help their managers to make decision and future development of the system etc.

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[edit] Literature Review

• The Definition of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM)*

Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) is concerned with the management and exploitation of customer knowledge (Rowley, 2002). It comprises the processes that are concerned with the identification, acquisition, and utilization of knowledge from beyond a firm’s external boundary in order to create value for an organization.

Paquette (2006) describes an important aspect of customer knowledge is that it is knowledge not owned by the firm, but by the others who may or may not be willing to share such knowledge. The processes that a firm employs to manage the identification, acquisition, and internal utilization of customer knowledge are collectively referred to as customer knowledge management.

• The Background of CKM*

In the past, many researches have used customer knowledge and customer information interchangeably, causing confusion between these two terms. According to Blosch (2000), understanding “how each customer interacts with business processes is to gain knowledge about that customer”. Gibbert, Leibold, and Probst (2002) would describe this only as customer information, as it is knowledge about the customer and is gained without a predetermined close interaction or partnership. However, the emphasis is on acquiring information about the customer but without interaction.

Davenport (2001) suggests that knowledge about the customer is only the first step, and organizations should create processes to manage the relationships they discover with this information to create profitable interactions in a better way. The focus remains with learning about the customer’s needs through different channels. In fact, the customer’s involvement in the knowledge process is still passive.

In recent years, a concept on customers as partners in the knowledge creation process has been presented by Sawhney & Prandelli (2000). Customers generate knowledge with an organization so as to create value for both of them by sharing knowledge residing within customers to create better products and services. Both organization and customers work together with common goals, and the customer becomes an active and key participant in the knowledge generation process.

• Hierarchical model of CKM*

Based on taxonomy of Customer Knowledge (CK) and definition of CKM, considering the degree of the enterprise’s CK application as well its effect on the management, CKM is divided into three hierarchies in theory. They are independence of enterprise, active acquisition and knowledge cooperation (Feng & Tian, 2005).

Within the independence of enterprise level, enterprise makes use of is the ‘knowledge that is prepared for the customer’. It is basically internal knowledge with little consideration of the customer’s needs. Active acquisition means enterprise actively obtains ‘knowledge about the customer’ to apply it in the decision and strategies of production and management activities. Lastly, knowledge cooperation includes those enterprise makes use of not only ‘knowledge about the customer’, but also ‘knowledge from the customer’. In this layer, it is easy for the enterprise to cooperate with corporate customers, but not so easy with individual consumer, though there might be exceptions.

According to Feng & Tian (2005), there might not be such clear hierarchical classification of CKM in reality. Active acquisition may occur on the level of independent of the enterprise and vice versa. Similarly, there also exists the same relation between active acquisition and knowledge cooperation. Every layer is permeable and interlaced. The objective of this classification is to find out the general rule in CKM development process. As enterprises from different industries offers different types of services and have different focus customer groups, the enterprise should adopt a contingency approach according to its specific situation. Most enterprises in China are now at the levels of ‘independence of enterprise’. The level of ‘active acquisition’ is the final target and trend of CKM. Therefore, the following part of this article takes the enterprise on the level of ‘active acquisition’ as examples to inquire into the successful implementation of CKM.

• Service Gap Analysis applied in CKM – the SERVQUAL Model*

Managers in the service sector are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their services are customer-focused and that continuous performance improvement is being delivered. Given the financial and resource constraints under which service organizations must manage it is essential that customer expectations are properly understood and measured and that, from the customers ’ perspective, any gaps in service quality are identified. This information then assists a manager in identifying cost-effective ways of closing service quality gaps and of prioritizing which gaps to focus on – a critical decision given scarce resources.

While there have been efforts to study service quality, there has been no general agreement on the measurement of the concept. The majority of the work to date has attempted to use the SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al. , 1985; 1988) methodology in an effort to measure service quality (e.g. Brooks et al., 1999; Chaston, 1994; Edvardsson et al. , 1997; Lings and Brooks, 1998; Reynoso and Moore, 1995; Young and Varble, 1997; Sahney et al. , 2004).

One of the aims of this study involves the use of SERVQUAL instrument in order to ascertain any actual or perceived gaps between customer expectations and perceptions of the service offered. Another aim of this paper is to point out how management of service improvement can become more logical and integrated with respect to the prioritized service quality dimensions and their affections on increasing/decreasing service quality gaps. In the following, after a brief review of the service quality concept, the model of service quality gaps and the SERVQUAL methodology is demonstrated and an example is presented to pinpoint the application of the SERVQUAL approach. Then, after a discussion, major conclusions are derived.

According to Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry (1990),

• Seven Service Gaps*

· Gap1: Customers’ expectations versus management perceptions: as a result of the lack of a marketing research orientation, inadequate upward communication and too many layers of management.

· Gap2: Management perceptions versus service specifications: as a result of inadequate commitment to service quality, a perception of unfeasibility, inadequate task standardization and an absence of goal setting.

· Gap3: Service specifications versus service delivery: as a result of role ambiguity and conflict, poor employee-job fit and poor technology-job fit, inappropriate supervisory control systems, lack of perceived control and lack of teamwork.

· Gap4: Service delivery versus external communication: as a result of inadequate horizontal communications and propensity to over-promise.

· Gap5: The discrepancy between customer expectations and their perceptions of the service delivered: as a result of the influences exerted from the customer side and the shortfalls (gaps) on the part of the service provider. In this case, customer expectations are influenced by the extent of personal needs, word of mouth recommendation and past service experiences.

· Gap6: The discrepancy between customer expectations and employees’ perceptions: as a result of the differences in the understanding of customer expectations by front-line service providers.

· Gap7: The discrepancy between employee’s perceptions and management perceptions: as a result of the differences in the understanding of customer expectations between managers and service providers.

For example, when someone goes into a fast food restaurant to a hamburger for meal, they are expecting exactly what they are accustomed to getting (a quick and tasty burger). If it takes 15 minutes to get a hamburger that does not even have the famous special sauce on it, the customer's perceived service of this fast food restaurant is going to drop.

A key question that many organizations may ask is how to understand their customers in more details? There is a famous Chinese saying, “If you are not fish, how you know that the fish is swimming happily in the water?” In order to meet the customers' expectations, it is better for us to learn from their experience in using your services and products.

Although the concept of customer knowledge is relatively new in the field of knowledge management, we would try to study the implementation of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) in a public transport corporation so as to discuss this concept in greater depth.

• The Need for Knowledge Management in Customer service sector*

As businesses continue to forge ahead in twenty-first century, knowledge management has materialized as the only real differentiator. According to Larry Prusak, the executive director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, “In the emerging economy, a firm’s only advantage is its ability to leverage and utilize its knowledge.” To accomplish the knowledge production and integration processes, an organization needs to foster collaboration among all individuals and to codify the resulting insights in knowledge base repositories for self-service access by others. This will enable knowledge management to reach its goal of facilitating the delivery of the best knowledge to the right person at just the right time. With this knowledge, people are empowered to effectively solve problems, make decisions, respond to customer queries, and create new products and services tailored to the needs of clients. (John M. Leitch and Philip W. Rosen 2001)

• Knowledge management solutions for Customer service*

Companies that are winning in this environment provide “stand-out” customer service by using knowledge to empower contact center agents and drive self-service interactions. In delivering KM solutions to world- class contact centers and self-service operations, the article mentioned six practices. (Egain trusted by Leaders 2006). They are:

  * Quantify value
  * Build the right team
  * Avoid the “Swiss Chess” syndrome
  * Maintain velocity
  * Balance “Ivory Tower Knowledge” with “Street Smarts”
  * Provide flexible content access

• Integration of Customer Relationship Management and Knowledge Management*

To achieve the goal of providing a solution for the process of the customers, enterprises need to focus on three sorts of knowledge in CRM processes. They make up what we consider to be customer knowledge. (Adrian Bueren, Ragnar Schierholz, Lutz Kolbe, Walter Brenner 2004).

  * They need to understand the requirements of customers in order to address them. This is referred to as “Knowledge about customers”
  * The information needs of the customers in their interaction with the enterprise require “ knowledge for customers”
  * Finally, customers possess knowledge about the products and services they use as well as about how they perceive the offerings they purchased. This “Knowledge from customers” is valuable as it feeds into measures to improve products and services. Efforts need to be made to channel this knowledge back into the enterprise. 

• Condition for successful CKM implementation*

CK acquisition is an important task in CKM. Compared with the knowledge of the employees in the enterprise, CK is more difficult to obtain. Because customers spread out in different regions or even in different countries, it is impossible for the enterprise to get “knowledge about the customer” and “knowledge from the customer” by face-to-face communication with all customers. Neither is it necessary to do so in most cases because of the cost, time and energy involved. But CK is vital to the enterprise. It is the inevitable choice for the enterprise to obtain CK by means of information technology. How could we guarantee to successful CKM implementation? According to the article written by Feng & Tian (2005), they pointed out three factors which lead to the successful CKM implementation. These three factors are adopting a customer intelligence system (CIS), establishing a comprehensive CK system by obtaining tacit CK and organizational guarantee to CKM implementation.

According to Forcadell, F. J., & Guadamillas, F. (2002), they had point out that it is important to have a well-developed knowledge management strategy, no matter it is CKM or KM. A case study on Irizar, which is a maker of luxury coach bodywork, has been quoted in the article. They also pointing out seven success factors in the strategy's implementation of Irizar, they are: effective use of KM tools, high innovative capabilities from KM, replacements of organizational structure, well-managed valuable human resources, strategic leadership and good corporate culture.

• Challenges of CKM*

The management of knowledge in CRM processes is a critical success factor; however, there are some challenges of managing customer knowledge.

Handling the entire customer relationship is a knowledge-intensive application that calls for the full gamut of applications for capturing information from a variety of sources and providing the tools to search, access, query, mine, categorize, aggregate, analyze and segment. According to Subhash Gupta, "We need to integrate information about the customer and channels of communication with the customer, so that the message to them is consistent." This calls for a great deal of technology and expertise in gathering total customer profiles. It includes not only demographic and psychographic profiles, but a complete profile of the customer's specific relationship with the company, which may range from purchase and credit history and profitability analysis to all forms of communication across all the company's channels, including the retail store, the catalog, the telemarketing center and the Web site for e-commerce. Given the volume and complexity of information involved, Gupta believes that companies will go to the database service providers to help them turn all that information into actionable knowledge. (Jim Tighe, 1999)

In particular, the challenge to ensure a consistent knowledge flow from the point of development of knowledge about the customer (in marketing, sales, and service) to the point of utilization, where the knowledge has to be presented in adequate form and complexity is far from being solved. Another subject of considerable relevance is the management of customer service. One of the challenges is the use of multiple communication channels to address customer service needs. All companies show further potential to exploit self-service technologies with the aim of increasing service quality and decreasing service costs. Using these technologies will raise the question of how to synchronize different communication channels to ensure consistency towards the customer. (Henning Gebert, 2002)

In order to address the needs of customers, some companies utilize different information sources provided by an internal unit. The content was mostly disseminated via email. While this was possible without further investments in the technical infrastructure, each employee had to organize his or her content individually and new employees did not have access to older information. Therefore, a knowledge platform was created using basic web technology which offered the same information as email with a certain time delay. Yet, with an increasing amount of content, the navigational structure eventually became more and more cluttered. In addition, communication and knowledge exchange, which were based primarily on documents, were not entirely satisfactory. As a result of the use of email, team members could never be sure to have the most up-to-date version of a document. (Adrian Bueren, 2004)

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[edit] Research Methods

A qualitative approach was used to analyze all of the data provided by Dr. Leung, Customer Knowledge Manager of the researched company. Therefore, it was based on a single case study. Semi-structured interviews, e-mail communication and extensive access to secondary data on the web will be adopted in this study.

The main fieldwork was conducted a semi-structured interview through phone and e-mail with Dr. Leung. We would ask 4 types of questions such as Simple Fact, Open End, Judgment and Comparison of Fact questions in our interview question. All information collected from the interview was encouraged to express themselves in their own terminology and experience.

Furthermore, we will analyze all of the data collecting from the interview and Dr. Leung’s presentation PowerPoint as our case finding. After capturing ideas from the discussing forum and draft version, we would further modify our work according to peer opinions.

[[3][Possible Questions for interview]]

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[edit] Case Study from Dr. Leung

It is a valuable chance that Dr. Leung is our case study. Not only discussion in e-mail, we also send questionnaires and take phone interview with Dr. Leung in order to take a deep and detailed study from Dr. Leung. Although we cannot interview Dr. Leung face to face, we can ask him any question and discuss any problem with him through phone and e-mail.

Now, let me introduce the background information of Dr. Leung. He is one of the Funders and Execo in Knowledge Management Development Center. Besides that, he is a senior executive and a fellow of a quality management association. Therefore, Dr. Leung really plays an important role and is well-known in the Knowledge Management of Hong Kong.

As Dr. Leung has rich experience in managing Customer Knowledge in the researched company. We learn lots of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) from his sharing. He point out that without an increased awareness and use of organizational customer knowledge throughout the entire organization, the organization is expected to loss of competitive advantage and ability to provide the products and services meeting the customer needs.

First and foremost, Dr. Leung introduced the Gap 1 and Gap 5 of SERVQUAL Model, which is the difference between customer expectations of service and perceived service. If expectations are greater than performance, then perceived quality is less than satisfactory and hence customer dissatisfaction occurs. In fact, there are totally five gaps in SERVQUAL Model, but Dr. Leung only selected two of most important gaps to share with us. Furthermore, Dr. Leung also mentioned that the researched company recognize the importance of good management in CKM to develop their scheme to control customer data for a long time.

On the other hand, feedback about customer experience from specific service encounters soon after the interaction occurs. He introduced there are number of tools to collect such information, such as telephone interviews, e-mail, website and fact-to-face interview. In addition, all of this information can be further divide into three categories, which are “for the customer”, “about the customer” and “from the customer”. Knowledge for customer is generated in the process within the enterprise, such as research and development. In a simple term, it is the product knowledge from service supplier to customers. Then, knowledge about customers is the knowledge about customer segments and individual customers. Information collected from surveys, service management and complaint handling are example of knowledge about customers. Lastly, knowledge from customers is captured from customers basing on the fact that customer gain their own expertise while using the product or service.

On the other hand, all information can also been classify into three types of customer knowledge. They are data-derived knowledge, human customer knowledge and tacit-unstructured, difficult-to-express knowledge.

Lastly, Dr. Leung gave us a real example of how the researched company maintains CKM. It is a meeting called Passenger Liaison Groups (PLG) Meeting, aims to invite university lectures to provide opinion from a forum for face-to-face exchange of opinion among passengers and organization management.

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[edit] Findings & Analysis of the Public Transport Corporation

Organizational background of the Asian Public Transport Corporation

The researched company was established in 1982, that providing high quality mass transport services in Asia. It is one of the world's most successful railway operators: each day it carries about 1.5 million passengers on its 113-kilometre network. In addition to its core territorial rail services, it also operates through train passenger and freight services.

It is also active in property development, property services and related commercial activities. As the network extends further, it spurs additional social and economic development in these fast-growing communities, and increases their appeal as places to live and work.

Over the years, the Corporation has demonstrated its commitment to fulfilling its role as a socially responsible corporate citizen through an extensive range of community programmes. The Corporation receives no government subsidies, is entirely self-financing, and has been consistently profitable since 1985.

Benefits of communication with customers

We found that there are several benefits that can result when the public transport corporation attempt to communicate thoughtfully and occasionally with customers about their products or services. Such kind of dialogues can obtain better information on what the customers needs, maintain a closer relationship with customers, share across the organization of what customers expect, make change of cultures within the organization and so on according to this case.

Furthermore, the information which is gained from communication with customers is lead to improvements in overall corporation services and products generally. It also help the corporation better serve the needs of customers and enable the corporation to better understand the customers' expressed. In addition, be in touch with the customers can pinpoint potentially effective approaches that may help address some of the customers’ concerns.

In this case, we have discovered some tools which used to gain feedback from customers in this public transportation corporation. They are telephone interviews, email, web site, interactive voice response (IVR) surveys or interview and face-to-face interview. Those feedbacks about customer experience from specific service encounters soon after the interaction occurs. Perhaps you will ask which is/are the most essential or efficient feedback tool on the customer knowledge approach within this cooperation. In fact, the choice of tools for use is all depending on the objective and scope of the study.

Besides, we investigated that a successful communication should clarified through active listening and interaction with customers. Here are some hints on establishing an effective responsiveness from your customers, they are: identifies needs of customers by asking questions and listening actively, encourages questions from the customer, listens for new information rather than making assumptions, works with the customer to identify solutions to problems, acknowledges customer’s feelings without taking them personally, uses nodding or other affirming communication behaviors, as appropriate and builds rapport by adjusting communication style to more closely match the customer’s (such as rate of speech, use of gestures, posture, etc.), as appropriate.

Managing customer knowledge

At the heart of marketing and marketing strategies is a fundamental understanding of customers. Almost every manager would agree that better customer knowledge can bring economic benefits to a company, which becomes valuable resources for them. It's profitable to know how many customers the company has, who they are, and the current and future value that their customers symbolize to the organization. Accurate customer data is the highlight of any business. Managers need to be able to rely on their customer knowledge which will in turn enable them to understand customer behavior and their preferences, and then use it for both operational and business planning purposes.

As most of the organizations store customer data across the organization in departmental silos, so the data may become inconsistent and unreliable which are useless for the companies. So as to enables companies to use their customer information with confidence, and to trust it as a basis for decision-making, ways of managing customer knowledge and keeping the data update are important tasks within the organizations.

Knowledge flows in CRM processes can be classified into three categories. Firstly, Knowledge for customers is generated in the process within the enterprise, such as research and development. It is required in CRM processes to satisfy knowledge needs of customers. In another words, this knowledge is produced from service supplier to customers. For examples, knowledge about products, knowledge about markets and suppliers. Knowledge about customers is about customer segments and individual customer. It can be captured by customer surveys, service management and complaint handling. It is accumulated to understand motivations of customers and to address them in a personalized way. This includes demographic data, customer histories, connections, requirements, expectations and purchasing pattern etc. It is necessary to manage these data continuously; otherwise, they will quickly become useless. Poor data results in wasted resources, lost productivity, and an inability to forecast accurately.

Lastly, Knowledge from customer is knowledge capture from customers basing on the fact that customers gain their own expertise while using the product or service. It is knowledge of customers about products, suppliers and markets. Customer data is often best collected close to the customer since there is greater familiarity with the customer directly. Within interactions with customers, this knowledge can be gathered to feed continuous improvement, e.g. service improvements or new product developments.

No matter what customer knowledge the organizations collected, it’s significant to manage and organize them well. Customer Knowledge consists of material that is both unstructured, open end and structured information, such as data from surveys. What we are looking for is to build structured data out of the unstructured information collected. To add structure, we need to be able to classify and determine what information we want in a structured format. In addition, most of the customer knowledge is incomplete. Sometimes even the customers don't know what they want. And every customer is different. However, it doesn't mean that the data we collected has no value.

The thing we need to do is to build up a customer knowledge database which has to allow for flexibility together with a wide variety of access and dissemination. The database needs to be able to capture data, classify it into a structured framework, but be able to do this on-demand, flexibly and easily. The database has to be capable of holding data in a wide range of formats and styles, while allowing that information to be searched and accessed quickly, and allowing the database integrity to be maintained.

Furthermore, different users will have different levels of access to different information depending on their seniority or the customers that they are dealing with. The design of a customer knowledge database is therefore different to most other database designs and the database itself almost needs to be able to grow organically without intervention. In transaction environments this creates a large performance overhead. However, in a knowledge environment processing is less important than access, which means a more flexible design is preferable. It is also important that the database needs to have the flexibility to add and access this additional information even if it is just for a relatively small number of customers which means there has to be flexibility to allow for a degree of organic growth. After building such customer knowledge database, the knowledge gap between actual customer expectations and management’s perception of customer expectations can be reduce.

Types of customer knowledge

Customer knowledge refers to understanding your customers, their needs, wants and aims is essential if a business is to align its processes, products and services to build real customer relationships. In reality, most of the customer knowledge which the companies have is in a fragmented form and difficult to share or analyze and often it is incomplete. But in this case, we found that the customer knowledge within this public transport corporation is well-defined and organized. There are three types of customer knowledge which includes data-derived knowledge, human customer knowledge and tacit-unstructured/difficult-to-express knowledge. The following is the examples of customer knowledge of this public transport corporation:

Sharing of Customer Knowledge

Without an increased aware nesses and use of organizational customer knowledge throughout the entire organization, the organization is expected to loss of competitive advantage and ability to provide the products and services meeting the customer needs.

How can the organization successfully to do so? In the following parts, we would select one Asian Public Transport Corporation as an example.

Passenger Liaison Groups (PLG) meeting of the Corporation

Although the Corporation was performing strongly, they realized that they had to look ahead to the future. While this decision provided strategic direction, it also presented some unforeseen difficulties. One challenge was to motivate people to change when there was no imminent commercial threat.

To overcome this, the Corporation initiated a culture change. The objective was to integrate customer satisfaction and continuous improvement with the work of every employee, everyday.

The Passenger Liaison Group (PLG) is a communication channel pioneered by the Corporation in 1991. It is a first for Hong Kong, the Customer first Training which won the HKMA 1994 Training Award for Excellence, and the successful implementation of ISO 9000. It allows the Corporation’s passengers and the management to have an opportunity to directly exchange views on the Corporation in the format of a focus group discussion. There are a total of four meetings in the year, and all passengers are welcome to enroll as members of the PLG. Passengers can make an application to be a PLG member via the web page. A random selection will then be carried out by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Selected passengers will be invited to attend the meetings. Members’ views and the Corporation’s responses will be published in a passenger newsletter regularly.

In order to cater for the needs of different passengers, the Corporation has introduced a number of other initiatives to better understand the requirements and expectations of their customers and measure their progress towards them. These include the Mystery Passenger Survey, Customer Forums, Customer Services Centres and Customer Hotlines and Suggestions Schemes. They have also made Performance Pledges to their customers, which enable them to measure how well they are meeting customer needs.

Challenges for Customer Knowledge Management

Many of the discussions on knowledge transfer deal with the challenges of sharing knowledge at the individual, group or organizational level. These problems really exist on sharing of customer knowledge. In the beginning, organizations may experience a cultural challenge of perceiving customers as a source of knowledge but not revenue. It reflected that most organizations are unwilling to accept externally generated ideas.

Besides cultural factors, an organization may not have the competency required to absorb and make use of the external knowledge. Cohen and Levinthal (1990) state that an organization’s absorptive capacity is a function of its prior knowledge, allows it to recognize and synthesize new knowledge.

On the other hand, organizations may concern about how do they know the customer is supplying correct information or that it is representative of the entire market? Customer Knowledge Management depends on the assumption that an environment exists where useful knowledge can be provided to the company.

It indicates that the potential value to be realized by a customer knowledge management initiative is equal to the ability of the external environment to provide such knowledge, and customer knowledge management may be more effective in some industries over others.

Future development of Customer Knowledge Management

As we can see, the concept of customer knowledge is relatively new in the field of knowledge management; it still continues to develop since more organizations embrace the idea of put it into practice.

Organizations can make use of sharing knowledge over external boundaries, and apply these skills towards improving internal knowledge transfer between different departments and users. It can strengthen a firm’s knowledge management abilities.

The definition of customer can be elaborated further to include those may not have a transactional relationship with the firm, yet contain relevant knowledge of an organization’s business environment. Paquette (2004) states that every organization should be considered a valuable source of external knowledge a firm requires to not only understand the environment, but also flourish in it. Expanding the range of sources providing customer knowledge will transform this knowledge set into external knowledge management, including all users’ knowledge available to the firm.

In fact, the development of customer knowledge is very expensive, but how to disseminate the knowledge within the organization? It needs to develop an organization culture to create, sharing and use the customer knowledge for actions.

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[edit] Conclusion

Promoting knowledge sharing within an organization is not an easy task. The challenges of CKM implementation increases when the knowledge sharing involves customers possessing knowledge that is not owned by the organization.

However, the benefits of facilitating customer knowledge flows can have a real impact on the performance of the organization. By actively involving customers in creating a two-way flow of knowledge, an organization (no matter it is a public organization or a private company) can have a new source of knowledge which can improve its standing in the marketplace.

Finding the correct combination of valuable customer knowledge sources and customer knowledge management forms can create an endurable competitive advantage through the introduction of products and services that satisfy customer needs. An organization’s understanding of the importance of customer knowledge will encourage the expansion of its current knowledge management practices to beyond the organizational boundary. This creates an improved ability to identify, select, organize, disseminate, and use valuable knowledge that an organization requires to be successful.

As a conclusion, we believe that the future development of Customer Knowledge Management is positive and promising.

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[edit] Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our interviewee, Dr. Leung for supporting this case study. We are particularly grateful to our course instructor, Dr. Chu for help and support. We are also indebted to our classmates for comments on earlier drafts.

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[edit] References

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[edit] Knowledge Management Practice in Telecommunication Industry

Chang Mei Ying, WIndy; Chow Wai Ching, Vivian; Huen Mei Ying, Harmony; Lam Tsz Kwan, Katherine; Yeung Sum Sze, Cissie

[edit] Abstract

Having a rapid business expansion in the telecommunication industry, organizations have adopted systems in managing good knowledge so as to maintain as the competitive enterprises in the global market. In this study, we intend to explore how knowledge management (KM) took place in organizations when developing technology intelligence within the telecommunication sector. With best practice of KM research, we make focus on the study of human resources and technology as the major solutions to the KM issues. The results presented in this study are based on interviews with information professionals and corresponding research resources.

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[edit] Introduction

Hong Kong has one of the most sophisticated and successful telecommunications markets in the world (OFTA, 2007). In view of the rapid growth in market expansion, it comes up to be the leading business sector in Hong Kong’s development. Such that, organizations engage with good practices for getting benefits of high business rewards and large segment of potential customers. Good practices are adopted by successful companies which are able to create new knowledge and further transferred and fully utilized within the companies (Nonaka, 1991). Shared understanding of good knowledge gradually becomes the main perspective in business culture. By referring to the real case study of KM application in the telecommunication industry, we are able to examine how the management tools drive the entire business processes with effective KM strategies and resources allocation. With best practices located through interview meetings and research review, we are provided with important information for a comprehensive investigation.

On the other hand, having professional experiences from field observation, we date concentration on the development of the KM strategies in the telecommunication industry. As for further analysis of the strength and weakness of the KM implementation, we provide with related recommendation for improvement as well as the future prospectus for KM development in the industry.

[edit] Role of Knowledge Management in the Telecommunication Industry

Telecommunications has taken up a long development history in Hong Kong’s economy. Generally it is directly responsible for the growth of the service sector in the community. With state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and excellence world network built, telecommunication industry demonstrates its true worth to the Hong Kong society. Since 1995, telecommunication market in Hong Kong is open for keen competition. Following the expiry franchise of Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited (HKTC), the other three new companies (New World Telephone Limited, New T&T Hong Kong Limited and Hutchison Communications Limited) were licensed to provide local fixed telecommunication services on a competitive basis. Such that, a high range of quality telecommunication services are available in the market at reasonable costs. As to maintain excellent service and to survive in the competitive market, individual organization has developed a systematic approach leading to the achievement of ultimate business goals.

[edit] Serve as important business intelligence

Telecommunication industry is often described as the “Sunset industry” for the reason that of rapid growth in product innovation and technology development. Information transfer circulates around the market speedily which uphold most of the input for business activities and operational processes. In the competitive marketplace, business organizations have to keep updated with the global trend and current status about telecommunications in order to lead a significant position among competitors. In view of the business structure, telecommunications are featured with hybrid science of collaborations among people, process and technology. The key issue for business benefit is to integrate those three components with a standardized and favorable management system. The shared knowledge system provides workers a comprehensive way to capture knowledge from individuals to the whole enterprises, so that valuable information and skillful experiences within the companies are retained. Besides, intellectual capital from workers offers as knowledge experts for business activities and future development at different aspects. When facing business conflicts and production problems, the knowledge intensive process works with the case by providing effective solutions for performance improvement. In addition, business intelligence enhances communications among departments so that co-operative team production can be more integrated with strong collaboration from different divisions. Having a high degree of accuracy and accessibility for information enables the organizations to respond more quickly upon market changes and decision-making.

[edit] Keep along as good practice captured

Nowadays, most developed countries pursue the global trend to engage into information society. It is a society centering the information life cycle as the main economic activities and participating with activate promote of information literacy. With the processes of creation, use, distribution, maintenance and disposal, information circulations around the cycle play a significant role for economic growth and wealth making. Telecommunications tie with the global market and master the inventive technologic advancement. On the one hand, we make contribution in technology innovation and create new information, and on the other hand, we pile up information generated and make out knowledge accumulation. Information can be easily lost if we keep it without good practice and relevant management procedures. Organizations in the telecommunication community have increasingly adapted into cultural changes upon working behaviors and business performances. At present, KM is the key factor leading to industrial success. By bringing in professional experts and consultants, workers are educated with KM practices so as to support productive procedures and further achieve business goals. After inputting KM as the major production scheme, communications among workers improve and hence the understanding between departments. New discovery of production processes with KM concepts makes progress for business achievements. Such knowledge is reusable which flows around in the knowledge management cycle for generating new knowledge.

[edit] Manage relationships with key customers

In the telecommunication market, people are the core aspect in knowledge management application, from integrating numerous informative transactions to generating innovative business knowledge. For an ordinary telecommunication company, typically sales people work at the frontline in the business production and deal with customers providing high-quality services and in return, getting numerous business transactions. This kind of business production pattern depends heavily on the people issue and that the skills bearing from the sales persons place influences on the production progress and achievement. By the means of knowledge management, information is handled and stored with appropriate classifications so that it can easily be retrieved and transferred regarding different needs urged from workers. In the past, workers had to search out the information in persons and such cases really tool up a long time and even a high cost for business operations. Further, it hindered the processes of transacting customer orders to be followed and managed. In order to improve the productivity level in entire operation process, organizations get started with knowledge development and intend to maintain good relationships with their potential customers. Large amount of customer information shows a majority in business production resources. With effective handling procedure and organization support, knowledge-intensive process retains the important customer information as well as the consumption pattern as the indication for making strategic business decisions and future development goals.

[edit] Build up as valuable organization assets

The emergence of the knowledge management locates as the chief execution in organization assets and knowledge repositories within the telecommunication market. It is the main objective to capture the human capital into explicit knowledge and to be understandable and long-lasting. Among the telecommunication organizations, it is true that dynamic changes in workforce show a positive percentage compared with other industry. Workers in the telecommunication market get a high tendency to shift employment from one company to another, which indicate the possibility of human capital being carried away since staff resign and leave the companies. To maintain sufficient human resources and build up informative support for business production, KM gives out contribution making up company’s own knowledge base by turning implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Accumulated KM strategies tend to be reusable and serve as the organization assets. KM implementation ties with organization objectives and integrates with different communities of practices among knowledge experts from various divisions in the companies. Shared knowledge and business intelligence bring in the most valuable resources for improved business performance and competitive advantages against competitors in the market. The practice of KM focuses on the management of specific knowledge gained from different organizational experts, and also addresses the development and cultivation of the channels through which knowledge would flow along with. By understanding the regular functions of the KM cycle, organizations can streamline business process for co-operating with different related sectors of the market.

[edit] Literature Review

Before we look into the details of the case study we have done, we will first give a general introduction of knowledge management by introducing the definitions of KM. What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge is not a new issue nowadays and many KM expertises have made excellent definitions to “What is KM”. The most well-known definition that we are familiar with is coined by one of the famous KM experts – Karl Wiig. Wiig (1997) said that “KM is the systematic, explicit, deliberate building, renewal, and application of knowledge to maximize an enterprise’s knowledge-related effectiveness and returns from its knowledge assets”. Knowledge management is defined differently in varied organizations. Malhotra (1998) made a new definition of KM in the new business world – “Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adoption, 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.”

This new definition of KM tries to go beyond the urgent solutions or uni-dimensional views offered by many others. It also intends to move the thinking of organizations’ executives towards the strategic, non-linear and systemic view of KM. Malhotra also discovered that there is always confusion between “knowledge” and “information” in the new business world. Knowledge and information are distinct entities. Those “dictated norms” generated by the computer systems is not a very accurate carrier of human interpretation for potential action, users usually cannot find the “knowledge” they really want. This confusion between `knowledge' and `information' has caused managers to spend large amount of money in technology ventures that have yielded marginal results.

Although there are so many definitions on KM, they all have something in common. They are all concern about two dimensions of People and Knowledge. KM lies in the relationship between these two dimensions, mediated by various systems and processes. It is generally seen as “a comprehensive approach which recognizes the inter-dependency for the organizational effectiveness of people, the technology, the systems and processes within which they use it.” (Brelade, 2003) After introducing the core concept KM, we will now move to focus on the industrial background our study object lies in – telecommunication.

[edit] Knowledge Management in Telecommunications Industry

Knowledge management is critical to all kinds of industry which can help the organizations to consider how to capture the knowledge resident in the organization. Especially for the telecommunications industry in which its operation rely on hundreds of or thousands of knowledge workers all over the world, it is important for them to communicate and share their knowledge. Therefore, telecom companies nowadays are willing to make investments to capture as much knowledge as possible from their most experienced workers. Many large telecommunications service provides start to create a senior-level management position to ensure that KM activities operate effectively. According to Strouse (2001), large telecom companies such as British Telecom, AT&T, and Deutsche Telekomm have created chief knowledge officer positions, it shows the fact that the telecommunications industry believe that intellectual assets have value.

Strouse (2001) has also stated several components that are important to an effective KM system in telecommunications industry.

1. IT supports needs to be adequate in both scale and communications response time.

2. Database should include user-friendly search capabilities.

3. Tools in the search engine need to pinpoint the proper information when requested.

4. Processes need to support the facilitation of information retrieval and must be in place to assist in the creation of new information.

5. System performance metrics should be maintained in order to help to determine the criteria for new data to enter the system.

6. Type of data to be available must pass tests defined in the design phase, it should be limited to information that will increase the performance of employees or improve the customer’s experience.

7. Effective incentives and supportive core values should be encouraged to the most expert employees to share their knowledge.

People also always argue that the benefits of knowledge management systems appear to be too theoretical to measure; the following is an example of returns from implementing KM in telecommunication industry. Quantification of benefits is most obvious in customer service sectors such as sales and customer support department. For example, a customer service center could use a knowledge management system to help service representatives to identify the source of problems by listing troubleshooting measures that were successful in the past. Therefore, more problems are resolved with a single call in customer service centers. Telecommunications service providers have used KM systems to increase their sales productivity. Sales representatives tend to specialize in those services that they have sold successfully in the past. KM systems can assist to increase sales by providing information about services with which the sales representative is less familiar with.

[edit] Knowledge Management Tools and Strategies in Telecommunications Industry

US West (Lewis-Chan, 1998)

Firstly, we will examine how the telecoms giants – US West reacted to knowledge challenge: the majority of its 47,000 employees will be eligible to retire in the year 2002 taking the bulk of the knowledge in the organization with them. We will also look at what suggestions that the Global Village Labs (GVL) has given.

Before planning the details of KM solutions, GVL have set some business goals:

1. Work within a time frame. Try to complete all projects within three months.

2. Deliver 10x on every project—a $10 million bottom-line return for every $one million spent. Accordingly, every project must have a clear business purpose and the measures to show it has been delivered. Rather than only looking at the literal requirements, the group tries to work with its internal clients to determine what the systemic effects might be.

3. Reject projects that have no chance of succeeding and no clear business value.

Major problems existed in US West and GVL’s solutions:

1. GVL discovered that there was a backlog, an enormous amount of errors and rework, and lost revenue due to lost customers. Solution: GVL team started to pool and codifies the needed knowledge. They turned it into a corporate asset, and distributed the new ordering tool via the intranet.

2. Local knowledge of US West was stored in numerous systems. This resulted in unfulfilled orders and incomplete information leading to missed commitments. Solution: The data was pooled and access was given across the system, providing completeness and corroboration. Again, the tool was distributed across the intranet. Users were motivated because the system was easy to use. Missed commitments were reduced dramatically.

3. The 65 agents assigned to the helpdesk provide assistance on 130 applications across the company, responding to about 40,000 calls per month. Traditionally, calls were assigned to people who were experts on the specific application with the problem; they wanted to capture the expertise to solve these problems in a system so that more people could have access to it. Solution: GVL chose a Web-based Inference product to build the system on. It converted personal knowledge into a corporate asset. Statistics are recorded on which cases are most frequently invoked. This enables identification and elimination of the root cause of the problem.

ORANGE (Minogue-White, 2006)

Secondly, we will then look into what work have been done across the KM at a well-known international telecom company – Orange

Orange’s strategies to implement KM: Orange emphasize on the training and learning of staff appropriately within their multinational, highly complex, knowledge based organization. They want all their employees to be competent in which they aim to learn from experience on how to improve working practices, how to excel at them and how to pass learning on. The KM team in Orange had to look at the way in which training can best adapt to and support rapid changing needs. Orange’s story is an excellent example to reflect how to bring the disciplines of KM, training and HR together in a knowledge community, so that the organization can be more flexible and timely in meeting changing needs and build capability for continuous improvement. What KM team in Orange has done? The Orange KM team had uncovered a wealth of good practice and innovative learning techniques. They share the techniques with all training professionals at other countries and provide a channel for others to access.

Orange also makes use of the knowledge communities like joining forum to share professional techniques. In early stage, such events concentrated primarily on getting to know each other through understanding current challenges, budget issues, key knowledge areas and the range of learning techniques employed. But now, much exchange and sharing of approaches and resources occurred; it gives the members access to training and workshop materials throughout the group. Orange have developed large amount of relevant context and materials, therefore, members can take these materials and add this to their training portfolio at a greatly reduced cost.

British Telecom (Auckland, 1999)

Lastly, we will examine the KM challenge that British Telecom (BT) faced and how they combated the challenge. The challenge that BT faced is that they find difficult to retain the discipline of customer focus while developing rich and extensive knowledge sharing. The team recognized that the lack of knowledge-sharing was inhibiting the business. They also found that learning from other sectors’ previous projects, experience and expertise could speed up new projects. Through the mass customization strategy, innovative new products and solutions could be created.

Strategy 1: Top Down Communication. They inform the employee on strategy, business performance and market knowledge via internal conferences and intranet sites. They also changed the design of the corporate scorecard to align with the new strategy. To encourage the knowledge-sharing, they increased the reward given to sector managers for achieving organizational goals.

Strategy 2: Targeting Critical Communities. The KM initiative team in BT would target those communities relating to their industry and working in partnership with them, such as develop, implement and measure the right knowledge strategies, tools and techniques to enhance the value proposition to the business. They also work closely with several other business units within BT and establish networking with knowledge practitioners in other major corporations so as to ensure they learned from others and brought in the right help as required.

[edit] Problems have been solved by employing KM practices

“Knowledge management aims to exploit an organization’s information for greater productivity, new value and increased competitiveness, and also to encourage the exchange of tacit knowledge.” (Davies, 2000) The performances of an organization will be affected by the effectiveness of the knowledge management practices. “Knowledge management (KM) must be applied in the right place at the right time. “(Coleman, 1998) It is more efficient in the daily operations of an organization if the people can get the right information in the right time. In fact, it is difficult to create successful knowledge management networks. It “requires skilled managers that master social processes and that understand how people learn and share knowledge. The limited empirical knowledge on how knowledge networks are set up in high-tech organizations may result that issues and problems encountered during the set up process become overwhelming. If the problems are not tackled properly the outcome will be unsuccessful knowledge networks which only consume financial resources and undermine the trust for management.” (Schönström, 2005) “One KM solution is an extranet that supports the sharing of knowledge between departments and a client.” (Coleman, 1998) By using the extranet, the client can post the messages and comment the performances of an organization through the website of an organization. Also, the department can have a better understanding of the clients’ needs in order to provide the better services.

[edit] Future trends of Knowledge Management in Telecommunication Industry

Nowadays, the telecommunication industries will bring together “the disciplines of knowledge management, training and HR in a knowledge community enabled the organization to become more flexible and timely in meeting changing needs and build capability for continuous improvement.” (Minogue-White, 2006) In order to meet the changing needs in the market, the telecommunication industries will employ the KM practices as an element of training. Thus, the staff in an organization can have the deeper understanding in the concepts of the KM practices. Also, the concept of communities of practice (CoP) is also encouraged in the telecommunication industries. The groups of people can share the ideas and knowledge in order to put the duplication of effort on the same incident. Besides, not only the formal groups of people can share the ideas, the informal groups of people can also share the idea among themselves. “Knowledge communities had already proven to be a successful and popular method to share professional techniques in a number of areas (including legal, fraud and revenue assurance, security and finance).” (Minogue-White, 2006) According to Davies (2000), the challenge for organizations is to support such communities and make them effective. Moreover, the Intranet becomes commonly used as one of the KM practice in the telecommunication industries. Intranet plays an important role in the more effective exploitation of both explicit and tacit knowledge. “Tacit knowledge is considered to be a vital component in innovation and product development processes.” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) It is difficult to articulate. “To transfer tacit knowledge is however difficult due to its dependence of the knower and the context where it was created.” (Orlikowski, 2002). By using the Intranet, people can share both the explicit and tacit knowledge through the Intranet, thus the people can get the updated information easily.

[edit] Research Methods

Information collected and findings gathered for the study are mainly divided into two sections, interview questions and professional experiences.

Interview questions

We have conducted an informal interview with the General Manager of the department in the company, Mr. Chan, in 2007. Prior to his employment in H&C, he was one of the contributors in KM implementation of P&W. He has greatly contributed to our study and provided us with quality information about KM practice both in P&W and H&C. The interview questions are shown in the Appendix 1. Further description and investigation will be shown in the case study.

Professional experiences

Having the opportunities working as summer intern in H&C, three of our team members gain a basic understanding about the ordinary operation process within the department. We have participated in various projects and take post in responsible for improved information management system. What we have observed can be input into the case study for research use. Besides, we hold some documentations in hand which are related to KM issues of the industry. We have asked for permission on the use of those documents from the department and Mr. Chan has also introduced us some useful business profiles about KM practice, both for organizations and the whole industry.

[edit] Case Study

In this part, we would like to present our study and investigation on the KM implementation status with two large telecommunication organization, P&W and H&C.

P&W

As we understand that well managed customer and staff knowledge was the major competitive advantages among telecommunication, we target this industry as our project study and research subject. P&W has a long development history in the telecommunication market. It is the largest and most comprehensive provider of communications services in Hong Kong and one of the Asia’s leading performers in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). P&W is often awarded with innovative technology and excellence business practice. For example, it supports the knowledge initiatives on the scale of the technology-themed Cyberport project and help make Hong Kong and IT hub around the international market. The company has employed KM practice which stimulates production progress and offers business intelligence to sales persons in order to provide high-quality services for potential customers. In this paper, we study how the extraordinary KM development brings in benefits to the company and turns into the good practice of the industry.

H&C

Having started its business in 1995, H&C is one of the newly established telecom companies in recent decade. Enjoying the most contemporary development in technologic creation and international communication network, H&C has been connected to China telecommunication market, making the first new fixed network provider in Hong Kong to offer direct telecommunications links with the Mainland. In view of the fact that KM practice holds as the key success factor to enterprise achievements among organizations in the industry, senior management in H&C believes that intellectual capital has its own value and they are willing to make investment for the KM implementation. As for the case, KM practice in the H&C positions at the very beginning stage, we aim at determining its KM procedures at current stage and compare its development framework with those in P&W.

[edit] Purpose of KM implementation in P & W

Competition was introduced by Hong Kong government in telecommunication industry in 1995, to instead of monopoly service provider for one century. Each of the new entrants can build their own network to provide new service at highly competitive prices. It is a great challenge for all the telecommunication companies to sustain and increase their market share for the dynamic changes.

Mr. Chan worked as a manger for pre-sales and bid management in P&W at that time, to lead around 70 staff in his unit. He was responsible of bidding for those landmark projects, such as Cyberport project, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center project, etc. In the very beginning, He was not aware of KM concept yet, only assigned to increase the winning bid rate from 20% to 30%, or ever reach 50%, to reduce the high cost of bidding preparations. Normally, it takes 9 months to complete the whole bid process. Mr. Chan called it as knowledge intensive process, on which they have spent significant resources. The bidding preparation includes discussion with customer on tender specification before bid book publishing, potential competitor analysis, costing and return on investment estimation, technical solution determination etc. To avoid wasting time and human resources, they need to know how much possibility they have to focus those highly recommended tenders.

As a matter of fact, the bid team has done something related to KM all along, but without an explicit KM practice. When they won the bid, manager would praise the team members and use the constant strategy for the coming bid projects. If the team failed the bid, they would discuss and find reasons or elements that they had not prepared enough for. However, this ordinary after-review could not reflect the real situation, since staff may feel fear of the responsibility of losing the bid.

[edit] Knowledge Management Pilot Project

To improve bidding performance, Mr. Chan invited one of his friends, a KM professional from Cambridge University, to present KM concept to the high level of management. Getting justification and budget for initial approval, they got started to undertake a KM pilot project in bidding team first. The consultant conducted a systematic survey to study how well the employees have done with respect to supporting KM in terms of collecting, storing, classifying, distributing, harvesting and reusing the knowledge.

Conducting the first survey within the bid team, the consultant only rated 30s score from total 500 score, which was far worse up to the standard. When the consultant conducted the second survey on the 3rd months after introducing and applying KM methods, the bid team got 50s score, and then 100s score after 6 months. Finally, they achieved 200s score on the 9th month. Most importantly, the bidding performance has been improved since the implementation of pilot project.

[edit] Knowledge Management Real Practice

The success of pilot project convinced Mr. Chan and senior level of management to implement a comprehensive KM practice within the entire P & W, from bid team to product sales and marketing department, customer service department, and engineering department as well. “We have shifted ordinary management level to extraordinary management level after KM practice.” Mr. Chan said. This top-bottom awareness of KM prompted the project easily in the whole organization. There are at least three types of staff evolved in the bid process in P&W, like sales, bidder and technical expertise. Once the bid was completed, the KM facilitator would conduct interviews with structured questions to collect comments or experiences from each related individual. Then the KM facilitator codified and categorized the information into specific project file. Except confidential information like financial records, the conceptualized content would be released in knowledge base for sharing among all the related staff.

The role of KM facilitator is neutral. It does not matter whether the interviewees’ comments is positive or not. The KM facilitator can validate their understanding of positive comments, and conceptualize the lesson learned from negative side as well. They need capture the tacit knowledge from interviewees into codified explicit knowledge, and teach staff to use the KM tools, more significantly, to stimulate the trust and knowledge sharing culture in the company. KM practice is a continual and on-going process to form knowledge pool. The KM facilitator usually set a short term target on a 6 or 9 month basis, to get quick result as soon as possible, and then repeat again to accumulate the knowledge into knowledge pool. Optimally, KM project is to streamline business process. However, KM staff need recognize the potential improvement method on each element in KM cycle first, and then, business process reengineering will come naturally to find the core knowledge of company. After two years KM practice, P & W became the only company in Hong Kong to win The Top Ten Knowledge Management Award in Asia.

[edit] Knowledge Management Cycle

File:KM cycle.JPG

Following a unique designed KM cycle, organization takes advantage to motivate business performance and streamline production process. Intellectual capital is first captured among workers which then turn into common practice and company expertise. With growing knowledge base such as database system or portal network, captured knowledge is stored properly with various classifications and then further shared within the organization. Every department in the company has its own knowledge base and experts. With better communication between departments, collaboration can be more easily carried out for large business projects and knowledge from different experts can suit for different needs derived from various business events. After that, knowledge generated will be documented, making the tacit knowledge and know-how of experts to be available to each other through KM education in the company. Knowledge harvesting is an approach allowing a wider use of existing knowledge to a much wider range of people. Capable case study of KM practice in the company will be codified as best practice showing around at the portal network and KM system. Once particular project was completed, the KM facilitator conducted interviews to review evaluation and measure the usefulness of knowledge being codified. Lastly a knowledge pool is formed through accumulation of critical knowledge.

[edit] Knowledge Management Tools and Applications

P&W use a wide range of tools in knowledge acquisition, codification and dissemination. Technology is used in order to meet the needs of communication, collaboration, learning and navigation. For example, Microsoft Word Processing is commonly used to create content, Microsoft Project is used to monitor project schedule, and XML-based protocol is used for communication networks. Ultimately, P & W use Portal as a means of KM platform. The Portal has enabled the staff to access Project Library, Discussion forum, E-learning, Subscription Alert, Taxonomy, Yellow Page and other functions.

The Best Practice would be formulated where more than 10 projects have been completed under the same subject, which is determined as the most efficient way to provide business solution by line manager in each discipline. When a new or less experienced staff dealt with the similar project, they can locate The Best Practice to find the method and solution for reference. If only a few projects have done before, the portal also provides Lesson Learned from previous works. If the project has not been encountered at all, staff still could locate Yellow Page to contact the experts for advices. Discussion Forum is used for post questions and responses. The staff was able to post his request on any technical or managerial issues; any other colleague could suggest possible solution in forum. Moreover, the staff could call a weekend gathering in forum, to count the people for entertainment booking. The frequent interaction among staff has encouraged the trusted and friendly relationship in the organization.

E-learning is used for teaching sessions under different disciplines, e.g. new sales training, new product presentation or new service demonstration. Every staff can download the teaching material to acquire primary knowledge on their own. This self-directed function let staff arrange learning plan according to individual schedule, to save the cost to held physical session once and once again.

Subscription Alert is a kind of personalized assistance to deploy the information to staff account after setting preference. Once there was new knowledge released under the subscripted discipline, staff could receive the alert to locate the contents at the earliest. E-mail is designed to compose and send the message among staff, and attach the files with a message. Furthermore, Group Calendar allows the staff to schedule their meetings, and detect if meeting times conflict occurred.

[edit] Purpose of KM implementation in H&C

H&C established in 1995 and committed to satisfy customer’s need with better services by building the fibre-optic network. Nowadays, H&C is also the largest "fibre-to-the-building" telecommunications network in Hong Kong. With the growing scope of services provided and the dealing with several hundred thousands of customers, sharing of knowledge is being concerned. And the KM concept penetrates among H &C in recent year since Mr. Chan is transferred to this organization. The first department that KM is implemented is Sale and Marketing Department. This is because of the department head, Mr. Chan, have a strong passion on putting KM into practice.

Sale and Marketing Department is divided into several divisions, such as Product Development division and Logistics & Business Intelligence support division. They work together to promote and operate of the local communication services including IDD, Internet Broadband and Voice. Therefore, each division within the department is closely co-related. Mr. Chan is strongly believed that efficient flow of knowledge sharing could enhance the daily business process and also providing a better quality service to customers.

[edit] Knowledge Management Pilot Project

Though there is a strong initiative on introducing KM into H&C, large investment is needed in this project. Therefore, Mr. Chan would like to prove the success of the KM to Top Management by starting the KM application in the Sale and Marketing Department. He stated that each unit in H&C actually already had its own function KM, but there is a lack of integrated strategy of a enterprise-wide KM, which is an extra-ordinary KM. Referring to his explanation, ordinary KM means each units just satisfy their own immediate information need. Actually, those information could be pooled and share among whole organization in order to shorten the business process time. He thinks this is a common situation and obstacle faced that newly KM developing organization may faced. Therefore, he wants to change the pattern of existing culture of knowledge transformation. He would like to develop a trust and willing to share relationship among employees. A software called “let’s share” and “e-learning” platform are introduced with his aims. Detailed of the software and platform will be discuss in following part. Also, a project of building a comprehensive data mining system is in processes. This system could systematize and synchronize whole department selling information and thus could generate an immediate, accurate and updated report upon manager’s request. In the field of telecommunication activities, the best use of advanced information technology has become the major contribution to the great turnover and huge information flow among the organizations. Accurate and efficient information dissemination is the essential factor in developing global markets against all kinds of competitors.

[edit] Knowledge Management Tools and Applications

As mentioned above, “Let’s Share” software is introduced to promote the knowledge sharing among employees. It is a collaboration tool. It enhances the communication and information sharing among employees. For example, people share on the same desktop view or presentation materials simultaneously though they are located at disparate area. They can co-operate to edit on the same document/power-point slide at the same time and thus enhance the knowledge sharing. With the “Share File” function of this product, sharing computer file are no longer limited by the means (E-mail, Compact Disc) and also not limited by the time (Using MSN Messenger, ICQ as transferring tools, then wait for the receiver online). People are sharing the information at any time, anywhere. Thus, a stronger and closer relationship built. It is assumed that the uses of the “Let’s Share” could facilitate the communication among employees and also change the existing culture of knowledge transformation.

In additions to the “Let’s Share” software, an “E-Learning” platform is also introduced. This is particular useful for training despite the time and place the staff want to learn about the product. The “E-Learning” platform captures the existing knowledge (i.e. Product concept, selling script and demonstration), codify and make them be available to all potential users. This self-learning concept is endorsed so as to shorten the problem-solving process and save the company resources ultimately.

[edit] Findings & Analysis of the Case Study

By reviewing the case study of P&W and H&C, we understand more about the real practice on implementing KM into organization. And thus several success factors for KM practice are generated.

[edit] Success factor of Knowledge Management

[edit] Bring abstract to practical

At present, KM is a new and quite abstract concept in Hong Kong commercial society, which could raise confuses within the organization. As existing business firm has operated its enterprise under a long-established working culture. Workers have already adapted to the traditional management style and business environment. Therefore, it is hard for them to accept the emergence of new KM management. From that case, Mr. Chen suggested us not to take the name of KM into account, rather than regarding it as part of general management. To promote KM into the business operations, the senior management should be the first group to believe that KM could bring benefits to the company. Without a firm faith and strong belief of KM success, it is definitely a barrier leading to business failure. All the senior managers should have the common goals and get the same consensus into the KM implementation. After that, the firm can hold different seminars and learning talks to promote KM. By means of different stages or phases, KM concept is progressively promoted to different divisions or departments within the organization. Once the whole organization became familiar with the KM procedure and system, the KM concept can be introduced gradually in width and depth then

[edit] Patience, Passion and Persistence of Management

Patience and persistence is the key for a successful KM practice. From the P&W cases, it shows us the facts that KM will not promise an immediate financial return. Therefore the patience of senior level of Management is critical. The most failed KM projects are quitted within the first year. No matter what reason caused the failure, it would be far more difficult to re-start the project in the coming years. Therefore, a small scale of pilot project can be implemented on a trial basis. Once the experiment is successful, KM manager can convince the senior level of management to finance and support the KM project. Also, passion for KM practice can drive the KM project to achieve the result. It takes long time to see the achievement. Multidisciplinary nature of KM brings a challenge for the KM facilitators, who need devote themselves in varied field such as cognitive science, sociology and information technology. Lack of passion, the KM practice would easily cease on any obstacles encountered. On the other hand, the more people participation in KM practice, the more value KM can generate. That is why most KM application adopted in the big firms, since small sized enterprise can share the experiences in more informal way.

[edit] Develop the Knowledge Share culture

Corporate cultural can either courage or discourage knowledge sharing. In the interview, Mr. Chan gave us two examples from his experience. One is to do with a non-profit institution, in which most staffs were serving as social workers for various volunteer communities. Those staff truly took pleasure to share their knowledge, but reluctant to be rated as the best practice. Another case referred his current working field, where staffs have striven for the best performance, but possessing concern to share their knowledge. Hence, the need for building knowledge sharing culture shows the extreme importance in KM practice.

According to Davies (2000), the challenge for organizations is to support knowledge communities and make them effective. To deal with this issue, ‘Let’s Share” and “E-Learning” platform are introduced by H&C, with the support of communities of practice (CoP) concept. Effective incentives and supportive core values should be encouraged to the most expert employees to share their knowledge (Strouse, 2001). CoP is encouraged in the telecommunication industries in the future KM development trend. We believed that the usefulness of informal knowledge sharing have the same weight with formal sharing. Instead of forcing people to share their knowledge with each other, the informal way could prevent the large resistance from employees. Encouraging the knowledge sharing informally enables the groups of people easily absorb and accept the idea of sharing their knowledge voluntarily in order to put the duplication of effort on the same incident.

[edit] Conclusions

Learning from the real case study, literature and KM text books, maintaining the continuity sustainability of Knowledge management is a long term task. It is concluded the successes of a KM project in organization are depends on the involvement and contribution of all the parties, especially strong initiative and passionate Top Management. The inter-related characteristics of KM create the complexity on real world practice. In order to develop an Enterprise-wide KM, an integrated view must be adopted. Not only should the theoretical and technology aspects be pay attention to, but also the cultural adoption and education among the participants (i.e. staffs within the department and whole organization).

[edit] Acknowledgements

Thank you for Mr. Eric Chan sharing his wonderful experience about performing the KM project with us and also the valuable data provided from staffs of Sales and Marketing department. Besides, thanks for the graceful support from our course lecturers and follow classmates. Finally, gratitude is expressed for the contribution of our group mate.

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[edit] References

Auckland, Marc. (1999). COMPETING THROUGH KNOWLEDGE. Knowledge Management Review, 1(6), 2-6.

Brelade, S. & Harman, C. (2003). A Practical Guide to Knowledge Management: A Special Commissioned Report. London: Thorogood Professional Insights.

Coleman, D. (1998). Taking the best approach to knowledge management. Computer Reseller News, 791, 111-112.

Davies, N J. (2000). Knowledge Management. BT Technology Journal, 62.

Dykeman, J.B. (1998). Knowledge management moves from theory toward practice. Managing Office Technology, 43, 12-14.

Kogut, B. & Zander, U. (1992). Knowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the replication of technology. Organization Science, 3(3), 383-96.

Lewis-Chan, Betsy. (1998). BUILDING POWER TOOLS FOR KNOWLEDGE WORKERS. Knowledge Management Review, 1(5), 22-27.

Malhotra, Y. (1998). Deciphering the Knowledge Management Hype. Journal for Quality & Participation, 53, 58-60.

Minogue-White, Lisa. (2006). CAPITALIZING ON INTERNAL EXPERTISE AT ORANGE. KM Review, 9(5), 24-27.

Nonaka, I (1991) Harvard Business Review. The Knowledge creating company, 6 (8), 96-104.

Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company - How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Office of the Telecommunications Authority, Hong Kong. (2007). Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://www.ofta.gov.hk/en/index.html

Orlikowski, W.J. (2002). Knowing in practice: enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing. Organization Science, 13(3), 249-73.

Schönström, M. (2005). Creating knowledge networks: lessons from practice. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(6) 17-29.

Strouse, Karen G. (2001). Strategies for Success in the New Telecommunications Marketplace. Boston: Artech House Telecommunications Library.

Wiig, K. (1997). Knowledge Management: Where Did it Come From and Where Will It Go?. Journal of Expert Systems with Applications, Special Issues on Knowledge Managemen,. 13(1), 50-60.

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[edit] Appendix

Interview Questions are shown as follow:

1. When did you adopt Km program in P&W?

2. How was the development of KM in P&W?

3. Why do you start KM program in H&C?

4. Can you describe the current status of the KM application in H&C?

5. Have you come across any difficulties? How do solve it?

6. What are the benefits and weaknesses of current KM practices?

7. Which elements in the KM program do you think are the most important for H&C? During the implementation, is that element cost you most heavily?

8. What is the future plan of KM development in H&C?

9. Can you share some interesting KM cases related to telecommunications industry? As a vice-chairman of the KMDC, how you feel about the prospectus of KM development in Hong Kong?

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[edit] Knowledge Management Pioneer of Non Government Organization (NGO) in Asia(Group E)

Leung Ka Shun (Karen),Wong Sze Nga (Clara), Wong Kuan I (Jessica), Chu Hang Tim (Kanas), Pang Ho Wing (Wing)& Kwong Tsz Wun (Joanne)

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[edit] Abstract

There is relatively little information on knowledge management in the public sectors, thus the knowledge management theories and frameworks applied in the public sectors are not well understood. This report aims to study on the knowledge management strategies in public organizations in Asia.

In the literature review section, we demonstrate a general study in the Non Government Organization (NGO) sector. We focus on the tools and strategies the various organizations employed and how the operational problems being solved and the improvement being made after engaging such tools and strategies. The review also discusses the future trend and development of knowledge management.

To achieve an in-depth study, C&Y was chosen for our case study. We focus on how Knowledge Management (KM) is implemented in the C&Y, a non government organization (NGO) which belongs to the social service sector in Asia. We identify the core issues and challenges the C&Y faces in delivering effective public policy, particularly challenges presented by increasing community expectations.

C&Y is the first NGO to implement the KM programme in Asia. In the case study, we are going to look at the degree of importance of KM implementation to NGO and commercial organizations. Besides, we investigate how the C&Y develops a complete new KM programme in compliance with the typical organizational assessment - People, Process and Technology (PPT) perspective. Also, we explore how the PPT is used for developing KM strategies, tools and activities. Besides, the case study also examines the benefits, problems, responsibilities and technological aspects that are entailed in managing knowledge in the organization. Moreover, the current situations, continuous improvement, and development trends of KM programme are also discussed.

Implementing the KM programme in NGO is a ground breaking issue. And this case has been the typical model for the other NGOs to carry out KM programme.

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[edit] Introduction

In the 21st century of the information society, Knowledge Management (KM) holds the key to success of the company. Knowledge now become more valuable assets than others which gives out the ultimate contribution to a range of company activities high from making strategic decision and low to operational process, and which is called “Intellectual Capital” and deemed as “Business Intelligence” in profit making company presents the ability to maintain and manage the knowledge kept and used in the organization. For the same token, it is known as “non-profit Intelligence” in non-profit organization.

Non-profit organization operated differently from commercial company, like the financial report is primary tool to measure how successful the KM involved. However, it is invalid to apply to the non-profit organization which purpose is not for profit making. In addition, less attention is given on educating the officers to be the knowledgeable generators as to deeply understand the particular issue, problems, challenges within KM. (Paul, 2003). The development of KM in non-profit organization is challenging and should be tailored to implement to attain the success of the sector.

It is worth to study the non-profit sector (generally called non-government organization (NGO)) in Asia. In 2004, a structured KM implementation has been carried out by the C&Y in Asia. The C&Y provides social services for the children and youths. The specialty of flexible and heterogeneous services provided in nature that the explicit knowledge is difficult to be captured, in addition to the internal challenges in budget policy, early retirement policy and high turnover of the new staff against the high demand for social services in the public, all of these increase the need for KM embedded in C&Y to maintain the services continuously provided in good quality with controllable budget.

This chapter is about how knowledge management can be applied in Asia NGO -- C&Y. The content center around the special needs of the organization, general and unique constraints faced, and analysis of the strategies used to implement KM project. Lastly, some recommendations are suggested to work with the challenges and to forecast the trend of KM development in the future.

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[edit] Literature Review

“Knowledge management (KM) has become a standard practice in industry, but for government agencies, information centers, libraries and non-governmental organizations, it is still a fairly new concept.” (Mclnerney, C., 2002) Non-governmental organizations (NGO), the non-profit sector, now are “involved in a deep renewal process that is changing both the structure of the sector and its internal workings” (Borzaga and Santuari, 2000; Lester, 1999; Ryan, 1999; Rifking, 1997). They are required to deliver tailored and high-quality services in order to overcome environmental complexity and scarcity of resources. So they implement knowledge management to share knowledge among workers in the spirit of learning, renewal and innovation.

Knowledge management is concerned with the exploitation and development of the knowledge assets of an organization with a view to furthering the organization’s objectives. The knowledge to be managed includes both explicit and tacit knowledge, which are documented knowledge and subjective knowledge respectively. Management entails all of those processes associated with the identification, sharing and creation of knowledge. This requires systems for the creation and maintenance of knowledge repositories, and to cultivate and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and organizational learning.

Organizations that succeed in knowledge management are likely to view knowledge as an asset and to develop organizational norms and values, which support the creation, and sharing of knowledge. (Rowley, 2000). There are three key elements of knowledge management should be considered by public sector. They are people, processes and technology. “People are the most important component, because managing knowledge depends upon people’s willingness to share and reuse knowledge.” (CIO Council, 2001)

Techniques and tools for KM is a key lever however it is not independently used, KM strategy must be coherent and integrated with a comprehensive strategy whose goal is to pursue excellence, highlight the mutual relationships among the planned improvement programmes. (Lettieri et al., 2004). At the very first beginning, developing the concept of strategy mapping is the initial point to facilitate the KM strategy, which is commonly used in public and private sector as a tool for their stakeholders to visualize, communicate, focus effort, test assumptions and measure progress to achieve the strategic objectives. It also becomes effective to be used in non-profit companies in three perspectives as a standard balanced scorecard: building customer loyalty, building business and developing employee commitment. (Howard, 2003)

General KM Strategy and tools are “use of success stories”, databases, archives, manuals or “people’s minds” are activities to codify and store knowledge (Lettieri et al., 2004). Stoll (2004) suggests that there is a need to enhance internal and external knowledge-capturing methods as well as face-to-face sharing opportunities, It is to develop relevant topics of conversation for meetings and facilitate online discussion in between meetings. The tool will provide members the forums, an online calendar of events, the ability to uploading and downloading files, polling capabilities, an updatable member roster, and an area to share useful links, facilitating the communities of practice and develop knowledge database are important.

In the KM World & Intranets Conference in 2003, a brilliant KM Reality Award obtained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has given a proof, a multilingual database of images and information on missing children has formed the network, NCMEC is able to transmit images and information instantly to law enforcement throughout the United States and to other countries around the world in each other’s native language, also technological advancements, training workshops, programme development, research and evaluation help to explore the method of using experienced-based database to find missing children. (KMWorld & Intranets 2003 review, 2004). This successful case revealed that Taxonomy has a great responsibility to contribute linking the desired content, it is sort of textual analysis to manage the knowledge to a conceptual framework for acquisition and sharing. C., Lee, W. & Wang, Y (2005) suggested the multi-facet taxonomy system (MTS) for effective management of unstructured knowledge, the relationships among the related concepts to the actual classification can be further expanded for the terminal concepts.

Besides database, intranet is a common tool used to share knowledge inside organization. In California, 14 non-profit libraries which are the part of the community foundation, volunteer center and management support organization and formed the California Management Assistance Partnership (C-MAP). The specialists share the best practices and lessons learned through meeting, conference calls and the C-MAP intranet. With an upgraded knowledge management system, the non-profit information services group could share its collective knowledge with other non-profit centers throughout the stated. The system could then be implemented to coordinate the work of nonprofit information providers across the nation. (Larson et al., 2005).

Liz (2005) pointed out that non-profit organization also needed to leverage “nonprofit intelligence” which is called as “business intelligence” in commercial world. It supports sophisticated analysis and insights for the non professionals to make decisions and demonstrate the value of services to the stakeholders. CPAs is one of the software tools to manage the business intelligence well by offering extensive data mining services, solution houses multiple data marts. Embedding with the Personalized Knowledge Management (PKM) concept is the trend for the software development, Alotaiby (2005) further elaborated with PKM presentations which can create the greater sense of familiarity and comfort with the system, and facilitate the advanced learning opportunity from portal, the standard-driven e-learning system which can assist the traditional learning with collaborative learning. Keeping up with the market trend also is one of the KM strategies and should not be ignored.

On the other hand, identified the problems and realized the potential obstacles in the organization or outsides can further tailor how the KM strategies and tools can be found in the NGO. Problems can be found in the process of sharing approach. According to Dalkir (2005), people will not lose credit for a knowledge product they created. Individuals are commonly rewarded for what they know, not they share. The reason why the experienced staff is unwilling to share is because they are afraid other people do not understand or accept their knowledge. “An organization’s main implementation challenge stems from the absence of a “sharing” culture and employees’ lack of understanding KM and the benefits it offers.” (Cong, Pangya, 2003).

Lemieux & Dalkir (2006) stated that non-profit artistic organizations have the problem of lacking resources and financial resources to purchase KM-related tools. That also happens in NGO that they have no formal team to classify and create captured knowledge. Without government support, it is difficult to maintain the KM systems and operations. As the same time, Increasing number of experienced staff retired and increasing number of contract staff left due to the innovation of government policy contributed to the difficulty in Building up organizational memory, “helps people do their jobs and save time through better decision making and problem solving” (Dalkir, 2005).

Although particular problems might be existed in different organization, measuring outcomes and benefits of KM is crucial because it helps to demonstrate the value and worthiness of a KM initiative to the managers, employees and stakeholders.

According to Ellis (1997), traditional measurement techniques that emphasize solely on financial performance can be misleading as Lin and Tseng (2005) found that the market values of many companies are higher than their accounting values. Chong and Choi, 2005 also stated the k-economy has to be based on intellectual capital which can not be captured by balance sheets, so just sharing with the same point with Austin and Larkey (2002), measuring the core competencies and distinctive abilities of employees would require the removal of traditional means of quantification Besides, the future usage of KM evaluation is heavily dependent on both the quality of the metrics and whether output generated by the metric management would provide tangible value addition to the organizations. This section describes the popular methods used by organizations for measuring the performance of KM strategies.

For the long term development of KM, Caldwell, F. (2004) forecasted the government agencies and non-profits are making significant investments in Knowledge Management (KM). It is because KM will increasingly become an important aspect for efficiency improvement and service enhancement in nonprofit organizations. But we may ask that where is the knowledge management going in the future.

According to Ronald Young, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Knowledge Office of Knowledge Associates International, he predicted that the knowledge management’s methods, processes, tools and techniques will become better and more automated. And, the knowledge management will focus more on coaching and developing the professional knowledge management team in the future. Also, the intelligent agentware will replace the costly knowledge categorization and indexing. (Young, R., n.d.)

Buckman, R. H. (2005) also predicted the direction of the knowledge management will be developed into three possible aspects. Firstly, Buckman thought that the organizations will focus on semantic software; this is one of the semantic search engines. This kind of search engine can help the individual knowledge workers to improve their abilities to find out what they need when they need. Secondly, the knowledge management will implement the virtual work in the future. It is because virtual work will be an organizational norm. It can make the staff to transfer, access and share the information or knowledge more effectively and efficiently. Therefore, the organization needs to provide more virtual training and tools for the staff. Thirdly, he also predicts that the organization’s staff will be as consumers. It is because the staff require more users-friendly system for working. Then, it can make the staff to know where they can find out the information quickly and increase the productivity. It makes the system to become a people-centric system rather than an organizational-centric system (Buckman, R. H., 2005). We can see that the new stage of KM is the arrangement and management of content through taxonomy construction and use, and also use information technology to make KM more efficiently and effectively. (McElroy,M.W.2002)

As to establish the KM within the organization, they need to identify why they need KM and what kinds of KM strategies, tools, activities and evaluation approaches they need to implement into the programme. Also, they need to face many problems and find the solutions to solve the problems. Moreover, they also need to make sure that the KM programme is running smoothly.

As a Knowledge Management Pioneer, C&Y is the first NGO to implement the KM programme. In this case study, we are going to explore how C&Y implement the KM strategies, tools, activities, evaluation approaches. Also we are going to see what kinds of problems they need to face and what kinds of benefits they gain in the KM programme. Finally, we are going to provide some suggestions for the C&Y's KM programme.

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[edit] Research Methods

The results of the study are highly based on the qualitative findings from the semi formal interviews, field observation of the platform and document analysis. Those involved an evaluation of the KM development in C&Y between the pre (1999-2004) and post periods (2004-2007), by this, the methodologies were designed as followed:

• Interview

The first interview at the I.T Consultants Company with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), he has been voluntarily involving in the project as a consultancy, the details and milestones of the KM platform project in C&Y from 1999 to 2004 was shared within that three hours interview.

The second interview at the C&Y's headquarter with the Knowledge Development Officer (KDO) was held in the next week of the first meeting, and the IT consultants also sit in to realize the current situation of KM development in the C&Y. Since the project has been ended for 2 more years, some reflection, comparisons and feedbacks of KM development in C&Y was generated. The interview was ended in two hours.

• Field Observation

Since the second interview held in the C&Y's headquarter, so the current KM platform could be demonstrated in the workplace and instant feedbacks and experiences can be observed in the real study field.

• Document Analysis

The sources for the Documentation Analysis are ranged from the C&Y documents, scholar journal articles, websites and some case studies center around to the NGO KM development.

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[edit] The Case Study of NGO in C&Y

[edit] Background of C&Y

C&Y is one of the Non Government Organization (NGO) to provide the social services for children and youths. C&Y has over 800 staff members and 50 community service locations. Their major target groups are children and youths from 2 to 35 years old.

In the past, C&Y had mainly provided the services to take care of their education, food and living. C&Y would also help equip them some living skills, such as weaving basket and needlework in order to improve their living standard.

Now, the society and economy have been growing rapidly, C&Y has changed their services. They provide a safe and supportive place for children and youths. They can experience new opportunities, overcome barriers, build positive relationships and develop confidence and skills for their life. Also, C&Y provides more educational and counseling services for the children, youths and their parents. The C&Y focuses on:

• • Healthy development of children and youths,
  • Nurture children and youth to be responsible citizens,
  • Take the special measures to resolve family crises,
  • Help children and youth to fight for rights and welfares.
    
    

Also, C&Y provides many programmes in physical recreation, technology, the arts and personal growth for the children and youths. Therefore, C&Y has provided many innovative and diversified services for children, youths and their parents. The services include:

• • Integrated Services for Young People
  • Youth Work Experience and Training Scheme
  • After School Care Services
  • School Social Work
  • Family Life Education
  • Outreaching Social Services
  • Campus Services
  • Counselling Centre
  • Hotline Counselling Services
  • Children’s Home
  • Kindergarten
    
    

C&Y has provided many different professional services for the children and youths, it helps them to grow in a healthy life and prepare them to face the challenges in the future.

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[edit] Findings & Analysis of the Case Study

After interviewing with the Chief Executive Officer from IT Consultants Company and Knowledge Development Officer (KDO) from the C&Y, we have collected much more information about KM programme in C&Y. In the following, we are going to explain our finding and analysis of the KM programme in C&Y, including the reasons and processes of implementing KM programme, KM tools and strategies, evaluation, benefits, obstacles and suggestions in C&Y.

[edit] The reasons of KM is needed

C&Y is the very first non-government organization to implement KM in Asia. Under the scarcity of resources and financial stress, they have tried to make use of everything they have in order to survive and to keep operating. The goal is to share knowledge among everyone in the organization to get things done in the shortest possible time and least resources. KM programme was what they have adopted to sustain their assets – employees’ knowledge. Two main reasons, which are brain drain and practical needs, were considered before starting the programme.

• Brain drain

In the social services sector, most of the social workers work at the frontline. They are dealing with different kind of people. Skillful techniques help them equip themselves. Many of the experienced staff could act as a mentor to help novices. However, the fact is that increasing number of experienced staff retired. Besides, number of contract staff would leave their job within a specific time frame because of many reasons including job security, salary and government vacancy. When staff leave, they would carry with their experience and knowledge which are the valuable assets in C&Y. That means the organization cannot sustain the performance that they always do in this circumstance. It directly affects the quality of services provided. At the end, C&Y would not retain any corporate memories.

• Practical needs

C&Y pointed out that there are increasing number of social problems. Unfortunately those problems are getting complicated which means the demand for experienced social workers has been increasing. Moreover, many cases they deal with are in urgent involving one’s life. Therefore, C&Y has thought about that if there is a place or a platform or an access point would store some kind of emergency or handy information for every staff to tackle with the cases in the shortest time would definitely improve their services. Within the organization, because of the culture built, experienced or senior staff are not willing to share their knowledge with other staff. Reasons determined include workload increased, busy schedule, job security and psychological bahaviour. Once junior or contract staff come in, they would not have enough time to pick up duties. Trainings are then provided but it is time consuming and costly.

[edit] Implementation of the KM programme

C&Y started to implement the KM programme in 2000 and finished in 2004. In 2000, C&Y ’s senior management started the exploration of KM. They are referred to many books and articles to realize what KM are. Also, they consulted some KM experts and IT consultants to get some advices. At the end of 2001, C&Y submitted their KM proposal to the Social Welfare Department (SWD) to apply for the Business Improvement Project Fund. This funding is Special One-off Grant (SOG).The aim of this funding can help the C&Y to develop the KM programme in IT aspects in order to facilitate organization management and delivery of services with higher quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

In April 2002, the SWD approved the KM proposal. In May, C&Y formally started the KM programme. Project steering committee, project management team and pilot teams were set up to implement the KM programme. In order to change the organizational culture and promote KM programme, some staff members briefing sessions were provided. At the same time, knowledge mapping and process design were proceeding. Pilot teams were responsible to identify the common sets of core services and map out knowledge assets, e.g. practice wisdom and domain knowledge, in order to finish knowledge taxonomy. Between October and December, C&Y started to select I.T supplier for fulfilling their I.T needs for facilitating knowledge sharing.

In 2003, after selecting the I.T supplier, the KM platform was designed and installed, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003. In May, the Microsoft designated the I.T professionals to teach the C&Y's I.T staff about operating the KM platform. Then, the I.T staff of C&Y would hold the training sessions for the C&Y's staff such as social workers and administration staff and teach them how to use the KM platform. In December, the whole formal implementation KM programme was set up. They started to run the KM programme in C&Y and made the evaluation about the implementation of KM programme. After evaluating the KM programme, C&Y wrote a post-implementation review report and submitted to the SWD in March 2004.

• Current situation

Today, the KM programme is still running in C&Y. We find that they work very hard to keep improving and maintaining the whole KM programme. C&Y would launch many community of practice (CoPs) such as Play Therapy, Family-based Service, Outreaching method and Service Learning. They are initiated and formed by respective teams in order to share knowledge. The staff would share their own knowledge base on their experience, works and interests. These are very useful in the performance of their daily work.

Also, C&Y is still devoted to the development the KM and sharing culture. Many different kinds of KM tools and activities are developed such as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Near Miss, Personal Sharing, KM Market, New Staff Briefing Sessions, Award and Annual Review Meeting. These KM tools and activities do not only encourage the staff to share their knowledge in different channels, but also they can identify what kinds of problems and outcomes in the KM programme and find out the solutions to improve the KM programme.

In addition, C&Y keep improving the KM platform. For example, they keep improving the platform’s interface design to make it more users friendly. Certainly, the content of platform is updated regularly. Also, C&Y is using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003. But now, they are considering upgrading the version of the KM platform to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2007.

However, C&Y encounters many difficulties when they make improvement in the KM programme. They would not have enough resources (budget and manpower) to upgrade the technologies such as hardware, software and networking operating system. Also, each staff has their own job duties and tasks, all the staff are voluntary to involve the KM programme. The contents of KM platform are depended on the staff's spontaneity to provide different kinds of information such as documents, articles and PowerPoint. That means the C&Y does not have a formal role to manage the KM programme such as screening. Then, some materials will not be classified in the appropriate location on the KM platform. At the same time, C&Y would also need tackle ways to sustain the enthusiasm and the level of participation of sharing practices among the staff.

Therefore, we can see that C&Y is devoted to the continuous improvement for their KM programme. They try to develop more KM tools and activities for the KM programme in order to improve the quality of management, services and programme in the organization. In the development of KM programme, it would appear many new challenges that they have to confront.

[edit] KM strategies and tools in C&Y

C&Y is providing the social services which involved high human interaction with clients, so the strategies used to implement KM is more people-oriented. To ensure the exact information of clients obtained, knowledge and experience located to handle the social cases effectively and efficiently, the typical organizational assessment – People, Process and Technology (PPT) is used as the direction for the strategies formed. (Kern, 2000)

The situation shows that needs and requirements of the organization or individual affect the process of knowledge flow, while technology is tailored to smooth the process to satisfy the needs. On the other hand, high technology also leads to the change on how knowledge can be formed, so the interactive relationship between PPT is revealed.

File:Ppt.jpg

(Collison & Parcell, 2004)

• People

Existence of Brain Drain and practical need inherited in the organization reveals the need for KM, through the KM identification and sustainability of KM practice, then the KM awareness is established and reaching to the cultivation of sharing culture is the ultimate goal. Steps by steps are the rhythm towards high pressure in nature.

• • Performance in Matrix
  • Skills development
  • Enforcement of participation
  • Promote enthusiasm
    
    

• Process

As to smooth the process to locate the right resources at the right time, the process layout should be structured with the consideration between the common practice of the staff and formal process of the organization.

• • Stick to the Taxonomy structure
  • Maximize codification for greater sharing
    
    

• Technology

With the aid of Technology to ensure the KM function in good practice of RAS - Reliability, Availability and Serviceability, which means the knowledge or information provided is corrected within the capable system in always operated in normal with less malfunction.

• • Focus to the Personalized Knowledge Management
  • Maintain efficiency of Data Warehouse
    
    

According to PPT, there are some tools and activities are set in order to implement KM in the organization. They are:

• Online platform

C&Y adopted the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to build up their online platform where many knowledge sharing activities performing. The online platform is the one of tools that the C&Y has been using to implement knowledge management. Once staff has got an access right, they can access anytime anywhere. It does facilitate the knowledge management which goals are to share information and experiences among staff in the organization.

Staff would find much information there, for example, official notices and upcoming events. Besides, they can upload documents to specific folders. And there are several folders in the front page of the platform which are Near Miss, Discussion Forum, KM Market, Personal Sharing, My Site and Knowledge Bank.

Here we would take a look at some of them. In the Near Miss folder, it is believed that documents are very useful to everyone. It stores information or things happened that everyone has the chances to encounter, for example, how to handle a table tennis table safely. As mentioned by the KDO, an accident almost happened when a little child walked past a folded-up table tennis table. As the locks of the table had not been locked properly, one half of the table fell down while the little child was walking past the table. The table almost hit the little child directly but luckily, a woman came along and saved the little child in time.

In the Personal Sharing section, everyone has to share a piece of information, no matter a PowerPoint or a document or a hyperlink whatever one thinks they are useful, half a year at least.

Inside KM Market, information uploaded goes into different sub-categories by subject. Taxonomy is used in the Knowledge Bank folder. We can see inside there are Emergency Handbook and Poverty. Staff could share their views in the Discussion Form where interactions happen.

According to KDO, knowledge shared on the platform has not been screened. As a matter of fact that there are not much sharing activities and amount of information shared is not huge, there is no one responsible for checking on what are uploaded. Besides, every posting has got its signature. This approach would definitely avoid lousy pieces. They might wish to do screening and organizing when the number of item increases. On the other hand, there is no restriction for the scope of information or knowledge uploaded. Because of the nature of the C&Y which deals with different kinds of people and cases, the broader the better regarding as the information stored.

• Elicitation

It is a sharing session based held by a team of people to control the focus on knowledge sharing with the speaker, then to codify it and upload to the internet. The idea for Elicitation came from the China Light and Power Company Limited (CLP) in 2006. And C&Y has once used this tool to elicit the knowledge from the organization officer, the length of the process was three hours long, however, ten hours was spent to codify it as written words. Then the video is split into several sections and uploaded to the platform for the staff convenience. The comments received projects it is a useful way to enhance the knowledge learning, however, the process take time and indeed not much staff have ever clicked it, they even claimed that the section is long although it just ten or twenty minutes.

• After Action Review

Leading activity is one of the job duties for the staff, the skills and knowledge involved are personalized and hard to share without actually being involved. After Action Review (AAR) involved the process note taking by someone observing the activity led, then, mark down the strengths and weaknesses with objective view, also the process is recorded. Then that tacit knowledge is codified and uploaded. This tool is commented as not reflecting the truth of the techniques used for leading activity. Since the staff might feel nervous and unable to perform in the normal quality when they notify their action is recorded, moreover, scared human resource is further occupied by assigning a staff sit aside to observe the whole activity.

• Exit Interview

Before the experienced staff gets retired or the contract staff left the organization after working for a specific period, there will be an Exit Interview prepared for them. It is a face to face interview held to directly extract the knowledge, useful practices, experiences accumulated from the head of the staff. Some tacit knowledge is disclosed and codified into the audio recordings, and then put into the platform as explicit knowledge for the exiting staff's learning. Part of the interview questions are tailored made for the staff's working spectrum. This method is treated as the last chance to extract knowledge from the experienced staff, and supposed to be introduced in this coming year.

Besides, in order to sustain the staff’s enthusiasm to participate knowledge sharing in the organization, there are some ways C&Y are used. They are:

• Commitment and support from the top management

The clear understanding and commitment from the top management is important to establish the direction of knowledge management. Then, the middle management can forward the objective to the staff and smooth the way to implement it. For example, the regional officers realize the coming deadline for the articles should be uploaded, and put this message in the very first beginning to remind staff. This will give out a sign the importance of sustaining the enthusiasm in the organization.

• Balance score card

As C&Y is a NGO, to measure the company achievement according to the vision and strategies of the company‘s activities can not base on financial outcomes, it also includes the counting on human issues that drive the outcomes. So that the participation to the company activities is counted, for example, number of articles has to be uploaded to “Personal Sharing” as instructed from the top management. Gradually the enthusiasm can be maintained and cultivating the sharing culture.

• Statistical record

The statistics of using the platform are collected by the system provider. The top three staff who have login to the platform mostly are award with the present. Besides, the award will be publicized in the monthly newsletter. Although the prized staff not intentionally plans to get the prize as they said the time out session always requires them to login. However, they are more aware of the KM platform and its importance, finally, the enthusiasm cultivated and increase the participation. Besides, measures of the participation often indicators of future performance.

• Employee Appraisal

Using the KM platform is treated as the technology part in employee appraisal. It forms a direct effect to force the employee to access to it. However, it only carries 3 points to the final appraisal, and it may not be effective to every employee. Several staff may feel it is more time effective to gain more points from other parts. As a whole, this way is effective to increase the awareness of the platform content, and sharing culture is facilitated by implementing it.

[edit] Evaluation

In C&Y, they are very difficult to evaluate their KM programme’s outcomes. It is because they are not a business organization; they would not use the profits to evaluate how successful the KM programme. Also, C&Y provides the social services and programmes for the children and youths. The staff in the organization mainly are social workers, so they would need more diversified data, information and knowledge to support their works. C&Y would store and share different kinds of information and knowledge within the organization. Therefore, it is very difficult to make the evaluation for their KM programme, such as usefulness of documents and articles. But C&Y would also make the evaluation for the KM programme base on the following aspects:

• Counted time-saved, cost-saved and work space-saved

C&Y would measures the duration of schedule involved in the projects , cost involved and work space of the organization have been shortened or saved after implementing the KM programme. It can help the organization to know that how the KM programme helps to save the resources and make the staff to work more effectively and efficiently.

• Counted inputs and outputs figures of documents and articles

C&Y would count the numbers of documents and articles that have been uploaded, accessed or downloaded in the KM platform, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003; to the staff. It can be evaluated by the utility rates of the KM platform and knowledge sharing situation within the organization. Balance scorecard is a method to count the number of inputs and outputs of the documents and articles of each staff.

• Number of core services sessions and programmes increased

C&Y would also count the number of core services sessions and programmes that have been increased after implementing the KM programme. Then, C&Y can estimate how the KM programme helps the organization to increase the core services and programmes and the degree of improvement the staff’s performances in the works.

• Personal express views

C&Y would ask the staff to express their views about the KM programme, such as the KM platform and networking. The organization would estimate the degree of usefulness, user-friendly and stability of the KM platform and networking. It helps to assess the KM programme and makes improvement.

• Benchmarking

C&Y does benchmarking to evaluate their KM programme in order to maximize the performance of it. They evaluate which aspects can be improved in the KM programme. On the other hand, C&Y acts a benchmarking organization for the other NGOs. Successful aspects can be shown in the KM programme.

Evaluation is important part in the KM programme, C&Y uses some KM measurement techniques to assess how well the organization is progressing. The programme will then run more effectively and efficiently.

[edit] The obstacles of C&Y in implementing KM

As a pioneer in the implementation of KM in NGOs, several kinds of obstacles have been identified while implementing and running the KM programme.

• Lack of KM background

The staff in C&Y mainly are social workers, but not KM professionals. Actually, they may not understand what KM is. Therefore, when they decided to implement the KM programme, they needed to spend much time to understand what KM is and how to implement it, such as codification. Also, after implementing the KM programme, the responsible staff of KM programme needed to promote the KM programme for the other staff in order to let them know what KM is and the advantages of the programme.

• Delay of Time Schedule

The project time schedule was delayed. It is because C&Y needed to take time for redesigning the project management structure and KM Process Design. In the project management structure, they found that the KM programme did not match the original plan, such as tasks, resources and manpower. Therefore, they needed to spend more time for redesigning the project management structure of the KM programme.

In the KM process design, they found that the partition of the knowledge subject is not in line with their mind of usual practices, it was inconvenience to the them. The staff could not make sure that the documents, articles and PowerPoint were classified in which part on the KM platform. Therefore, they needed to prolong KM process design.

In addition, the problem of KM platform’s stability was found in the User Acceptance Test. C&Y found that the KM platform was unstable and too risky. Therefore, they needed to spend more time to solve the problems. Then, it made the time schedule delayed.

• Lack of tailor-made KM software

On the market, there was no tailor-made software for KM. Therefore, they have to find the suitable software to adopt. After choosing the I.T supplier, Microsoft, C&Y decided to select their software Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to be the C&Y’s KM platform. In the mean time, C&Y has to discuss with Microsoft about designing and pricing of the programme according to their needs.

• Lack of formal team for the KM programme

C&Y does not have a formal team to manage the whole KM programme. When C&Y decided to implement the KM, a working group was set up; they were Project Steering Committee, Project Management team and pilot teams. However, they were disbanded after implementing KM programme. Knowledge was classified by experience staff. That means C&Y does not have a formal team to manage the classification scheme. The knowledge gaps could not be identified and there was no mechanism to fix it. Also, they have not acted on analyzing and reworking information. It cannot help to clarify what C&Y has known and what it needs to know.

Moreover, the contents of KM platform are depended on the staff’s spontaneity to provide different kinds of information such as documents, articles and PowerPoint. Then, the knowledge may not be classified in an appropriate space. This affects the effectiveness of retrieving for knowledge by staff.

In addition, as they don't have a formal team to mange KM programme, there is no screening process for different knowledge. As a result, the knowledge which is not useful for the organization cannot be filtered.

• Lack of appointed organizational structure to follow up

After disbanding the Project Steering Committee, Project Management team and pilot teams, C&Y only appoints a staff to be the KDO to handle the matters of KM programme. But, this KDO also is a social worker, he has another duties and tasks in the C&Y. He is voluntary to put effort into the KM programme. Thus, he cannot engross in the development of KM programme.

In addition, although the C&Y’s I.T department also helps maintain the operation of KM platform, the I.T department only has five staff. Not only supporting the operation of KM platform, but they also need to support the whole C&Y’s I.T operations. Therefore, they cannot provide support to the KM programme fully. Therefore, it makes the works of KM become decentralization.

• Lack of user-friendly concept in KM platform

The KM platform is not user friendly. It is because staff need to login the website every time when they open a new page. Also, the KM platform would logout automatically if he or she no long uses the platform in the session time. Then, the staff would need to login again. This is really irritating and time-consuming.

• Lack of resources

C&Y is NGO, they are accepted the Lump Sum Grant (LSG) arrangements from the SWD. They should manage the financial issues carefully. Sometimes, resources (budget and manpower) would be assigned to some emergence services and programmes. Thus, scarcity of resources might affect the performance of KM programme.

We can see that C&Y has encountered many obstacles in implementing and running the KM programme. Therefore, C&Y need to keep devoting to the continuous improvements for the KM programme.

[edit] The benefits of C&Y in implementing KM

Although there are difficulties and obstacles during the process of implementing and running KM, there are considerable advantages and benefits of the KM programme in C&Y.

• Building effective communication

The KM platform, i.e. the SharePoint Portal is set up and works successfully which contributes to the effective communication between the staff in the organization. The shared explicit knowledge can be employed on the jobs and results in effective and smooth operations and speed up the creative responses. Thus, the capability to solve problems and sudden issues are improved. The resources and budget were utilized in a proper way which resultes to cost-saving.

• Enhancing the knowledge sharing

In addition, the culture of knowledge and experience sharing is established and firmly rooted in the organization; it is vital to support the sustainability of KM project. Both the implicit and explicit knowledge are retained as corporate memory. The problems of brain drain and the loss of knowledge can be mitigated. The increasing cost because of the high turnover rate is also eased gradually.

• Benchmarking for the other NGOs

Furthermore, as the KM pioneer in the social service sector, C&Y acts as the leader to share the experiences and practices of how to initiate KM to other NGOs in the same industry, and it is reputated as the typical benchmarking studies.

• Smoothing the process

KM programme facilitates the process of activities run smoothly and effectively, it shortens the gaps between the plan and actual activities implemented, that is highly contributed to the resources and budget arrangement with the information resources supported, the productivity and effectiveness at work are formed.

• Getting positive feedbacks

There are positive feedbacks and personal statements from the staff which is a good testimony that the staff foster the effective work habits after the KM programme has been carried out.

Those benefits are agreed by both the staff and management. The KM project achieves the preliminary success and achievements, most importantly, the improved productivity and effectiveness are witnessed.

[edit] Suggestions

C&Y is a pioneer of KM in NGOs; many NGOs in social welfare sector would choose them to be the benchmarking object when they decided to implement the KM programme. However, C&Y has some obstacles or difficulties in implementing and running the KM programme. Therefore, we are going to suggest some recommendations for C&Y in order to improve the quality and management of KM programme.

• Setting up a formal team

Formal team is needed to be involved in operational process in KM programme. Formal team should constitute with a full time KDO and I.T staff to handle all the matters of KM programme. They can spend more time and put more effort to the KM. It will then improve the quality of KM programme and make the KM works more effectively and efficiently.

• Technological audit

Technical team need to have a technological audit regularly to ensure the validity of technology is used within the organization. Requiring staff to login in every webpage shows the symptom of technical problem in technology. The team may need to carry out the audit to scan out the problem by checking the network, hardware, software etc. Then user can just login once to browse any part of the portal no longer need to login every time. Technology should be improved to provide user-friendly KM platform for the staff.

• Building up a standardized knowledge taxonomy

KM taxonomy should be built up with the synergy effort of the social welfare sector. It is because a classification scheme is very important for codification. If the knowledge taxonomy can be established by the social welfare sector, it can be an authority tools and regard as the standard guideline for the social workers to identify knowledge. For example, as battered child syndrome is classified under domestic violence according to taxonomy guideline, the service sector stakeholder can easily locate it without confusion. Therefore, a standardized coding system can help to classify knowledge subject within the KM programme in C&Y, thus, information searching can be more effective.

• Changing proportion of appraisal for staff

The proportion of the element within the personal appraisal should be altered in order to increase the enthusiasm of using KM platform indirectly. Increase the numbers of appraisal criteria related to the platform usage, e.g. numbers of files uploading, suggestions given etc. Also, the participation in IT Platform in balance scorecard should be adjusted to higher proportion, so the staff are awarded of using KM platform. Besides, the rewards are given for these two evaluation methods can increase the use of the KM platform.

• Increasing number of reviewing meeting

The number of meeting of KDO and I.T consultant should be increased. The meeting held each year is not enough, it is because the technology change is very fast in this information society. And new information should be updated with the pace. Therefore, the meeting for half a year should be held.

• Forming strategy to sustain staff

The methods should be added to sustain new staff in order to decrease the turnover rate. For example, giving more reward for staff that had performed well in their works. The organization can hold more activities in order to give more communication between staff. It can increase the sense of belonging within the organization. Staff sustained implies that knowledge can be sustained too.

Personnel strategy should be formed to prevent the new staff from leaving at the end of their contract. Apart from the monetary reward, non-monetary reward such as providing more career development for the staff can be included. The organization can hold more activities in order to build up the social network between staff. It can increase the sense of belonging within the organization. So they can apply what they learned and continuously contribute to the development of KM.

These suggestions for improving the performance of KM programme in C&Y. If C&Y can improve the performance of their KM programme, it can help C&Y to facilitate corporate management and delivery of services with higher quality, efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.

Those are the suggestions focusing on the People, Process and Technology aspects, and we believe those suggestions are feasible to make improvement for their KM programme, finally, the services can be provided in higher quality and delivered efficiently and effectively.

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[edit] Conclusions

We are now moving steadily from information age to knowledge age where knowledge has been recognized as the most important aspect in human life. Organizations are starting to understand and appreciate knowledge as the most valuable asset in the competitive environment. In an article in Harvard Business Review, Nonaka (1998, p21) began with the simple introductory words “In an economy, where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge.

Bailey & Clarke (2000, p235) claim that “Leveraging knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge, is the key to sustained the competitive advantage in the future.” Knowledge is an attribute of people or communities or societies. Knowledge comes as a person uses information and combines it with their personal experiences.

Although KM has been widely discussed, there is relatively very little information on KM in public sector. The ultimate objective of KM in public sector organizations is for providing quality services rather than profit making in other non-public sector organizations.

[edit] The importance of KM to NGOs & private sectors

After the analysis between the public and private sector, facilitating KM is more important in public sector, as they are providing social services to the public under the restricted resources and budget, and it is vital to learn the organizational knowledge and contribute to the KM to support continuous development of KM. Employees are identified as the key knowledge repository in the public sector than others. As an public organizations, like C&Y, more difficulties are encountered by them than the private sector organizations.

• Trend

C&Y is the forerunner of implementing KM in the public social service sector, there is a trend for the other NGOs in the industry, they are going to start carrying out their KM programme, as the industry senses the importance of KM and the benefits and advantages KM might bring to them.

Besides, Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the new trend and innovative concept to the industry. Employees consolidate and share their own tacit knowledge in the platform, i.e. personal websites, portal and other people can browse and acquire knowledge and finally, some tacit knowledge turns into explicit knowledge.

• Challenges

C&Y, as the pioneer to develop the complete new KM, there are many challenges ahead, such as the problems of how to sustain the enthusiasm and the how to improve the level of participation of sharing practices among the employees, apart from those personnel problem, the problems also involved how to design and operate the IT sharing platform in order to enhance the productivity, the technical problems of the portal, the loss of knowledge assets in the organization because of the increasing number of experienced staff retired and contract staff leave their jobs.

Developing KM is a long-term journey. It needs time and effort to establish an effective and standardized KM programme. For C&Y, we observe that there are existing and potential KM problems and issues, which are retarded by the restricted resources and financial supports. Those pressures impede the development and advancement of KM. However, KM is vital to the social service sector. If the problems of limited resources have not yet resolved, the growth of KM will be at a standstill.

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[edit] Acknowledgements

We thank the CEO of I.T Consultants Company and the KDO of C&Y for having interviews and sharing their experience with us.

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[edit] Implementation of Knowledge Management in Telecommunication Industry

Yip Pui Yee (Pearl), Cheng Kit Ying (Kitty), Chu Beckie, Chan Ching Yee (Candy), Chung Chi Lok (Benjamin)

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[edit] Abstract

This report first presents briefly the importance of knowledge management to the telecommunication industry; then it proceeds with a literature review that covers the following areas : knowledge management strategies and tools, KM in Telecommunication Industry, the challenges of KM in China and the future development of knowledge management. The third part of the report is the research methods. We adopted the case study method approach with semi-structured interview with a senior knowledge management consultant.

The following section is a case study. The study object is a Mobile Telecommunication Organization in China. It is one of the leading operators providing wide range of related services in a province with over ten cities. In order to cope with the rapid expending (customer service department staff from 500 in 2003 and increased to 2000 in 2005) and uplifting its services, the company turns to knowledge management for solution. The knowledge management project begins with the customer service department. Specific goals have been set and satisfactory results are achieved. In this case study, we identified the KM tools and strategies employed and the various implementation stages. We also looked at the results after implementation of knowledge management and the logical ways for future development. The report ends with a conclusion that knowledge management sure has its benefits and strengths in the customer service sector of the telecommunication industry. And it is only a beginning ! There are so much more sectors that knowledge management can play a part in.

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[edit] Introduction

China, the world’s largest mobile market by subscribers, has passed 467 million mobile phone users as at the end of Jan 2007. The gradually opened telecommunication market policy in response of entering the World Trade Organisation brings signification impacts on local mobile network providers. In this report we try to find out how knowledge management can play its role in the telecommunication industry in China especially in customer services area, ways, methods, and problems facing in implementation.

On entering the new knowledge-based economy, telecommunication organizations face even more severe and stricter competition in the global marketplace than ever before. (Chong., et al., 2006) Knowledge may be the greatest competitive advantage for a company (Davenport, Prusak, 1998) Only firms participating in the creation and utilization of knowledge can hope to enjoy the rewards of business reform in today's knowledge-based economy. (Hung et al., 2005)

Knowledge Management, therefore, becomes a majority methood for the telecommunciation organizations to survive in this knowledge-based economy. Notably, in developing countries.

This report will expolre the implementation of Knowledge Management in a China’s telecommunication organization. With a detail case study inlcuded in this report, a better undstanding of implementing KM in telecommunication organization can be emerged.

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[edit] Literature Review

[edit] What is Knowledge Management ?

Knowledge Management can be described as the way organizations build, supplement and organize knowledge and routines around their activities and within their cultures, and develop organizational efficiency by improving the use of employee skills. (Pan, 1999)

Most scholars divide knowledge into two types: (1) explicit knowledge or information, and (2) tacit knowledge or know-how (Kogut and Zander, 1992; Grant, 1996; Ryle, 1984). Explicit knowledge is precisely and formally articulated and codified in documents and databases of corporate procedures and best practices (Alter, 2002). Tacit knowledge is the practical wisdom possessed by experts that is difficult to capture, yet repeatedly demonstrated in contexts as varied as factory floors, research laboratories, army basis, and corporate board rooms (Crowley, 2000).

[edit] Knowledge Management Strategies and Tools

The implementation of KM strategies allows improvement of the firm’s learning capability and its ability to combine knowledge-based capabilities and so make better use of them (Kogut et al. 1992) On the other hands, KM Tools used to foster creation and transmission of knowledge (shared experiences). (Forcadell at al., 2002)

[edit] Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) aims at leveraging investments in customer relations to strengthen the competitive position and maximize returns. (Bueren, 2005) Relationship Management (RM) is an integrated effort to identify, build up and maintain a network with individual customers for the mutual benefit of both sides (Shani et al. 1992). Three types of knowledge flows can be classified in CRM processes:

• 1. Knowledge for customers is required in CRM processes to satisfy knowledge needs of customers. Examples include knowledge about products, markets and suppliers. (Garcia-Murillo, 2002)

• 2. Knowledge about customers is accumulated to understand motivations of customers and to address them in a personalized way. This includes customer histories, connections, requirements, expectations, and purchasing activity. (Day, 2000)

• 3. Knowledge from customers is knowledge of customers about products, suppliers and markets. Within interactions with customers this knowledge can be gathered to feed continuous improvement, e.g. service improvements or new product developments. (Garcia-Murillo, 2002) Managing these different knowledge flows is one of the biggest challenges of CRM. The most important issue is how to collect, store, and distribute only the knowledge that is needed and not waste time and effort on collecting and storing useless knowledge. (Davenport, 2001)

[edit] Service Management and Complaint Management

Service Management and Complaint Management are typical Knowledge Management Strategies in telecommunication industry. The objectives are to improve customer satisfaction in the short-run by directly addressing problems that led to complaints and to design a continuous improvement process in the long-run. (Bueren, 2005)

Service management is the planning, realization and control of measures for the provision of services. A service is an intangible output of an enterprise generated with direct involvement of customers. Examples include maintenance, repair, and support activities in the after-sales phase as well as the provision of financial or telecommunication services after the conclusion of contracts. (Bueren, 2005) Within the scope of complaint management, articulated dissatisfaction of customers is received, processed, and communicated into the enterprise (Grönroos, 2000). The objectives are to improve customer satisfaction in the short-run by directly addressing problems that led to complaints and to design a continuous improvement process in the long-run. (Bueren, 2005)

[edit] Taxonomies and document classification

Knowledge of a domain can also be encoded as a “knowledge map,” or “taxonomy,” i.e., a hierarchically organized set of categories. The relationships within the hierarchy can be of different kinds, depending on the application, and a typical taxonomy includes several different kinds of relations. The value of a taxonomy is twofold. First, it allows a user to navigate to documents of interest without doing a search (in practice, a combination of the two strategies is often used if it is available). Second, a knowledge map allows documents to be put in a context, which helps users to assess their applicability to the task in hand. (Marwick, 2001)

[edit] Key Performance Indicator

Managers use Performance Measurement to monitor key issues in businesses. These measures provide the most relevant information of the organization, showing managers how the business is performing. (del-Rey-Chamorro et al., 2003) Key Performance Indicator is a way to measure performance. The goals of those KPIs are to highlight the contribution of the micro level KM solutions to business process improvements and to measure that contribution according to the business objectives (del-Rey-Chamorro et al., 2000).

[edit] After Action Review

After Action Review is a mechanism that encourages people to learn from the past experience. These allow organization to reflect on past experience leading to effective future actions. (Carrillo, 2005) According to Horvath (1999) AAR, are consistently and rigorously applied throughout the Army to ensure that mistakes will be uncovered and successes reflected upon. The mission or project is broken down (often by task or function) into manageable pieces, each of which becomes the focus of a separate AAR. A discussion leader is designated to conduct a group discussion that is structured around the three questions:

• 1. What did we set out to do?

• 2. What actually happened?

• 3. How do we account for the difference?

[edit] Knowledge Management in Telecommunication Industry

Previous study by Nonaka (1994) has demonstrated that a company's individual and organizational knowledge serves as one of the cornerstones for its sustained competitive advantages. To be successful, firms must be able to learn continually and apply their knowledge, anticipating market changes ((Alvesson, 2000). Through superior knowledge companies can accomplish their results faster, cheaper and with higher quality than their competition. Knowledge about customers, markets and other relevant factors of influence allows faster utilization of opportunities and more flexible reaction to threats. (Gebert, H., et al., 2002)

The era of industrialization and information age has made the telecommunication industry expand into diversified functions to support the growth of technological advancement for better services demanded by any nation (Yusof, 1998). The shifting winds of change in today's business environment where the marketplace is increasingly competitive and the rate of innovation is rising, together with the pressure of the emergence of global knowledge-based economy. (Snyman. et al., 2004). Therefore, knowledge has become a crucial asset in reducing these uncertainties and the only sustainable source of competitive advantage (Gorelik, 2002) As such, the management of knowledge has been recognized as a competitive weapon for the telecommunication industry to move forward and to chart more successes in the uncertain future. (Chong., et al., 2006)

[edit] Challenges of Knowledge Management in China

Various cultures in different countries influence the ways of knowledge sharing.In high-context cultures, such as China, Brazil and Russia, people tend to rely more on the context of non-verbal actions and the environmental setting to convey meaning, and therefore tend to prefer communication media with high media-richness, such as face-to-face communication or phone calls. For members of low context cultures, such as the USA, meaning is not readily available from the environment because they tend not to learn how to perceive information from the environment. Consequently, in low-context cultures more emphasis is put on the written word, which leads to the conclusion that communication media low in media-richness, such as e-mails or online discussion boards will be more accepted. (Ardichvili, 2006)

In addition, Chow et al. (2000), comparing factors influencing knowledge sharing behaviors between US and Chinese managers, have found that Chinese nationals were much more reluctant to share with an out-group member than Americans. Therefore, diverse cultures may become a barrier to implement Knowledge Management in China.

[edit] Future Development of Knowledge Management

The current literature has examined how, why, when, and where to leverage knowledge assets; they have ignored the question – how to secure knowledge assets (Desouza, 2005). One of the immediate challenges facing knowledge managers is finding the balance between open knowledge sharing and enterprise intellectual capital management. (Randeree, 2006) In addition, a number of developments suggested by Wiig (1999) are:

Future KM practices and methods will be systematic, explicit, and relatively dependent upon advanced technology in several areas. However, overall, we expect KM to become more people-centric as the recognition spreads that it is networking of competent and collaborating people that forms the basis for the behavior and success of any organization.

Management and operating practices will change to facilitate KM in many ways. Incentives will be introduced and disincentives eliminated to promote innovation, effective knowledge exchange (“sharing”), learning, and application of best knowledge in all work situations. Cultural drivers such as management emphasis and personal behaviors will be changed to create environments of trust and concerns for finding root causes of problems without assigning blame.

By building on extensive experiences from many organizations, the manner in which effective and active KM is organized, supported, and facilitated will change. The more obvious changes will be associated with placement and organization of the KM effort itself, be it with a high-level Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) or with distributed effort. Changes that deal with reorganization of work and the abolishing of whole departments that are integrated into other operations, will be less apparent but prevalent.

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[edit] Research Methods

This project is based on a single case study, semi-structured interview. In organizational research, the case study method remains one of the frequently adopted research methods, and the felicity of the method is well documented (Myes, 1994; Orlikowski, 1993) In addition, the case study method allows investigators to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events such as individual life cycles, organizational and managerial processes, neighborhood change, international relations, and the maturation of industries. (Yin, 2003)

The primary objective of this study was to explore the implementation of knowledge management in telecommunication industry. A KM specialist was interviewed to identify the procedures and techniques of implementing knowledge management in a China telecommunication organization.

Typically each of the interview lasted for 2 hours. All of the interviews were taped with prior permission. The interviewing questions are listed as below.

• 1. What is your job title and job duty(s) related to knowledge management?
• 2. What kinds of KM tools and /or strategies are used in the organization?
  • i. What are the obstacles/challenges of such implementation?
  • ii. How can you solve these problems?
• 3. Does the application of the KM tools and/or strategies generate positive result(s) to the following aspects in the organization?
  • i. Different departments
  • ii. Quality of services
  • iii. Competitiveness of the organization?

• 4. Which departments/group of users would apply the KM system in their department?

• 5. What do you think about the future development of KM in the organization?

• 6. Does the organization solve the problem of information overload by any KM tools and/or strategies?

• 7. Does the organization have any best practice of applying KM in certain areas?

• 8. What is the KM cycle of the organization?

• 9. What are the objectives of the KM system of the organization?

• 10. How do the KM systems support the daily operation of the organization?

• 11. Can you provide more background information regarding the application of KM system in the organization?

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[edit] Case Study

• Background information of Telecommunication organization

ABC Company is one of the leading owners and operators of telecommunications in China, offering a wide range of related services in a province with over ten cities. Since they have a huge number of customers, they decided to enhance the customer services system, to build up a systematic mechanism in managing the customers’ requirements in the project. As the project is based on another similar project from another province, the telecommunication organization is willing to concretize it and to define the knowledge management scheme for their employees.

Over 80% of the enterprise knowledge and information have not been standardized and structurally organized together. The official files and electronic documents are the important fortune in the business; some of the documents, messages and records just exist in the database but have not been reorganized yet. Furthermore, the documents in the computer include different kind of file formats, which is also a main problem for managing those files at the same time.

The information with no regulation and no structure would be appearing every moment. There are so many different kinds of data that can be collected by the organization nowadays; they’re having a problem in finding the related information at the moment. The inaccurate and non-structured results searching by the organization was due to the mechanical searching engine. It uses a mechanical calculation in searching which letting the result not to be convenient.

While emerging information technologies facilitate coordinating, fusing, sharing, and displaying relevant information, these functions remain very human dependant It needs so many time and energy to sort the data by human hand. Today’s work environment is more complex due to an increase in the number of subjective knowledge items we need to attend to everyday. It is difficult to get the tacit knowledge from staffs, and also their experience. So that a systematic knowledge management system is need.

A systematic knowledge management system can help for organizing and managing non-structured data, accelerating the learning of new staffs, speeding up the index mechanism, enhancing the reserve of data and have a better decision making support. According to the above points, the telecommunication organization asked for the KM consultant to help them to build up a knowledge management system to increase the intelligence of the organization by building and leveraging knowledge.

Due to the difference in usual duties and needs of knowledge of different department,designs and changes should be tailored to achieve knowlegde management effectively. Firstly, the telecommunication organization decided to focus on the customer services department, whether the department has 500 staff in 2003, however, after using the “knowledge repository” to integrate the information and adopt the customer service training project to strength their staff’s managing skills in 2004. The customer service department has 2000 staff in 2005.

The organization also believed that, the knowledge management project can access into different departments later on.

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[edit] Findings & Analysis of the XYZ Case Study

[edit] Goals

In view of the keen competition of mobile telecommunication business in China, the company strives to improve its customer services in order to stay in the business and outlast the rivals. Since 2002, the company has been implementing different projects to enhance the customer services. In 2004, the organization established a business guide book for customer service staff, unified information can be provided to customers. A customer service training centre was also set up in the same year. In 2006, the company would like to its services a step ahead and set out some goals :

• Speed up new staff training process
• Let new staff familiar with the job as soon as possible
• Provide instant access to information index search
• Better decision making support
• Better and precise information for decision making
• Minimize knowledge lost due to staff leaving
• Embed knowledge management into workflow

[edit] KM tools and strategies

As the above mention, due to this Telecommunication organization expanding their business, so it realize that need to apply knowledge management, in order to have systematic coordination between people, technology, working processes and organization itself. It can be divided into three major phases of knowledge management tools and strategies: Knowledge Creation and Capture Phase, Knowledge Sharing and Dissemination Phase and Knowledge Acquisition and Application Phase used to meet the organization goals.

First of all consulting firm conducted knowledge audits and meetings with Telecommunication organization, to get more understanding about background of pilot department, work processes, staff relations and their knowledge needs of current situation. In this case study, customer service department applied different knowledge management tools and strategies to their daily operation and management.

[edit] Knowledge Creation and Capture Phase

Because customer service department duties are mainly responsible to handle large amount of customer enquiry phone calls, during the process it created many different information or document, such as: complain records, handbook (include organization information and basic enquiry information), training information, reports and reference materials. For this reasons it applied “taxonomy” to classify records in a hierarchical structure of 3 levels from 0 to 2, that can let staff follow in a step by step approach to capture, store, share and collaboration for re-use and innovation the created deliverables. It start from a boarder topic then each level narrow down to related smaller topic to organize the records together in a unify way. The following are few example used by this organization to classify the information under different categories for easier findings.

Knowledge Content	Level 0	Level 1	Level 2
Customer Service Records	Case Reference	Customer Service	Analyse and Guidance
Product and Service Description	Service	Product	Detail Description

Staff Position	Level 0	Level 1	Level 2
First Call Resolution	Case Study	Customer Service	Solutions of Complain
First Call Resolution	Tool	Online Handbook	Complain Platform Handbook

Samples of taxonomies

It used this method to set guidelines for staff to follow and identify who will take part in process and review the information stored, in order to keep information up to date.

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[edit] Knowledge Sharing and Dissemination Phase

The other tools are “knowledge repository”. In this case it is a mixture of structured internal repository, includes such as: policies, customer details, marketing information, product information, etc. and informal internal knowledge repository such as: lesson learned, experience from staff.

Different knowledge can be applied when a telephone operator receives an incoming call from a customer, asking for telecommunication information or complaining of services. In the structured internal repository, this organization collected reference materials, organization policies, product details etc., then selected and summarized and uploads to the online database. The content became more centralized for access, distinct from the past each team or departments keep their own set of knowledge content and unorganized.

Other than that, the business manuals specialize for telephone operators used for answer enquiry, the manual users can access through online database and editors of the manual can be more accurately and efficiently update information, because they can get the related information from the central knowledge repository to analyse and update the sections accordingly from the manual.

The other aspect of the knowledge repository is informal knowledge areas. It contained some sound recordings (conversation between customers and telephone operators) will classify under different categories, share as good or bad examples for training resources. Furthermore, included some customer feedback statistics and product survey documents. These assist staff to work more efficiently, easier to evaluate their performance, in order to improve their weakness.

The knowledge repository provided a one-stop-shop for organizational users access archives and current knowledge content that assist in their work, also can let multiple users commonly share resources together.

[edit] Knowledge Acquisition and Application Phase

Besides organized knowledge create from daily business activities, this organization also apply the knowledge management concepts into e-learning applications that can stimulate staff motivation to learn not only from working also outside work place as a self learning process.

It is a web-based training platform provide different tools for staff self learning needs, for example: some demos of telephone conversation, mock examination questions for staff reference to prepare for monthly examination of their work, provide information about training course, business trends and product description. It can be easily access at any time any where.

[edit] Results

Karl Wiig in his book “Knowledge Management Foundations considers knowledge management in organizations from three perspectives, each with different horizons and purposes:

Business Perspective - focusing business-related issues with senior management on why, where, and to what extent the organization must invest in knowledge management. Strategies, products and services, should be considered from knowledge-related points of view.

Management Perspective – focusing tactical approaches and solutions with middle management on determining, organizing, directing, facilitating, and monitoring knowledge-related practices and activities required to achieve the desired business strategies and objectives.

Hands-on Perspective – focusing on hands-on methods and techniques with professional knowledge practitioners, applying the expertise to conduct explicit knowledge-related work and tasks.

The three perspectives are also mapped to the strategy, tactics and operational level of knowledge management respectively.

The subject focus of knowledge management in this case is Organizational Knowledge within the customer service centre. Organizational knowledge has distinct characteristics.

• It’s related to the activities of organization business
• It can direct, lead and enhance business activities
• It’s value-added
• It’s been processed

Through training, monitoring, assessing, etc., the company has implemented various policies to help improve the customer services. The results are satisfactory. There is little resistance from the customer services staff. The following areas have been improved.

• The front line staff‘s ability to solve customer complaint
• The sensitive of needs of customer service centre and marketing department
• The communication among customer service centre, marketing department and product development department

In view of the success, the management also considers to put forward other changes in the future, such as :

• Establish individual customer service staff profile to track the quality of service
• Improve learning environment and tools, e.g. online learning, learning through games and competition, to cultivate the self learning motivation
• Reduce the test frequency of good performance staff
• Award staff who has good performance in test
• Use training to replace test
• Encourage after action review (AAR)

[edit] Future Development of KM in the organization

Information Technologies play an important role in business nowadays, and also in how successful knowledge workers are in acquiring and applying knowledge content that is made available to them by the organization. A well developed system is needed for the organization to build up a content management system. Since Robertson (2003) predicts that content management systems (CMS) will become a “commodity” in the future. Many content management system project fail owing to a lack of good implementation standards and a lack of an understanding of usability issues, Technology-only approaches will continue to generate unsuccessful projects. CMS should be handled in a strategic way. The system which involves knowledge management strategies and tools should be developed in the near future.

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[edit] Conclusions

This case study has been used to illustrate some benefits in Knowledge Management Implementation like knowledge sharing allows staff to learn others’ experience and E-learning cultivates the self-learning motivation. The goal of this telecommunication organization is to improve the quality of customer services by not increaing the pressure of the staff. Monthly test have to be taken by all staff in Customer Service Department in order to ensure all staff can meet the quality service standard. This paper suggests the telecommunication organization to replace the test by training or learning through games and competitions which helps to release the staff’s pressure. For futher studies, research can be conducted on other important factors influencing Knowledge Management implementation such as leadership, organizational culture, measurement, and technology (Chong and Choi, 2005).

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[edit] Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our interviewee for providing such valuable information. We are particularly grateful to all our classmates for providing useful comments. We are also indebted to our professors at the University of Hong Kong for comments on earlier drafts as well as anonymous journal referees.

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[edit] A case study of how knowledge management be applied in a school environment in Hong Kong

Wat Sin Tung, Wendy; Tam Shuk Ying, Rebecca; Leung Man Shan, Shanny; Chan Shuk Wah, Ada; Chung Shing Kit, Timothy

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[edit] Abstract

Although there has been a great deal of recognition in the business world that information and knowledge management can be vital tools in organizations, it is only recently that educational administrators and teachers have begun to look at how they might use information systems to assist in creating effective learning environments. This chapter explores how knowledge management can be applied into school environment. We will use a secondary school in Hong Kong as a case study to see how KM support learning and teaching.

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[edit] Introduction

Although there has been a great deal of recognition in the business world that information and knowledge management can be vital tools in organizations, it is only recently that educational administrators and teachers have begun to look at how they might use information systems to assist in creating effective learning environments. In the business research environment, the evolution from data to information and from information to knowledge plays a leading role in shaping how organizations develop strategies and plans for the future. (Petrides & Guiney, 2002).

In Learner-centered e-Schools, all school members, including the principal, teachers, staff, students and parents, are regarded as learners, and learning opportunities are provided for each and every single one of them to enhance their learning ability and knowledge; it is expected that learners will become autonomous and lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and knowledge-producers. To this end, schools must become Knowledge-Creating Schools. Thus, schools need to become boundaryless organizations, reinvent school curriculums and adopt knowledge management (KM) for teaching and learning. This will enhance learners' learning motivation and learning ability, as well as encourage them to share and disseminate knowledge, and undertake knowledge management. (Yip, 2004)

This chapter explores how knowledge management can be applied into school environment. We will use a secondary school in Hong Kong, as a case study to see how KM support learning and teaching.

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[edit] Literature Review

Definition of Knowledge Management

What is knowledge? In The Knowledge Management Toolkit, Tiwana (2000) states that knowledge is a “fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, expert insight, and grounded intuition that provides an environment and framework for evaluating new experiences and information” (p.5).

Rosenberg (2001) defines Knowledge Management as the “creation, archiving and sharing of valued information, expertise and insight within and across communities of people and organzations with similar interests and needs’ (p.66)”, KM can include the “key documents expertise directories, lessons-learned databases, best practices and communities of practice that reflect and deliver knowledge to learners at a particular time of need” (Bielawski & Metcalk, 2003, p71).

The management of knowledge goes far beyond the storage and manipulation of data, or even of information. It is the attempt to recognize what is essentially a human asset buried in the minds of individuals, and leverage it into an organizational asset that can be accessed and used by a broader set of individual on whose decisions the firm depends (Marshall et al., 1997, p. 229).

Tacit knowledge

An organization’s success is greatly influenced by its ability to mobilize and capitalize on internally held tacit knowledge (Fullan, 2001) Conversion of tacit knowledge occurs between individuals and may involve verbal and/or non-verbal communication. Examples of non-verbal communication include observation, modeling, imitation and job shadowing. (Edge, 2005)

Business shift to education

Petrides & Guiney (2002) stated that the idea of knowledge management has been recognized in the business world but the literature regarding information management to support education learning is scarce. It is time for educational administrators to look for information system to assist in creating effective learning environment, which in turn supports teaching and learning.

Business organizations need to capture, manage and store knowledge from materials and resources accumulated by information technology. Schools have also gathered a lot of files, documents and materials since 1990s. Their effective management and utilization has become an important issue. Knowledge management principles may be employed to make them easily available to users for retrieval and sharing (Tan, 2005).

There has been little discussion of knowledge management as a strategy for improving organizational practice, program implementation and teaching and learning within education (Fullan, 2001). “Knowledge management within public and education sectors can contribute to improvements in both individual and organizational performance.”

EMB (2004) mentions that in enriching digital resources for schools, knowledge management strategies will be adopted to facilitate the usage and sharing of resources and experiences.

Knowledge Management Strategies

Petries & Guiney (2002) identified four steps that can be taken for school to apply an ecological for knowledge management to adapt external demands.

• Evaluating the current availability of information.
• Determining information needed to support decision making.
• Operating within the context and perspective of the school’s organization processes.
• Assessing the schools information culture and politics.

It is argued that knowledge driven schools will not emerge until affordable information tools are readily available in schools and prove their value to administrator and boards of education (Streifer, 1999)

Three areas which IT contributes to KM are: information resources management, creating knowledge bases, and collaborative technologies (Skyrme, 2000).

In Toronto, The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario, mentioned by encourage its staff as experts in their chosen field. Good models are profiled regularly in an in-house newsletter distributed to all employees. Because the practice promotes a sense of pride and of being valued, workers are more likely to pass along knowledge if they know they will get positive feedback from colleagues. This is also applicable for resource-limited public organizations like schools. (Chiem, 2001)

Knowledge Management Tools

• Portal

School which is recognized as an organization should also better utilize “portal” as a tool in KM. But, the portal is the interface, the place where information exchange and knowledge transfer takes place, but it is only one component of successful KM (Ifrah, 2001). KM other than the portal also needs attention.

A portal act as a platform for sharing knowledge, as mentioned inside an organization, for example, “Enterprise Portals” are applications that enable companies to unlock internally and externally stored information, and provide users a single gateway to personalized information needed to make informed business decisions. The Enterprise Portals facilitates human capital creation by consolidating, integrating, enhancing and connecting to the knowledge people have within an organization. It enables structural capital to be shared, used, re-used, acquired, retained, identified, received, transmitted, applied and networked within an organization. (Cloete, 2003)

It is suggested that Portal is suitable for higher education to implement KM. It is a gateway to applications that integrate collaborative tools, business intelligence, and unstructured text search capabilities. Portals started as a way to organize a variety of Web-based information sources on one desktop interface: a search tool, news feeds, links to favorite Web sites, content organized by topic, and so forth. It allows users to customize their desktops to show information from a variety of sources within the organization. (Kidwell, Vander Linde, & Johnson 2000) Portal can be used for organizing teaching resources and collecting assignments.

• Community of Practice

The concept of communities of practice is a useful tool in understanding the diverse ways in which all learners develop competencies and understanding of self through interactions with others. Teachers can facilitate their own professional transformations by constructing and participating in communities of practice. (Van Sluys, 2007) Online forum to some extent can be a form of Community of Practice because there are different interest groups.

Benefits of using KM in school

Using knowledge management techniques and technologies in higher education is as vital as it is in the corporate sector. If done effectively, it can lead to better decision-making capabilities, reduced “product” development cycle time (for example, curriculum development and research), improved academic and administrative services, and reduced costs.

Coe (2000) stated several pros of using KM in education:

• As a shared resource available to all, it will allow instructors to both submit their ideas and also draw on the curriculum development expertise of their colleagues across the institution.
• Another benefit of the shared database is its interdisciplinary nature. Tertiary institutions can break down disciplinary walls and ensure that the reality of this convergence in industry is reflected in the form and content of student curriculum.
• Students will not abide the over-crowded, time-and-place-dependant lecture theatre when new technologies can just as readily facilitate the lecture-based form of information transfer. Rather, students will look to instructors and peers for activities that will facilitate learning in a collaborative environment.
• Teachers interacting with students will observe the nuances of their cognitive growth and development over time, their individual strengths and weaknesses.

As Kelogg (1999) mentioned, the entire academic community must work together to place more of an emphasis on student learning and to create a seamless learning environment between in- and out-of-class experiences for students. In a seamless learning environment, students will have opportunities for learning both in the classroom and out-of-the classroom through co-curricular activities. Students will work with and get to know faculty and staff while taking courses and participating in non-classroom learning activities. All of these learning experiences will contribute to personal growth and development in students. The more students are involved in a variety of activities inside and outside the classroom, the more they gain.

Some of the benefits of KM are the following (Sallis & Jones, 2002; ASTD Research, 2002; Wheatley, 2001; Bielawski & Metcalf, 2003):

• forming relationships and knowing whom to contact for help
• promoting enthusiasm and commitment to the job
• increasing problem-solving capability and ability to make improvements
• avoiding reinventing the wheel
• developing an organizational memory
• improving the likelihood that the organization will survive

A report released by the half Moon Bay, Calif. based Institute for the study of knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) urged college leaders and school administrators to balance their investments in technology infrastructure with equally important effects to integrate data and information into decision making. The report also cited that knowledge management is being used to examine more effective ways to teach particulars subjects and to track student grades, attendance patterns, and even suspension data. On the other hand, it is also suggested that school officials should connect knowledge management approaches to education outcomes and to more clearly distinguish knowledge management approaches from technology implementation and information systems management.

Santo (2005) recommended that launching a knowledge management program to make improvements within one’s own organization should be a primary consideration, especially for schools of education whose emphasis is learning. knowledge repository should be provided to allow are easy way to enter and retrieve information, such as course materials, best practices, research findings and tips for success. Leadership, communication and collaboration, technology issues and evaluation issues must be considered when planning knowledge management program.

In addition, the portal will improve the efficiency of knowledge exchange and deliver a set of shared business objectives that include communications around best practices, a gateway to research on the use of teaching and learning through technology, professional development, policy development and review, and resource development. The portal also provides the faculty members at the individual campuses with efficient, direct links to current knowledge about teaching and learning through technology among the campuses of the university system, nationally, and internationally. (Kidwell, Vander Linde, & Johnson 2000)

Senge (1990) fifty discipline “through learning we recreate ourselves…This, then, is the meaning of a learning organization an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future”.

Barriers for KM in education

According to Rowley (2000), the greater challenge lies with the two elements of knowledge management: in the creation of a knowledge environment, and the recognition of knowledge as intellectual capital, there is still scope for considerable progress. Although knowledge based organizations might seem to have the most to gain through knowledge management, effective knowledge management may require significant change in culture and values, organizational structures and reward systems.

Thorn (2001) believed that school information systems are one of the most difficult to harness because they often lack any overall rationality for cooperation and compliance. Differences in data needs and uses across different organizational levels present significant barriers to the collaboration necessary for innovation in knowledge management.

N.Protheroe (2001) believed there would be a few barriers for KM in education, (1) change management strategies will have to be developed and implemented to support the drive toward these new capabilities. (2) And, of course, the people issues will be enormous. The new technologies are designed to devolve power and authority to the individual. To accomplish this, the (3) hundreds of campus central and distributed units will have to develop and conform to certain uniform standards of practice and design. This will not be easy. The issues raised here will also be about (4) how one creates loyalty to an institution in environments that are completely tailored to the individual.

Some of the barriers to KM include (Sallis & Jones, 2002; Bielawski & Metcalf, 2003; Goman, 2002; Wheatley, 2001):

• an organizational culture that values control of information and sees employees as being expendable
• lack of upper management support
• an effort that is not organization-wide
• lack of trust and fear of negative consequences for revealing knowledge
• encouragement of employee competition and secrecy, with reward systems that discourage knowledge sharing
• no time available for sharing and reflection

According to Chiem (2001), sharing can always be encouraged and rewarded financially in the private sector, but this may not be an option for the resource-limited public organizations.

Schmetz (2002) believed that most people shared the view that sharing knowledge meant losing power. Therefore, knowledge sharing can only be promoted with compensating the loss of power with the disclosure of information needed by others.

Yiu and Lin (2002) pointed out that Asian cultures seem to understand that effective knowledge sharing depended more on natural relationships among people than retrieving information from databases. However, knowledge cannot be widely and effectively disseminated with only natural relationships. Staff members who did not have close relationships with other colleagues and were less open might be relatively disadvantaged in acquiring knowledge.

Future development of KM in school

Several trends will shape the field knowledge management in the not-too-distant future:

• Emerging technology solutions
• The convergence of knowledge management with e-business
• The movement from limited knowledge management projects to more enterprisewide projects
• Increasing use of knowledge management to enhance innovation
• Increasing use of tacit knowledge (rather than explicit knowledge)

(Kidwell, Vander Linde, & Johnson 2000)

From their primary school days onward, students will be increasingly exposed to technologies such as the Internet that facilitate independent learning and self-inquiry. These will be confident and technologically literate individuals who will demand learning that meets their personal requirements. (Coe, 2000)

While at the same time, R. N. Katz and Associates (2002) empathized that in the future, these systems need to be secure and to handily recognize an individual’s authorizations, based on roles and other personal attributes.

There are a few actions we have to do in promoting KM practices in future within the educational arena. We should continue to refine and communicate to others the value of knowledge management approaches in education, be rigorous in connecting KM approaches to expected outcomes (i.e. improvement in decision making for enhancing student learning), distinguish the KM approaches from technology implementation, assess the extent to which KM practices can continue to transform the classroom experience. (Petrides 2003)

[edit] Research Methods

Research methods

Our research objective is to investigate how knowledge management can be applied into school environment such as its uses in education and its impacts to the students and teachers etc. In order to achieve the objective, we had studied and analyzed a number of books and articles which are relevant to the above topic. Apart from this, a secondary school in Hong Kong, was used as a case study for us to understand how KM support learning and teaching. To further investigate on the topic, we had attended the conference (IT in Education symposium - held on 2 March to 3 March) as well as conducted an interview with the Academic In-charge of the school.

[edit] Case Study on a secondary school in Hong Kong

[edit] Background of the school

In 1998, the Government set out a five-year strategy (1998-99 to 2002-03) centered on “Information Technology for Learning in a New Era”, stating that Information Technology (IT) was to be a key component in transforming school education from “a largely textbook-based teacher-centered approach to a more interactive and learner-centered approach” (EMB, 1998). Schools were expected to harness the powers of IT in order to help students “develop an understanding of the pervasive impact of IT on the society and their daily lives, higher order thinking skills, as well as abilities to seek, evaluate, organize and present information”, students would develop a “habit of life-long learning” (EMB, 1998).

The secondary school in this case study is one of the oldest secondary school in Hong Kong. Since 2000, the school began to realize the vision and worked to transform itself from a traditional school into one IT-based, support-active school.

“Our vision is to extend the school's physical boundaries into the virtual space to enable both teachers and students to connect and learn with their counterparts all over the world,” said Mr. Yip, the Principal of the secondary school. (Microsoft, 2007)

Aiming at enhancing student-teachers' relationship as well as supporting students' outside-class learning, it has developed knowledge management in school, for instance, a collaborative learning platform like portal and forum that allow students to post questions and have online-discussion with classmates and teachers.

[edit] Findings & Analysis of the Case Study

[edit] Knowledge Management Tools

[edit] Resource Bank

Resource Bank is the most official structural platform in the secondary school. Each subject or department has its own hierarchical structure designed by its panel. Access right has been set for students, teachers and super user. The principal, the administrative panel and the academic in change own super user's accounts which can access all the resources in the platform. After logging in, registered users can access different subjects and browse the resources according to their access right. Users can also make good use of the search engine in this platform. Search fields include: Name, Name and Details, File, Link and All resources.

This resource bank is mainly for subjects (curriculum) which include past paper subscribed from the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA), the school's past papers, quizzes and practical tests. From 2000, the school started using the platform; first of all, teachers uploaded a few resources onto the platform. In 2004, the school was aware of the importance of KM, teachers spent their spare time to upload and organize all the resources very well in the platform to fulfill the knowledge sharing purpose. Take Computer Studies as an example, it is easier to manage Form 1 to Form 3's resources because teachers only need to upload the data file (teaching resources) for each course or module. For A-Level or AS-level's Computer Studies, it is more difficult to manage because there are large amount of modules and projects.

Besides curriculum, the Counseling Department and the Academic Affair Department are also aware of the importance of KM and the benefits of using the platform after the external review in September 2006. From then on, they decided to upload all the minutes and useful forms to the platform instead of using folder to keep the records. Take Academic Affair Department as an example, members of Academic Affair Department have discussed the 3+3+4 Educational Reform since 2004. There are a lot of meetings, all the details of the meeting including the curriculum planning and timetables have been recorded down clearly and kept in the platform.

This resource platform can enhance the flow of knowledge and fulfill the knowledge sharing purpose. With this resource bank, it is convenient for the principal to check and see if any panel has difficulties on creating curriculum or any other issues. Principal would like to know: How many people join the meetings? How long did the meeting last? What is the students' performance? Who won a prize? etc. In addition, if one of the staff has left the school, all the document or knowledge which created by him or her can be traced and kept in the platform for reference. Besides subject matters, error reports of facilities and room booking details have also been kept in this platform. They are well-organized so that teachers can make good use of them online.

[edit] Assessment Server

The Assessment Server is a non-structural KM tool. It started from 1999 with the purpose of collecting students' assignments. Nowadays, the school has stored students' assignments dated back to 2000 and recent years' resources are uploaded to the server. It has three databases including databases for different academic years (2004-2006, 2005-2007 and 2006-2008). Students can log on to the server to access the resources.

Structure of the Assessment Server:

• Problem-based learning project
• Assignment area
• Download area
• Curriculum management
• Exam area
• Student management

The Computer subject has the most complete resources among all subjects. Computer teachers of every form also use this server to collect assignments. For example, we can see from Form 2, how many people are in a class, what assignment they have to do in a whole academic year, who handed in assignment on time or late. With this server, the principal can check any pieces of assignment anytime. This year, the school plans to ask all students to digitize their hand-written assignments as well as exam papers and submit them through this server. However, this is still in process and some technological problems have to be solved in the meantime.

For example, Form 5 Computer Science students have to hand in coursework for School-Based Assessment (SBA). It is a long report with topics like programming or others. The Computer teacher has divided the coursework into different phases from one to five, in order to collect students' work in a systematical way. Also, students can handle the project more easily. Other subjects may only collect the final copy of the coursework but the Computer subject collects assignment like this, because students can continue their progress in the summer vocation.

This server was originally a tool for collecting assignments. Why does it become a KM tool? If a new staff comes to the school, he/she may want to know what to teach in the Computer subject. Then, he/she is asked to look at this server, seeing what assignment students are needed to do, as well as notes and other teaching resources. There is also a download area for user to download relevant resources, e.g. materials for HKCEE, assignment, module coursework, answer for textbook, marking schemes, notes, etc. Even students know how to get resources from this server. New teachers can know that how many tests were there in last year also since all tests are uploaded onto the server after they are designed by teachers.

The third function is online exam. For the Computer subject, all past paper are typed into the server and students can do them online. Teachers can view students' performance. In particular, questions that are frequently with wrong answers can be figured out for discussion.

The Assessment Server is a structural teaching tool (for sharing teaching resources and collecting assignments) but a non-structural KM tool (since the original purpose of the server is for collecting assignments but not for KM sharing) according to the interviewee, like online portals using in different universities. Teachers can trace back a few years for the subject activities, but it only depends on which subject. For example, Chinese History would not use this server to collect assignment. The folder of this subject would be empty.

[edit] Students' Server

The Students' Server is a non-structural KM tool, which is launched in May 2003. It is a public forum in which members include teachers, students, parents, and outsiders. This discussion forum was surely welcomed by web-citizens since it launched. There are nearly six hundred web-citizens login to the Students' Forum every day. All members take advantages of this e-Communicating Environment to initiate discussions related to current events, personal enquiries, learning problems and any academic issues. Users can also make use of the search engine in this forum to search a specific post.

This Students' Forum serves as a multi-purpose portal. There are different discussion areas, including general issues, academic issues, and club and committee issues.

• Academic discussion

For academic discussion, there are subjects including Physics, Computer Studies, Mathematics, Geography, Chinese Language and English Language. In these academic discussion forums, any member of the school community can post a question, an issue for discussion, or simply share some ideas or thoughts. With these forums, students can acquire different subject knowledge not only in the textbooks, but also through knowledge sharing and learning among schoolmates and teachers.

For example, teacher of the Computer Studies may post exercises to the forum. Students who have difficulties in doing the exercise can post their questions to the forum. Different teachers, classmates or even some past students may help to solve students' enquiries with their knowledge through the forum. In fact, not only students can learn from the discussion, teachers who teach the same subject may also exchange their knowledge and their teaching method with each other. In addition, as all this information will not be deleted, the knowledge can be kept, so the students of the next year can reuse this knowledge. They may also simply refer to the posts when they encounter similar difficulties during revision, by making use of the keyword search function provided in the forum.

From the above examples, we can see that members of the forum are assisting each other to develop their knowledge in this forum. When a member did not understand a concept mentioned in class or during their revision, they can asked for answers. This shows that the forum is not only a place for exchanging information and seeking help, but also a platform for members acquiring and developing knowledge.

• Clubs and activities

For club and committee issues, details of events or competition of extra-curriculum activities will be posted on the forum. For example, the date, gathering time and venue of a basketball competition, or how many practice sections would be held before the competition etc. can be posted in the forum. Therefore, students who are interested in the competition can get this information from the forum and go to support the teams. Besides, even if the coach or current teacher has to leave the team temporarily, new teachers may know the pattern and frequency of the team practice, as well as how to organize a similar event, and which competition is held during the semester by searching the related topic in the forum.

• Online gallery

In addition to the discussion platform, the forum also includes an online gallery, all photos of the event held in the school was organized and grouped orderly and uploaded to the album.

For example, during the trip to Beijing, students may post their daily events and the photos taken during the trip to the forum, so that parents can know about the situation of their children. And of course, parents are also welcomed to give opinions about the trip through the forum, or to leave some warm messages to their children, like asking them to wear the thinker jackets under the cold weather. This shows that the forum does not only enhance the knowledge sharing among students and teachers, it is also useful to help connecting and maintaining the relationship between parents and children.

To sum up, this forum provides users a couple of pros: first, it allows ideas exchanging among teachers, parents and students. This is undoubtedly vital to enhance and broaden users’ perspectives. Besides, it encourages knowledge sharing which will be beneficial to users to further their knowledge and understandings on any types of issue. Another advantage of the forum is that, users can make use of this platform to keep a closer connection with each other.

[edit] Benefits noted by our interviewee of KM in school

According to the interviewee from the secondary school, KM can help a lot in both learning for students and management of information for the school. Student assessments or assignments are submitted through Internet, teachers can then easily get access to them at once when it is uploaded. Meanwhile, in such way, teachers or students can trace back the previous works for reference very conveniently.

On the other hand, under the concept of Community of Practice, teachers, through KM, can gain from the process of sharing. What teachers possess can be knowledge in any forms, for example, teaching schemes, assignment and test paper they constructed, schedules of any kind, circulars, information of any extra-curricular activities, etc. They are digitalized and submitted to the web space. Teachers can then be able to look at each other's information and give suggestion or even learn from them.

Moreover, KM also assists more enthusiastic parents to get to know more about their children's learning environment. Parents can receive special notices and newsletter or even actively participate in discussion, for instance, online forum.

[edit] The Barriers

KM implementation is welcomed by most of the staff. About 60% of the teachers are not willing to be active in the issue.

We believe culture has the edge. As Schmetz mentioned our traditional culture is in some way discouraging one to share her knowledge, since it is being considered a loss of power. (Schmetz 2002) Fortunately, the interviewee said that this newer generation students are enthusiastic in using the KM tools, including the forum, homework uploading portal, etc. However, for the large portion of the current teaching staff, they are reluctant in embarking in KM’s activities.

Why the teaching staff reacted negatively towards KM? Beside the fright of losing power, they consider KM implementation is going to mount up the workload for them. As many of them have been so familiar with the traditional way, they do not know how to totally shift their work to the computer especially for the older generations. The interviewee also told us that, if teachers are ordered to participate in sharing online notes, a number of them would only upload some worthless materials to the web space.

[edit] Future development for KM in the school

The interviewee foresees that there will be a lot of effort needed to promote the idea of KM among the staff. The first action to take, he said, is to let all the teachers know how beneficial the implementation of KM can be. It is also considerable to reward staff by regularly profiled in an in-house newsletter sent to all staff according to Chiem. (Chiem 2001)

[edit] Conclusions

To conclude, knowledge management in the secondary school is astonishing. The tools and methods the school adopted for the implementation of KM is, in certain extent, successful. For instance, the forum is welcomed by different aspects of users, including students, teachers and even parents. Each group of users can no wonder gain from the sharing of information. They can voice out their ideas and needs, and at the end, this could benefit the school management in creating a sophisticated environment for education.

The only concern is that, knowledge management might be so new to current teaching staff. The changes it brings could be uncomfortable to teachers who prefer sticking with the existing teaching methods. It is vital that the school should encourage more and more staff to take part in the sharing of information by rewards or other reinforcements of similar form. Without full support from the teacher party, the idea of KM would not be able to emerge throughout the whole school.

[edit] Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Academic In-charge of the secondary school for his detailed and complete information. He is so enthusiastic in helping us to understand how KM is applied in the school environment. Besides, we are grateful to our professor in providing relevant references and advices to our work. Finally, we felt gratitude to our classmates for the amendment of our work.

[edit] References

• Anonymous, (2007). Pui Ching Middle School enabling learning without boundaries through a windowsbased collaborative environment. Retrieved March 6, 2007, from Microsoft: Partners in learning - case sharing Web site: http://www.mshk.com/hk/education/PartnersInLearning/docs/Pui_Ching.pdf

• Anonymous, (2006). Reflections on knowledge management in school. Retrieved March 5, 2007, from The Corner Web site: http://www.thecorner.org/ict/km_reflections.html

• Anonymous, (2003). New approaches to KM can improve learning, instruction and decision-making in education. Information Technology Newsletter, 14 (2) 18-19.

• Bielawski, L. & Metcalf, D. (2003). Blended elearning: integrating knowledge, performance support, and online learning. Amherst, MA: HRD Press.

• Chiem, P. X. (2001). In the public interest: government employees also need incentives to share what they know, KM Magazine, Vol. August.

• Cloet, M., Snyman, R. (2003). The enterprise portal: is it knowledge management? Retrieved March 23, 2007, from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Articles/2760550405.html

• Coe, C. (2000). The digital curriculum database: meeting the needs of industry and the challenge of enhanced student learning. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://naweb.unb.ca/proceedings/2000/coe.html

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[edit] Knowledge Management of a Chinese Dining Corporation in Hong Kong

Koo Ching Lan, Jasmine; Au Yeung Ching Sum, Sam; Chow Wai Yin, Yanny; Cheong Iok Teng, Stella; So Ka Kee, Katherine

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[edit] Abstract

In order to sustain a business in terms of long-term profit, enterprises such as catering industries need to be careful about controlling their knowledge resources in order to use and develop these resources effectively and efficiently inside the organization. This study examines how the concept of knowledge management is applied to a local Chinese dining corporation, and its level of attainment in the world of knowledge management.

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[edit] Introduction

The Chinese dining house we choose to study has a history of over 16 years in Hong Kong. Ten years ago, it sought expertise from specialized management consultants for improving the quality of services. In 2000 it started business in South Mainland China. It has been expanded in recent years from a restaurant to a dining holding corporation with more than 40 restaurants in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Its great success in running Chinese restaurants which provide various special menus for local cuisine from different areas of Guangdong attracts our attention. The Corporation receives awards for its innovation, outstanding catering service management and excellent customer relationship. It is worth exploring the innovation it makes especially in terms of knowledge management, which is quite a new idea in Chinese dining industry.

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[edit] Literature Review

Scholarly articles on knowledge management in the dining industry are rare. It is a domain that has a vast room for research and exploration. We can only select twelve articles on dining industry or related fields to see how some sorts of knowledge management are applied to enhance the business performance. The term 'knowledge management' might not be used in all of the articles we choose but we are looking for the ways how strategies are employed to keep the employees' experiences and expertise, and how these are utilized for the benefits of the company. After consideration, it is decided that the literature review is presented by briefly introducing each article rather than by themes of KM since almost no KM articles on dining industry can be found. The following ones are written within ten years and several of them are not addressing the dining industry but industries in general, that is business management, such as Six Sigma and enterprise resource planning. The trend of KM in dining industry is only at the preliminary stage. It has a long way to go.

Data are fool’s gold unless converted to knowledge that best helps your business (Wilson, 2001)

Data can be collected easily but their values are not obvious unless the company converts them into a standardized and unified language which can be shared. The food service industry is the case that needs to convert the data into a system which is industry-wide. It helps the company in both regional and national aspects. The standardization allows company to keep track on the supply chain management for forecasting, planning and reviewing which in turn increases the effectiveness of the business operation. Although the advantages are obvious, some companies are reluctant to experience such changes. With the popularity of information technology, companies have no way but to do as what the society requires. (Wilson, 2001). Data collection and analysis is one of the crucial factors for developing knowledge management in dining industry.

Knowledge management and Six Sigma: Exploring the potential of two powerful disciplines (Leavitt, 2002)

American Productivity and Quality Center states that knowledge management (KM) and Six Sigma are the two best practices in business management (Leavitt, 2002). Six Sigma aims at process improvement while KM is to deliver information to the right people in the right time at the right place for decision making. Although their purposes are not the same, the two approaches intersect each other at communities of practice (CoPs). Many companies e.g., HP, Ford, Halliburton have created CoPs by using many Six Sigma approaches in reducing cost and increase gain. The two approaches allow professionals to learn from another arena. These not only improve operation efficiency, but explore opportunities for the company. It facilitates decision maker to formulate knowledge strategy and prompts business improvement actions by improving knowledge. (Leavitt, 2002). By making good use of the two best practices, the dining industry is sure to attain higher performance.

Developing a restaurant revenue-management strategy (Kimes, Barrash, & Alexander, 1999)

The goal of restaurant revenue management (RRM) is to maximize revenue per available seat hour by manipulating price and meal duration. RRM is commonly practiced in airline industry and lodging industry. It also applies well to food service. The paper explains in details with graphs, diagrams and tables how revenue-management strategy is developed for the 100-seat casual restaurant, Coyote Loco, in Ithaca, New York. It includes identifying hot, warm and cold business periods, and which revenue-management strategy to use: suggestive selling, reservations, host, menu variety, prices, promotions, clips and salsa. (Kimes, Barrash, & Alexander, 1999).

Best practices in human resources (Enz & Siguaw, 2000)

Training and knowledge building is one the best five human resources practices in the hotel which Cornell University Hotel School has chosen. To increase the service quality of the current employees and newcomers, hotels provide lots of information and knowledge opportunities to achieve this. Disney’s Polynesian Resort, the Hyatt’s, Coastal Hotel Group, Four Seasons & Regent Hotels and Resorts have all set up the training program to let employees to understand and commit to the business. Participants are encouraged to have personal-reflection to increase recognition to both themselves and the organization. All these enhance the personal-job fit and personal-organization fit which in turn increase strength to the operating structures. (Enz & Siguaw, 2000). Knowledge management in dining industry implies certain level of best practices in its human resources.

Finding the right mix: Franchising, organizational learning, and chain performance (Sorenson & Sorenson, 2001)

The paper mentions that franchising provides a common vehicle for entrepreneurs to pursue opportunities in creating wealth and growing their business. It says that maximizing the wealth created through franchising depends on successfully managing the interdependent relationship between the franchiser and the franchisees. At the same time, finding the right mix of governance structures in the chain directly affects the success of both the franchiser and its franchisees. The paper stresses on the relationship between governance structures and firm performance. Moreover, the organizational learning literature on exploration and exploitation portrays a trade-off between two types of learning without considering what might lead actors to engage in one at the expense of the other. The research also points toward potentially interesting new research topics like a learning perspective provides a useful frame for understanding both the mean and the variance of firm performance. (Sorenson & Sorenson, 2001). The organizational learning experience is helpful for the knowledge management of the restaurants we will study.

Implementing enterprise resource planning and knowledge management systems (Newell, Huang, Galliers, & Pan, 2003)

Enterprise Resources Planning system (ERPs) is a method of using computer technology to link various functions, and to facilitate information sharing, business planning, and decision making on an enterprise-wide basis. The benefits of using ERPs are (Newell, Huang, Galliers, & Pan, 2003):

• Replacing diverse legacy systems, so creating a common IT infrastructure
• Creating a common productivity measure
• Restructuring production, logistics and warehouse divisions
• Enabling centralized procurement
• Bringing higher efficiency through improved information sharing

For supply chain management, ERPs has the following functions: inventory record keeping, order entry, purchasing, product configurator, supply chain planning, supplier scheduling, inspection of goods, claim processing and commission calculation.

How ERPs integrates with KM implementation (Li, Chaudhry, & Zhao, 2006)

In the knowledge-based economy, it is more important for enterprises that ERPs can react according to the experiences and knowledge generated from within the organization. Implementation of ERPs strengthens KM because KM creates an integrated environment of knowledge-based processes of creating, organizing, storing, retrieval, transferring, distributing and applying knowledge for all ERPs users. ERPs provides the management team the ability to manage all business aspects of an organization including material, financial and information flows. The knowledge required for system implementation can be communicated in a timely and effective manner. For example, through the knowledge management mechanism in ERPs, the developers of different modules can rapidly master the skill and experience besides the knowledge of their own fields. (Li, Chaudhry, & Zhao, 2006). ERPs is implemented in the Chinese dining corporation we are going to study.

Customers, concept top ingredients at menu development panel (Walkup, 2004)

This article looks at what things are important to the menu development panel. It reports that a group of International Corporate Chefs Association members have expressed their views on the topic. One of the members Steven Jayson mentions that the crucial ingredients of menu development include the universal trend, customers and rivals. He adds that there are other factors affecting the menu development such as development of full-service restaurant, food quality, emphasis on customer service and value, fast moving society and the significance of children’s market. Another chef Paul Carr notes that the growing of elderly segment will bring food industry with opportunities since people retired early have more disposable income. Moreover, he explains that different menu should be designed for different divisions. There is no fixed one that can specifically serve for all divisions. Therefore special considerations should be given by developing different recipes and concepts based on special requirements. (Walkup, 2004). The menu development discussed by the chefs is useful in applying to the restaurants we are going to investigate.

Dinner houses hone focus on food, strategic recipes on spicier sales (Battaglia, 1999)

Enacting all manners of change, which range from refined menus to redirected marketing opportunities, dinner houses stay competitive to retain loyal return customers and attract new ones. Revitalization of employees by new programs boosts morale. Distinctive food, spiciness and strong taste has become the segment’s top priority. More food research and development, and menu changes need to be more emphasized in the long run, according to a vice president of a consulting firm. The chain O’Charley’s offers unique products of Italian, Chinese and Mexican foods. Cheesecake Factory enacts two major menu changes per year. Recent additions have included bold flavors, represented by a Jamaican black-pepper shrimp dish. (Battaglia, 1999).

The brain behind the big, bad burger and other tales of business intelligence (Levinson, 2005)

The article focuses on the business intelligence system — a variety of software applications which analyze the organization’s data and extract useful insights from it. The system has been failure when implementing in other industry but not in the restaurant industry. The article lists out several successful cases of several restaurants when they are using the BI system. For example, although the Monster Thickburger introduced by Hardee’s contains high calories which may harm to health, CKE restaurant still can successfully introduce it nationally. It is because they make use of the BI system. Since the Monster Thickburger exceeds expectations in test market, it decides to roll it out nationwide and eventually it has been a resounding success. Many of the big chains have been using BI software like Wendy’s, Ruby Tuesday, and T.G. I. Friday’s.

In the article, it also outlines what are the key factors in using BI system which make restaurant industry become successful and what problems other industry is incurred when they use the system. Eventually, it addresses recommendations to improve the operation of BI system such as avoiding old data, data consistency and accuracy, preventing redundant data, etc. Another means of implementing the system is to let the operators automatically embrace the new tool rather than force them to use the tool. It stresses that user’s concerns is more important, even at the expense of slowing down the rate of return. (Levinson, 2005). The success of applying the BI system in food industry provides good reference for the Chinese restaurants we are going to examine.

Appetite for stability: Consolidated Restaurants Inc. thrives on consistent food, strong locations and a steady staff (Roarke, 1997)

Consolidated Restaurants Inc.’s strategy on consistent food, strong locations and a steady staff bring it to continuous success since its founding by David Cohn in Seattle in 1951. It has built a business of fine dining places on grill food and oyster, and of upper-crust take-out stops. Consolidated offers an array of employee benefits. The full-time staff, who occupy 60 percent of its 600 employees, are covered by medical, dental and disability insurance. Everyone has a chance of rising to top management position. In 1995, Molly Hancock, a long-time company employee originally hired as a college student, became the chief operating officer. With tight family ownership, it insists on making use of internal human resources and providing a unique dining experience for each location. For $3.77 million, the Cohn family bought most of the city block the restaurant occupies. The real estate acquisitions are steps toward ensuring their long-term presence in the Seattle community. (Roarke, 1997). Although this kind of family owned business is different from the holding company which we are going to study, we can still learn from Consolidated that internal human resources are what it most treasures.

How Outback Steakhouse created a great place to work, have fun and make money (DeCottis, Sullivan, Hyatt, & Avery, 2004)

This article clearly describes the milepost of one of the success restaurant, the Outback Steakhouse, Inc. It outlines lists of key factors which make Outback to success like quality employees, low employee turnover, starting with a detailed statement, using rigorous hiring standards, etc. The founders of Outback Steakhouse believe that people are the key element to meet the company’s commitment. The idea behind the company is enabling the founders to have autonomy in operation, to generate enough income to fund a comfortable lifestyle, and to have fun doing it. They believe that the rapid growth of their business is a result of a high-quality, trained staff being at Outback. They are committed to grow a values-driven company with high quality of product, service and customer experience.

At the critical juncture, they recognize they need a more explicit understanding and statement about the Outback’s future and direction. After embarked visioneering with their strategic partner consulting firm, they realize that stakeholders need for a sense of place and to feel valued. Also, the cornerstone of Outback’s idea that a company is its people is the most important thing. The Outback theory of success stresses on staff training and regards high turnover rate as unacceptable. On the other hand, quality is also important so they obtain the best raw ingredients for the food served in the restaurants. Besides, they see the Outback culture as the means to attract, retain and energize their employees which makes them to feel Outback restaurant is 'a great place to work'. The company has focused on earning the trust of employees, and through them, the trust of its customers.

There are three primary avenues used by the company: education, integration and measurement. For education, one of the means called The Walkabout is executed. This is a meeting held ten times a year which is conducted by the founders, president, and other leaders of the company. During the meeting, all people share their experience with others and the restaurant leaders and managers are taught to develop a team which follows the Principles and Beliefs, a manifesto describes the culture that all Outback leaders are expected to create and maintain. Also, the training program includes sharing key ideas in 'Alley Rallies', which are preshift meetings to energize and focus employees.

For integration, a rigorous employee selection process is developed for hiring the right people. Outback takes promotion seriously and has carefully charted a career path for individuals who desire to be a partner. It also develops numerous tools and processes to support the development and advancement of both hourly and management crew. For instance, the Regional Walkabouts, which are training meetings providing managers with opportunities to share their views and the Principles and Beliefs to other crew members. Another example is the online database Career Portfolio, which allows crew to keep track of their development experiences and identify areas where they need more improvement.

For measurement, the company implements several measurement processes such as the Outback Experience Survey, accurate measures of turnover, etc. The survey helps the company to confirm the worth of implementing the Principles and Beliefs and the value of the quality hire by using the discipline of selection. As a result, it can be seen that the formula for Outback to success is hiring the right people and living the principles and beliefs. (DeCottis, Sullivan, Hyatt, & Avery, 2004). Again we see that quality employees are the key element for success.

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[edit] Research Methods

Our group will investigate the major knowledge management activities done in the selected Chinese dining corporation. Semi-structured interview(s) will be conducted, so as to gather useful information and understand the corporation’s vision, as well as how Chinese dining corporation in Hong Kong applies knowledge management concepts into practice.

Sampling: A local dining corporation will be interviewed for one to two times.

Methods: There are three parts of our research.

Firstly, scholarly journal articles and other reliable sources regarding to knowledge management in restaurants will be extracted and analyzed. Secondly, one to two interviews, each lasts for one to two hours, with the representative of a local dining corporation will be conducted. Regarding the interview, we will start by asking preset questions designed by our group, and followed by several follow-up questions, so as to let our participant think-aloud when interacting with our group. The researcher will take notes and record the whole interview. Thirdly, we will analyze the information gathered from the interview, and combine it with the findings discovered from journal articles and other sources.

Research plan: A tentative schedule for the research plan is as follows.

• Mar 2007:

Extracting useful articles from databases and other electronic resources. Interviewing a local dining corporation.

• Mar - Apr 2007:

Analyzing the research data and relevant articles. Creating a book chapter in Wikibooks on knowledge management in restaurants.

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[edit] The Chinese Dining Corporation Case Study

Our group has interviewed the Assistant Manager, Corporate Communications and Administration of the Chinese dining corporation, which has ten brand names, 5,000 employees and owns over 40 restaurants, each occupies over 13,000 square feet averagely. The following is a detailed transcription of the contents.

1. How do your jobs relate to KM?

The administration department in the dining corporation is responsible for implementing the knowledge management strategy. Knowledge management was firstly implemented three years ago. KM is important because there is a difference between information and knowledge. Therefore KM is used to distinguish the difference between knowledge and information and help to change the information into explicit knowledge that is valuable to the company. As the company was restructured at that time, it helped KM to be implemented more easily.

• Why use KM

In 1991, the first restaurant was established and KM was implemented in 2003. When the business has run for about ten years, the CEO started to have a concept that only using the existing management method and the previous experience to management the business are not enough at all. Also, the sector of restaurant contains a lot of human affairs and it is essential to manage the personnel matters well in order to make the business successful. Therefore, they started to carry out a series of management strategy and KM is one of the strategy they added to improve the business.

2. What kinds of KM tools or strategies do you apply?

• Meetings

KM is very useful in gathering tacit knowledge from the chefs. It is very helpful for the management team to manage the daily operations in the restaurants and make decisions with the chefs. As KM makes people share their knowledge with each other, less influence would be bought to the company if one of the chefs or restaurant’s managers left. However, only some KM strategies are used inside the corporation and they are not systematic. For example, we provide some channels for the crew to facilitate the sharing of knowledge. In order to let the crew to share, we advocate the atmosphere of knowledge sharing by providing training courses and holding meetings. One of the meetings is called ‘Bottom to Top’ which requires only the branch subordinates to attend.

The moderator will take charge of the meeting and the focus group inside will be asked some questions about their work condition. So the crew in the meeting can express their ideas and feelings without having pressure since their boss would not attend the meeting. The aim of holding such meetings is to allow different crew in different positions can express their ideas freely. This helps to make an atmosphere of sharing because this makes everyone who works in the company to feel that they have the right to say and they are respected as well.

• Communication channels

On the other hand, we regard communication channels as one of the KM tools, too. There are several communication channels that are provided for the employees. The first one is the Restaurant Daily News. We deliver the news everyday by sending emails to let the crew receive the immediate messages and the recent news about the Corporation. Branch manager needs to sign it to ensure staff members have read it.

The second one is poster. The poster would be posted inside the restaurants and it contains some real cases about the customers or some information about product analysis. This helps the crew to know more about how to manage the customer’s complaint effectively and to learn more on the new product.

The third one is VCD. We would distribute a 15-minute VCD to the crew per week. The VCD contains the recent trend of the corporation and the information of different departments. Restaurants especially arrange time for employees to watch the VCD to get the updated company information and news. The manager is responsible for supervising the staff to make sure that they pay attention to the content of the VCD.

The forth one is the Monthly Magazine, which is distributed to the management team monthly to share knowledge about business management. It contains information useful for managing daily operations of the restaurants, such as achievements of some branches become best practice for other branches to follow.

• Management manual

Each department has its own management manual which will be updated half a year. Since the management manual contains important knowledge, it should be carefully preserved to avoid the leakage of important information.

• Menu

If the dish is created by individual branch instead of the dining corporation, then there may not have a standard recipe for the dish to be kept by the corporation. But, if the dish is generated by the corporation, then it must have a standard menu which shows clearly about the procedure of making the dish. In future, we hope that we can make a series of dim sum recipes and store them in a computer database. Inside the recipes, the content includes all the things such as ingredients, making procedures, cost, price list and the dishes’ pictures.

• Logistics

Most ingredients are supplied by the company's central Logistics Center, but it is still flexible for restaurants to order some materials by themselves from different suppliers based on their needs. However, for the seafood, all restaurants should order the needed materials from a specific list of suppliers provided by the company.

• Seafood

We are the first Chinese dining company in Hong Kong to get an accreditation certificate of Quality Seawater Assurance Scheme.

3. How does the application of KM tools lead to positive result?

KM is not yet fully practiced in our organization, as it was started three years ago, so we do not have a particular KM practice tool to facilitate our business. However, we believe KM practices definitely help to manage our business. Traditionally, knowledge is mostly owned by the chef who is the master of the kitchen but now KM promotes the culture of sharing. It makes knowledge to be owned by the organization, so even the chief cook leaves the company, the influence is lesser. Undoubtedly, it mostly depends on management practice to change to a sharing culture; KM is an auxiliary tool to achieve this.

• Strategies

Channels are needed for employees to speak up and promote the sharing atmosphere. However, it is quite difficult to urge each branch manager to share their knowledge with others, as they are competing with other branches of sale volume. Sharing atmosphere is required for practicing KM as knowledge is the basic criteria for KM. Therefore, our managing director holds meetings with all the branch managers and prompts them to share. Surely, he has foreseen the benefits and importance of sharing.

4. How does KM system help managers make better decision?

We hold meetings with the front line employees. Each meeting would have a target group of employee to discuss. Employees are encouraged to express themselves freely as no supervisors of those target group employees would be present. Questions asked are related to their main scope of work; they may need to report or give comments. The meetings provide chance for employees of different positions to voice their opinions. For the employees’ aspect, they feel that they are being valued and have the right to express themselves. This further promotes the atmosphere of sharing. The meeting minutes record all their suggestions to ensure that the opinions are being seriously treated by the company. Follow-up works will be allocated to improve conditions or tackle problems.

Furthermore, Daily News, posters, VCDs and Monthly Magazines mentioned above all help to enhance knowledge sharing. The Annual Magazine contains the recipes of dishes in the yearly culinary final competition. In addition, a management handbook with in-depth practical management practice knowledge deals with management affairs. The handbook includes all the departments’ knowledge. The knowledge mentioned in the handbook are announced and filtered by the department head to ensure the knowledge sharing has no negative effects to the department. It is updated half-yearly.

5. How KM is applied by means of food tasting sessions?

Special and unique ways are carefully designed to distinguish, define and gather information about customers’ different style and needs. These are the food tasting sessions organized twice weekly. You can also join their sessions if you like. The highest executives in the corporation attend the sessions at least once a week. There are two timeslots available, the ‘dim sum’ tasting in the morning, and the culinary tasting in the evening. We invite frequent customers and even complainers to come. The staff will record what they said and follow-up the issues raised.

The food tasting session serves as a platform for customers to express their opinions freely. It is easier to gather opinions and discover different customers’ needs and styles. Although many food tasting sessions have been carrying out in other similar Chinese dining companies, we are the one who keeps this session for as long as three years, from once a month, to twice a week now. This is not an easy tool to carry on but finding focus is the most important issue, because it paths the way for improvement.

6. How to manage knowledge in terms of technology support?

Regarding KM with technology support, the dining corporation has not yet applied it to the operations of different departments. Right now only Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERPs) is used in logistics, which we consider as a kind of KM technology. We have adopted ERPs since 2004 to facilitate logistics operations.

7. Is there any information overload problem solved by KM?

• How to organize the information

The highest-positioned executives will filter the gathered information whether it is useful to the company or not. For example, we will see whether it has overlap or contradiction in the reports within the same department. When it comes to different departments, the Executive Director will oversee the reports and make necessary changes. If overlapped or contradicted information occurs, the Executive Director and other executives will hold meetings and try to solve the problems. Furthermore, the documents are organized and will be reviewed every six months to keep all recorded information up-to-dated.

• Who owns the recipes

The menus belong to our company. We seldom videotape the flow of cooking dishes because there are 11 sub-brands within our corporation, and we would like to give each sub-brand a room to expand their unique way to run their business. For example, there will have some differences in producing ‘siu mai’ (a kind of popular dim sum) in different sub-brands.

• How to manage and keep the recipes

There is a model created by the mother company that helps each branch to run their own business, but this is just 70% of the whole story. Each branch still has 30% freedom that let them run their own business. This is the difference between Chinese dining companies and fast food companies. Every branch can sell their brand new dish designed by a chef for two months. If the dish gains positive feedback from customers and staff, then the mother company will expand the dish available to all branches. At this time the ownership of that recipe will belong to the mother company. If it is not as good as expected, the mother company will let the chef decide whether he would like to modify the dish or not.

We would like to make a sense of creativity in the company. The way of running a dining company is providing standardization as well as creativity to customers. For example, we have a monthly culinary style competition, which we invite all staff in all branches to participate. Moreover, every year in spring, we will have the final round to test the winners in last year. Our big boss will attend this final round too. During the competition, we will distribute the Annual Magazine that shows all the recipes of the competing dishes, why they won, boss’s overall comments, and how popular the dishes were sold in last year.

8. Do you have KM best practice to follow?

The dining corporation itself introduces role playing in table booking, asking the employees to act as customers to be served and reflect their feeling afterwards. In fact, we set an example of good services in the Chinese dining industry in Hong Kong.

9. What is the KM cycle in your corporation?

Let me take the seawater assurance scheme as example. To ensure that the seawater inside the fishbowl maintains a high quality, a lot of checking procedures are carried out. There is explicit knowledge captured such as the supplier, the system of the fishbowl and a clear workflow. In 2004, a task force was established to be responsible for the assurance of the seawater quality. For the implicit knowledge, experts in fish culture are invited to share their experience, e.g., the seawater inside the fishbowl cannot be replaced every day. They also concern the degree of saltiness and the water temperature.

Once the task force gets any new messages or information about seafood, they will gather all the experts and inform them. Through gathering both the explicit and implicit knowledge, a check list of standard requirements is used. Since the world temperature is changing, and the Hong Kong Productivity Council would change the instructions on the seawater quality when necessary, the procedures for ensuring the seawater quality need to be modified continuously to meet the requirements.

10. What are your objectives of applying KM?

The objectives of applying KM in our corporation are to keep the enterprise alive; to empower the managers of next generation to take over the management; to uplift the image of the Chinese dining industry (as at the beginning of this year, over one hundred restaurants closed); to employ scientific and systemic management methods; to convey an impression to customers that the enterprise has an environment of good quality and good brand names; to set up an information repository for capturing, keeping, distilling and sharing useful information within the company and the whole Chinese dining industry; to aim at becoming a standard model in the industry, like MacDonald?, which has achieved strong standardization; and to nurture the culture (Collison and Parcell, 2004), encouraging the employees to share their experiences for the benefits of all.

11. What are the difficulties when implement KM and the ways to solve them?

Information can be obtained from many sources but who can tell what is useful. The decision-maker must have good judgement. For example, he is able to distinguish seven useful points out of ten points and the rest is ad hoc. Another problem is that business can continue to run without KM, so the staff would ask what they have to participate in it.

We have our unique methods to implement KM in the company. For instance, we have employed some soft methods such as the VCD, which has pictures to attract them besides text; it has a lucky draw, asking questions from the information inside, three winners for each time, each gets $50 coupon. It receives good response. On the other hand, a hard tool would be from the management mechanism, like adding sugar on bitter food. It enables the staff to feel the importance of knowledge sharing. Another example is teaching them the four steps of how to set customers as first priority. These four steps to handle complaints are: give name card, apologize, offer other choices, and lastly solve the problem, e.g., if the customer is dissatisfied with this table, bring the customer to his preferred table.

In order to gather more useful opinions, we welcome employees to raise suggestions in the 'Bottom to Top' meetings. Those suggestions which are crucial to bring changes to the company would be recorded in minutes as a knowledge gathering tool. When the opinions are accepted and implemented, the Restaurant Daily News will be the knowledge broadcasting tool to announce such acts. The employees will be happy to know that their contributions are recognized.

12. Do you have exit interview for any employee leaving?

The purpose of our exit interview is mainly focusing on improving the relationship between both parties. Questions are more sentimental than grabbing the employee's knowledge developed in the company. It is because we think we should do it before he/she resigns. On and on we encourage knowledge sharing for the employees' own good. Besides, what the employee says during the exit interview may not be accurate.

13. Are you afraid of exposing your valuable information to others?

No, it is because our culture is different from other companies. We like sharing information to others, even to competitors. Although the middle level executives would like to keep the information to ourselves, the high level executives would like to share the information to others such as selling cooking books, and training programme called ‘Rice Seeding Cultivation’ with the Institute of Vocational Education.

We have invested HK$19 million in this programme but have not been hiring any graduates from this programme. You can see we want to share our gathered and useful information and knowledge to people, so as to promote and improve the image of Chinese dining industry. Therefore, we do not keep any secret and useful information from others, but vice versa. Of course, having this kind of idea — sharing culture and keeping it up is not easy to do. We just aim at making things done properly.

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[edit] Findings & Analysis of the Chinese Dining Corporation Case Study

Background of implementing KM

“No Chinese restaurant can survive over ten years”. Using the existing management methods and previous experiences alone cannot manage the numerous human affairs and the personnel matters arisen inside the dining corporation. The CEO of the corporation is desperately aiming at breaking this curse of short life of Chinese restaurants. He believes knowledge management is the only way to sustain the life of the dining corporation. Hence, he has implemented knowledge management into the corporation since 2003. The goal is to change the information into explicit knowledge valuable to the corporation. The critical successes of implementing knowledge management are infrastructure, infostructure and infoculture. (Pan & Scarbrough, 1999).

• Infrastructure

This corporation constructs its knowledge architecture by setting up organizational memories — meetings and food tasting sessions for employees and customers respectively to share their knowledge and opinions, and then filter the information into documents like restaurant daily news, posters, VCDs and manuals that help with the continuation of the business operation. Furthermore, the corporation sets up knowledge repositories — recipes in common, to keep chefs’ knowledge in the organization without any exit interview.

• Infostructure

Although the corporation does not adopt comprehensive KM technology tools at this moment, it still has the knowledge sharing processes such as printed manuals and code of practices from meetings, focus groups and food tasting sessions. Besides, ERPs is adopted for accessing and managing the logistic issues. The online ‘recipes in common’ lets the chefs access the recipes available in the corporation.

• Infoculture

This dining corporation has been creating a knowledge enterprising culture, which promotes knowledge sharing within and outside the dining corporation. For instance, the dining corporation launches in-house knowledge sharing meetings, food tasting sessions with employees and customers, as well as distributing filtered information through the restaurant daily news, posters, VCDs and manuals. Besides, it also promotes knowledge sharing outside the dining corporation such as selling cooking books to the public, and organizing a training programme called ‘Rice Seeding Cultivation’ with the Institute of Vocational Education.

Knowledge creation

Knowledge creation is the transformation of personal knowledge between individuals, e.g., dialogue, disclose, sharing and storytelling. Through the food tasting sessions, knowledge is created since the customer’s opinions are collected and used to analyze the customer’s style and needs. Besides, they also use storytelling approach to create knowledge. For example, the monthly published magazines with some successful cases of other restaurants are distributed to the crew.

Knowledge capture

Knowledge capture refers to the process of retrieving knowledge resides within people, artifacts or organizational entities. Besides storytelling, the approach of ‘learn from other’ is one of the main strategies used to capture knowledge. Through the briefing session held by the managers, the staff receive knowledge from the storytelling of other restaurants in the corporation. Also, from the posters inside the restaurants, they learn some real cases about the customer complaints or information of product analysis. The corporation also uses best practice capture method to train their employees. For example, role playing in table booking is conducted and employees are asked to act as customers to be served. This helps employees to learn about how to perform a good customer service.

Knowledge sharing

The clear objective from the managing director plays an important role to promote the sharing atmosphere. The sharing meetings provide chances for employees to express themselves freely. There are various communication channels, such as the daily e-news, posters and weekly 15-min VCD contain the company latest news, details of the restaurants’ specials and customers’ complaints. Branches especially spare free time for employees to read though all these materials to ensure they are reached by the knowledge. Personal tacit knowledge is expressed into the form of explicit knowledge and shared.

Knowledge application: Benefits of implementing KM strategies and tools

In the dining corporation, a common used KM strategy is peer assist. A peer assist refers to a meeting or workshop where people are invited from other team to share their experience, insights and knowledge. For example, the regular meetings of ‘Bottom to Top’ not only advocate the learning environment but also develops strong network among people. It also successfully introduces the self assessment framework to the staff who are able to feel that their contributions are valued, recognized and rewarded. In the crew intranet, lucky draw is performed in the information session regularly to attract employees to answer the questions. Moreover, cooking competitions are conducted to allow all the chefs free to join. The winner will gain reward and the winning dish will be added in the menu of his branch restaurant.

Knowledge application: Obstacles of implementing KM strategies and tools

As mentioned above by the interviewee in question 11, selection of useful information to facilitate decision making needed wise judgement. Soft skills such as the VCD and lucky draw, are necessary to encourage the employees to create, capture, share and apply knowledge instead of hard sell. The management team set good examples in promoting KM in the corporation. Resistance still exists in implementing KM to the whole organization because more resources have to be invested in terms of technology, time, people and money.

Suggestions for advancement

From the interview, KM is only mostly implemented among the chefs and front line employees. It is not yet applied to other departments of the corporation, except the logistics. Some suggestions are given below to foster the whole organization towards the maturity of KM culture. Expertise from knowledge management consultants has to be sought to further apply sound KM to a corporation of 5,000 employees.

• KM mechanisms

KM mechanisms, which are organizational or structural means used to promote KM, can be more utilized to strengthen KM in the dining corporation. Examples of these mechanisms are analogies and metaphors, brainstorming retreats, on-the-job training, face-to-face meeting, apprenticeships, employee rotation, learning by doing, learning by observation, etc. (Dalkir, 2005).

• KM technologies

KM technologies can be better and further applied to the dining corporation.

• • Knowledge creation: Data mining, and annotation
  • Knowledge capture: Concept map, metadata, and ontology
  • Knowledge sharing: Groupware, videoconferencing, and electronic discussion groups
  • Knowledge application: Expert systems, decision support systems, case-based reasoning, and intelligent agent.

(Dalkir, 2005).

• KM systems

KM systems are the integration of KM mechanisms and technologies to support the KM processes. They are knowledge creation systems, knowledge capture systems, knowledge sharing systems and knowledge application systems. (Dalkir, 2005). KM systems should be properly developed to integrate various KM mechanisms and technologies in the corporation to improve knowledge management.

• Data mining

Data mining can be further enhanced in the dining corporation. According to Dalkir (2005), data mining is another name for knowledge creation or discovery in databases. It is a process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information which can be converted into knowledge about historical patterns and future trends, such as target marketing and sales forecasting. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases. Statistical analysis software can be introduced in data mining.

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[edit] Conclusion

The Chinese dining corporation we are studying takes a leading role in implementing knowledge management in the Chinese dining industry in Hong Kong. Although it has only a history of three years in KM, it has obvious positive feedbacks from the employees and customers. The corporation is keen in knowledge sharing inside and outside their restaurants. Intranet, Daily News, Monthly Magazines, Annual Magazines and 'Bottom to Top' meetings are excellent KM tools although more KM mechanisms and technologies can be introduced in the long run. The Enterprise Resource Planning system is applied in logistics. The CEO has a vision for improving the image of the Chinese dining industry in Hong Kong. The corporation sponsors generously the training of management level and contributes great sums to the charities. The future is bright.

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[edit] Acknowledgments

We express our sincere thanks to the Assistant Manager, Corporate Communications and Administration of the Chinese dining corporation for accepting an interview with us in one of their famous restaurants. We give our thanks to our professor, Dr Sam Chu for his advice on writing the article and posting it on TWiki. We also have to thank our CITE technicians Murphy Wong and Simon Leung for helping us to solve the technical problems in using TWiki.

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