Question

Q1: You are given a responsibility as IT manager to implement knowledge management system for Ajman University (AU) students. How would you design a knowledge management system that will help student during registration process:

a)         What issues can a KM system be of help for them (AU students) in registration process? [2]

b)         What are the needed infra structure, mechanisms and technologies, and applications that could be used in managing the processes of that system? [2]

c)         Give a sequence of sub-processes that could be used in that system [2]

Answer 1

The knowledge management (KM) framework is very important for the organizations that intend to implement the KM system in their organization. The most generally recognized four organizational knowledge management strategies are culture, leadership, technology, and measurement.

Organizational knowledge is considered, nowadays, an asset that, although intangible, generates competitive advantage to the organization. To Grant (1996), competitive advantage is reached through continuous improvement and process innovation and of product, and knowledge is the organizational resource that allows the organization to develop activities of improvement and innovation.

The evolution itself of the concept of company theory shows a paradigm change regarding the importance of knowledge. Grant (1996) and Kogut & Zander (1992) argue that this evolution comes from a vision in which profitability is explained based on existing productive factors, to a vision based on knowledge, constituting the theory based on knowledge according to which the competitive advantage of an organization is subjected to knowledge.

Although many of its central points are not new to the academic world, the study of Knowledge Management (KM) is a recent concept, discussed more fully in the 1990s, treated as a process that promotes the flow of knowledge between individuals and groups within the organization, consisting of four main steps: acquisition, storage, distribution and use of knowledge (Durst & Edvardsson, 2012; Liao et al., 2011; Argote et al., 2003; Cormican & O’Sullivan, 2003).

The main purpose of this article is to discuss, from a theoretical background, the steps that make up the KM process in organizations, and in addition, examine the aspects that deal with each stage of this process and classify the main theme of references around these perspectives.

There are two main perspectives of study on the KM process. The first, referred to in this article as flow based on organizational development, focuses on increasing the knowledge storage and reuse of the knowledge repository (Gonzalez et al., 2014). In this perspective, KM refers to the development of methods, tools, techniques and organizational values that promote the flow of knowledge between individuals and the retrieval, processing, and use of this knowledge in improving and innovating activities (Yang, 2010). The second important area, called process-based flow, has as its main interest the study of the contribution of Information Technology (IT) as a mechanism to stimulate the creativity of individuals to develop new values to the business (Teece, 2007).

This way, organizations need to prepare themselves internally so that knowledge can circulate among individuals and, in addition, be used in actions that result in some kind of improvement. Around this context, emerges the question that guides this article: “How is the process of knowledge management in organizations, considering the perspectives aimed at organizational development and processes”? And yet: “What are the main aspects that relate to each phase of the KM process”?

The Employee Recruitment process, when broken down into Sub-Processes, consists of the following three activities:
1. Find new employee.
2. Complete paperwork.
3. Train new employee.

Let’s take a look at each of these activities represented by a Sub-Process.