Collaborative knowledge management - A construction case study

Due to the new threats and challenges faced by the construction industry today, construction companies must seek new solutions in order to remain ahead of the competition. Knowledge has been identified to be a significant organisational resource, which if used effectively can provide competitive advantage. A lot of emphasis is being put on how to identify, capture and share knowledge in today's organisations. It has been argued over the years that due to the fragmented nature of the construction industry and ad-hoc nature of the construction projects, capture and reuse of valuable knowledge gathered during a construction project pose a challenge. As a result critical mistakes are repeated on projects and construction professionals have to kee

Students' knowledge sharing to improve learning in academic engineering courses

This paper presents an example of scaffolding during the development of an engineering course, in which students are supported by teachers and other students. This proposal covers the benefits of the use of shared knowledge repositories in which content was created by students. Teamwork is the transversal competence that is considered to be the central knowledge topic. The cooperation among students through teamwork methodology has generated more than 500 learning resources and a knowledge management system, BRACO, which has been created with these resources to manage information and conduct searches according to each student''s profile and needs. The generated knowledge spiral is composed of knowledge circles that increase during each iteration of the action-research implementation. The reflection phase of this research consists of the evaluation of the impact on learning for students in the experimental group after using the knowledge resources generated by students in relation with teamwork competence, in contrast with the control group that does not experience this intervention. With regard to the assessments, several surveys and a learning analytics system, this paper explains the underlying methodological foundations and the empirical study. In comparison to the control group, the experimental group obtained better results in relation to indicators of positive learning results, such as studentstudent interaction, teamwork development and final grades during the teamwork process

Development and Implementation of an E-Commerce Database Application to Support St. Paul A.M.E. Church

This project proposal is an endeavor to implement modern technology into long-standing processes at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. The modern technology is e-Commerce. The long-standing process is the method of paying tithes in a collection plate and ordering books, tapes etc. through a designated individual or committee. The goal of this project is to research realistic solutions and develop a practical plan to implement the project. Throughout this process, special care is taken to select resources that are moderately priced and straightforward to implement, this is to increase the probability of a successful implementation

A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOL COLLABORATIVE LEARNING: A CASE STUDY USING A WIKI.

Technology and knowledge seem to be at hand for everyone, but evidence shows that both still are eluding us. The University of Guadalajara (UDG) as well as other higher education institutions create knowledge from research on a daily basis. Nevertheless, in UDG there is not a system that promotes creation, preservation, and sharing of knowledge created experiences from research work among faculty members. Nonaka and Takeuchis Theory of Spiral Knowledge Creation had used as theorical foundation for the present study. This theory proposes that tacit knowledge is transformed into explicit knowledge creating new knowledge among members of an organization through for types of knowledge conversion: Externalization, socialization, Combination and Internalization. At the University of Guadalajara-South Coast campus, a virtual community was created in a Wiki website, which was used as a Knowledge Management System (KMS) tool for collaboration and experiences interchange among its members to promote knowledge creation when conducting research. The Wiki contained a set of 27 topics related to research issues previously posted. For three months its members were able to post questions, answers and/or replies on corresponding topics. Findings suggest that the Virtual of Community is comprised of one or two leaders and its followers. They also suggest for a knowledge item to be created in the Wiki what matters is not how interesting the subject matter but how actively members participate on the discussion. Evidence from the study suggests that informal knowledge is created and shared among the members of the Virtual Community, although it does not follow the strict sequence of knowledge conversion of Nonaka and Takeuchi\u27s (1995) creation spiral theory of knowledge. Furthermore, evidence also suggests that for successful KMS important characteristics such as shared culture, internet tool knowledge, and members\u27 identity disclosure are needed. Questions have arisen from this study with implications for future research, such as why did not knowledge creation necessarily follows the proposed sequence of knowledge conversions of Nonaka and Takeuchi\u27s Knowledge Creation Spiral theory proposes? What are its implications of knowledge creation does not follow the strict sequence of the four knowledge conversion in the theory proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi? What is the cost in human resources terms of creating a knowledge sharing culture in higher education institutions? These new questions open a research window on Knowledge Management Systems for future research work

Framework for collaborative knowledge management in organizations

Nowadays organizations have been pushed to speed up the rate of industrial transformation to high value products and services. The capability to agilely respond to new market demands became a strategic pillar for innovation, and knowledge management could support organizations to achieve that goal. However, current knowledge management approaches tend to be over complex or too academic, with interfaces difficult to manage, even more if cooperative handling is required. Nevertheless, in an ideal framework, both tacit and explicit knowledge management should be addressed to achieve knowledge handling with precise and semantically meaningful definitions. Moreover, with the increase of Internet usage, the amount of available information explodes. It leads to the observed progress in the creation of mechanisms to retrieve useful knowledge from the huge existent amount of information sources. However, a same knowledge representation of a thing could mean differently to different people and applications. Contributing towards this direction, this thesis proposes a framework capable of gathering the knowledge held by domain experts and domain sources through a knowledge management system and transform it into explicit ontologies. This enables to build tools with advanced reasoning capacities with the aim to support enterprises decision-making processes. The author also intends to address the problem of knowledge transference within an among organizations. This will be done through a module (part of the proposed framework) for domain’s lexicon establishment which purpose is to represent and unify the understanding of the domain’s used semantic

Community driven energy system transition : an action research case study of the energy system transition in Röstånga

The European Energy production system is in transition towards renewable energy sources (RES). Concrete targets have been set through the European Union “Energy Roadmap 2050”. The transition has started by national states but concrete action towards the targets has been mainly taken up at a local level. In this context, this research work aims at exploring how can a community trigger and drive an energy system transition locally. This research question has been applied to a case study of a Swedish community’s energy system transition journey. As researcher in the field, using Action Research as guiding methodology, I have involved the inhabitants of Röstånga in the participatory co-creation of knowledge and co-design of solutions for their energy system transition. During the research process the participants where asked to complement a sustainability assessment of renewable energy potentials in the area, co-create a vision for the future and reflect on how to achieve it both from consumption and a production side interventions. In this process my role as researcher has been mainly of coordinator and facilitator of the transition process. This research is still on going and therefore the energy transition has still not been achieved yet but the contribution of this work is to give and insight of how energy system transition can be triggered and how knowledge and decision can be co-created with a community

Knowledge management in new product development (NPD)

This thesis analyses features that, in New Product Development process (NPD), foster knowledge, and their contribution to the creation and application of knowledge with the aim of increasing both global performance and organizational effectiveness. Since knowledge is becoming more important to achieve competitive advantage, companies have already started to focus on their ability to generate new competencies and create new opportunities for producing new knowledge. One of the issues compelling knowledge management understands what aspects of the organization\u27s work system and organizational design affect its ability to acquire, create and apply knowledge. In fact, the way that workers are organized and managed determine the success of NPD organizations. In this work, topics such as Knowledge Management and New Product Development are addressed. Furthermore, the study focuses on several models and frameworks of knowledge management, extracted from the existing literature, provides analyses of such models, and, based on them, proposes an additional framework

Collaboration requirements for project management information systems and its implications to project knowledge management

More and more organizations are changing their way of managing projects, switching from a traditional and controlled to a more flexible bottom-up paradigm, where collaboration and knowledge sharing between internal and external project members are critical factors. In addition, the role of technology is increasing in the context of project management due to greater challenges in today’s technology-enabled work environment, where technology tools are habitually used for collaboration, communication, and deployment of project management practices The purpose of this thesis is to identify and analyze current requirements of project management in project-based organizations regarding collaboration and knowledge management, as well as the impact of these requirements in use by practitioners on improving the management of projects. The research design and methodology were supported by main research questions. In order to collect the evidence to answer the questions a comparative case study approach was selected, which included several project-based organizations in Finland belonging mainly to the IT industry. In addition, the evolution and roadmap of a project management information system was presented and analyzed. The findings reveal the influence of collaboration and knowledge management to be incorporated in the management of projects through the use of socio-collaborative tools. An integrative project management framework combining these tools is presented.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format