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

The Building of a Knowledge Portal for Supply Chain Co-Evolving

Today, companies are demanding more than just access to data. They want processed and refined information that will help them to reach more effective tactical decisions. With the global deployment of computers, inter-connecting network, mobile devices, and information architecture, participants can work collaboratively by sharing networked resources, and exchanging knowledge in order to improve corporate performance. The collaboration/cooperation feature is especially important in today’s supply chain practices. Under this paradigm shift, information-oriented productivity depends on the sharing of knowledge and skills among workers. Therefore, supply chain strategies can be driven by the collective intelligence and competence to meet today’s business challenges that enable organizational learning. Management of organizational knowledge for creating business values and generating competitive advantages is critical for organizational development. In other words, it is related to the efficient integration of enterprise system, e-business application framework, and knowledge portal in order to achieve the goal of a learning organization and a supply chain. co-evolving This paper focuses on the design of an enterprise knowledge portal in a supply chain scheme for today’s business. The ultimate goal is to develop a technological framework for a knowledge network that brings people, information, technologies, business processes, and organizational strategies together to better utilize knowledge in e-business. The benefits of knowledge portal in today’s e-supply chain collaboration will not only expand the learning capabilities of workers. It will also help supply chain trading partners to develop a more concrete vision and strategy for enhancing their market values

Description and Experience of the Clinical Testbeds

This deliverable describes the up-to-date technical environment at three clinical testbed demonstrator sites of the 6WINIT Project, including the adapted clinical applications, project components and network transition technologies in use at these sites after 18 months of the Project. It also provides an interim description of early experiences with deployment and usage of these applications, components and technologies, and their clinical service impact

A Metrics Approach for Collaborative Systems

This article presents different types of collaborative systems, their structure and classification. This paper defines the concept of virtual campus as a collaborative system. It builds architecture for virtual campus oriented on collaborative training processes. It analyses the quality characteristics of collaborative systems and propose techniques for metrics construction and validation in order to evaluate them. The article analyzes different ways to increase the efficiency and the performance level in collaborative banking systems.collaborative system, collaborative learning, virtual campus, banking, metric

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

EU-China collaboration in design: research in Web-enabled collaborative design supported by the Asia-Link and Asia IT&C projects

The research of Web-enabled collaboration in total design supported by the European Union's Asia Link project [1] and Asia IT&C project is reported in this paper. The two projects both aim at enhancing research collaboration between the EU and China. The Virtual Research Institute (VRI) is described first, which is the platform for the collaboration for the Asia Link project and is established by utilizing the advanced Web techniques; and then, the framework for the collaboration and the Web techniques involved in the research are presented which represent the major research of the Asia IT&C project. The effective collaboration between the project partners and the impacts of the project outcome on the partnership are also discussed

Extended architecture of knowledge management system with Web 2.0 technologies

Knowledge management systems (KMS) become increasingly important in periods of crises and economic slowdown, as many organizations are forced to lay off people, to reduce research and ICT budgets, to restructure departments and to optimize their costs. Subsequently, organizational knowledge assets, and mainly the existing tacit knowledge are threatened. This raises the importance of technologies that could assist organizational efforts to capture the existing knowledge and to mobilize it in order to overcome the crisis. Knowledge management systems should respond to these expectations and enable organizations dynamically to acquire and profit from all sources of knowledge. The present paper discusses the opportunities provided by extended KMS architecture combining elements of Web 2.0 technologies. It considers how Web 2.0 technologies can increase organizational effectiveness, efficiency and usability for company KM. The main services provided by KMS are identified and ranked. Finally, the paper makes an overview of the issue how KMS can enable companies to transform risks of the crises to new opportunities for further development

The Framework of Enterprise Information Processing Network for Knowledge Discovery and Sharing

The challenges of the global marketplace are increasingly forcing today\u27s process-centered organizations to utilize the knowledge, capabilities, and resources to be found within their information processing networks. The issue of whether or not companies should exploit their intangible knowledge assets is far more critical than their ability to invest and manage their existing physical assets. Under this paradigm shift, information-oriented productivity depends on the sharing of knowledge and skills among workers, so that enterprise strategies can be driven by the collective intelligence and competence of the group to face today’s business challenges and enable organizational learning. Management of organizational knowledge to create business values and competitive advantages is critical towards the organizational development. This paper focuses on the transformation of an enterprise information-processing network into a knowledge network for supply chain co-evolution. The ultimate goal is to develop a technological framework for a knowledge network that brings people, information, technologies, business processes, and organizational strategies together to better utilize knowledge in e-business. A knowledge network is introduced to enhance collaboration, encourage innovation, boost productivity, achieve adaptivity, and increase the information system efficiency. In tomorrow’s enterprises, knowledge will be the key to release creative energies that will inspire enormous innovations and great discoveries

Intranet of the future: functional study, comparison of products and practical implementation

Future intranet: functional study, comparison of products and practical implementation 1. Introduction The project has fulfilled three goals: 1) To perform a study of the functionalities which have to be covered in a modern intranet (web 2.0, unified communication, collaboration, etc) 2) To perform a comparison of tools of the market which can be used to implement intranets (commercial and open source products) 3) To test three of these tools (Oracle WebCenter, Liferay Portal and Microsoft SharePoint) and develop a prototype with Oracle WebCenter. In addition, it includes a research about the evolution of the Intranets among the time, as well as a work to discover the current state of this kind of platforms over the entire world. In this introductory research it is also convenient to include other topics which are not strictly technical involving the use of this Intranet. To be more concrete, there is an analysis of the importance of the human role and management of the Intranet, the process of deploying a new Intranet in an organization and methods to evaluate the performance of this new system.   2. Functional study The approach taken to fulfil this goal is to develop a theoretical model describing the relationship between the Intranet and its users, and a complete set of functionalities which could be covered in the Intranet of the future. These functionalities are categorized in groups. The project describes these groups and the functionalities included on them. 3. Comparison of products The project will describe and compare several technologies which can be used to develop an Intranet that we have previously modelled. The purpose here is to discover the strong points and weaknesses of each technology if it was used to develop the Intranet we desire. After having done such a review, the project focuses on three technologies and performs an extensive evaluation of them. Finally, an extensive comparison between these three technologies is done, highlighting where they offer better solutions and performance compared to the other possibilities. 4. Practical implementation The project focuses on three technologies: Oracle WebCenter, Liferay Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. Then, a prototype which covers a set of functionalities of the modelled Intranet has been built with Oracle WebCenter