An Investigation into Collaboration and Knowledge Management during Product Development in the Aerospace and Defence Industry

Organisations need to overcome a number of challenges, including improving knowledge management, to ensure competitiveness in today’s global business environment. Product development and engineering design decisions are typically based on the knowledge available within enterprises. An ability to quickly discover and capture this knowledge and communicate with colleagues is required to enable effective outputs. An in-depth industry investigation, conducted within a leading manufacturing organisation in the Aerospace and Defence Industry (ADI), confirmed that knowledge management is only average. Employees would welcome the introduction of new technology to improve knowledge sharing and feel competent to use Web 2.0 and social media technologies. Based on the investigation, an interactive groupware prototype employing collaborative Web 2.0 technologies has been proposed. The prototype will be introduced as a case study to engineers within the collaborating company during product development projects with benefits in productivity and collaborative practices being assessed

Role of Semantic web in the changing context of Enterprise Collaboration

In order to compete with the global giants, enterprises are concentrating on their core competencies and collaborating with organizations that compliment their skills and core activities. The current trend is to develop temporary alliances of independent enterprises, in which companies can come together to share skills, core competencies and resources. However, knowledge sharing and communication among multidiscipline companies is a complex and challenging problem. In a collaborative environment, the meaning of knowledge is drastically affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted; thus necessitating the treatment of structure as well as semantics of the data stored in enterprise repositories. Keeping the present market and technological scenario in mind, this research aims to propose tools and techniques that can enable companies to assimilate distributed information resources and achieve their business goals

A knowledge sharing framework to support rapid prototyping in collaborative automotive supply chain

In today’s global economy, competition is increasingly driven by a high rate of product renewal. In this context, with market demands for the development of high quality products at lower costs, highly customisable and with short life cycles, new technologies have been adopted by the automotive manufacturers in the move away from a local economy towards the global economy. The continuous evolution of this technology often requires the updating and integration of existing systems within new environments, in order to avoid technological obsolescence. To allow companies to compete in the global market, they (the companies) can no longer be seen acting as standalone entities and are having to reconsider their organisational and operational structure. This thesis presents a Knowledge Sharing Framework Design Roadmap to support rapid prototyping in the automotive and collaborative supply chain. IranKhodro Diesel (IKD) is the automotive company and CarGlass Company (Iran) is the supplier and sponsor of this research study. These two companies will be used to develop and test the Knowledge Sharing Framework Design Roadmap (KSFDR) methodology. An industrially based case study was conducted in IKD and CarGlass to identify key elements in the Knowledge Sharing Framework and provide the focus for this study. The study itself drew on empirical sources of data, including interviews with IKD personnel via an internal company survey. The absence of mechanisms to make information accessible in a multilingual environment and its dissemination to geographically dispersed NPD project team members was identified along with the lack of explicit information about the knowledge used and generated to support first stage rapid prototyping in the product development process with respect to reduction of costs and lead times. The Knowledge Sharing Framework Design Roadmap was tested between IKD and CarGlass. The business objectives in both IKD and CarGlass are the main drivers of knowledge system development. The main novel point from this research study is that this particular framework can be used to capture and disseminate information and knowledge. This was supported by positive feedback from a series of interviews with NPD practitioners. The Knowledge Sharing Framework Design Roadmap (KSFDR) methodology, however, can also be applied in other manufacturing and business environments. Further testing of the framework is strongly advised to minimise any minor flaws, which remain

Assimilation of Enterprise Mashup Systems − The Impact on Changes in Work Processes

A number of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms are beginning to proliferate. By leveraging typical Web 2.0 attributes, these platforms provide enterprises with a collaborative environment to develop capabilities by collectively generating, sharing and refining business knowledge (including information, functionality and business processes). Deductively deriving from the assimilation literature stream, this article conceptually discusses a quantitative research model to constitute a deeper understanding of Enterprise 2.0 technology assimilation on an individual level. Our research contributes to the existing assimilation and adoption theory by integrating the social exchange theory as well as emphasizing the impact of Enterprise Mashup system assimilation towards changes in work processes. Furthermore, we include several object-related constructs like user perceptions about technology-specific aspects and work characteristics as well as moderator effects which are emphasized to have an impact on usage behavior of work-productivity systems and the resulting work processes

A Memory Based Model for Knowledge Organization and Sharing in Knowledge Grid

Abstract. The knowledge grid is an intelligent interconnection environment that enables people to effectively manage knowledge resources. To enhance the acquirement and sharing of critical knowledge in knowledge grid, this paper proposes a new knowledge model --memory grid. Memory grid incorporates memory theory of psychology into knowledge grid to deliver plenty of context information. Based on the intelligent interconnection and increasing mechanism of memory, memory grid not only supports the organization of explicit knowledge, but also enables the acquirement of knowledge through memory transformation mode. Memory can be described by some entities along three dimensions (business, agent and knowledge), so memories can be semantically related with each other. Based on the above model, a web-based knowledge management system is developed for a Chinese enterprise to facilitate its knowledge management in the collaborative commerce environment

Born digital? Pedagogy and computer-assisted learning

Purpose - The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of the shift to a knowledge society, where information and communication technology (ICT) and the widening spread of internationally distributed information are creating a "skill revolution", as O'Hara suggests, there is a widening culture mismatch between what members of the knowledge society need to succeed and what current systems of higher education are geared to offer and to adequately prepare people and communities to thrive in the global knowledge society. Design/methodology/approach - For universities, as the scope and complexity of the actual business environment grows, the changing landscape of business education needs to come to terms with a developing global environment that has impacted on business, demographics and culture which demands a change in managerial skills to lead sustainable enterprise. Findings - Students need to master higher-order cognitive, affective, and social skills not central to mature industrial societies, but vital in a knowledge based economy that include "thriving on chaos" (making rapid decisions based on incomplete information to resolve novel situations); the ability to collaborate with a diverse team - face-to-face or across distance - to accomplish a task; creating, sharing, and mastering knowledge through filtering a sea of quasi-accurate information. Originality/value - These skills, according to Galerneau and Zibit, are "the skills for the twenty-first century", as they are "the skills that are necessary to succeed in an ever changing global society where communications is ubiquitous and instantaneous, and where software tools allow for a range of creative and collaborative options that yield new patterns and results that we are only beginning to see". © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Value enhanced collaborative working (VECW)

In recent years, the service industry has been made aware of the advantages of risk sharing and inter-firm collaborations. In the current turbulent business environment, a large proportion of Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME) firms rely on collaboration and partnering with other businesses. The value of such collaboration is highly enhanced by pooling resources to help exploit complementarities between the collaborating businesses and significantly increasing performance and management. Many studies have been conducted on the determinants of collaboration success or failures. However, authors have suggested further research to provide a framework to cover the factors responsible for enhanced value within collaborative working. In particular, the susceptibility of SMEs to successfully collaborate is significantly less than that of large organisations. Hence this was the focus of the current study. The research was focused on establishing the value enhancement of collaborative working within ServQ’s, the sponsoring organisation’s, collaborative environment. The main aim of this research project is ‘To investigate the potential of Value-Enhanced Collaborative Working (VECW) in an SME management advisory firm’. The aim was achieved with the help of the development of a VECW framework based on the issues faced by ServQ’s collaborative environment. To achieve this aim, an inductive research approach was adopted; this was facilitated by literature reviews and research methods such as semi-structured interviews, focus groups and scenario planning. This was to ensure that the project was an applied research based on the sound foundations of available theories on collaborative working. The research was initiated with a preliminary case study of the sponsoring organisation to better understand it. This period of initial investigation entailed learning more about the organisation’s management and working culture. Parallel to the initial case study, a literature review helped establish a definition of Value Enhanced Collaborative Working (VECW) as well as a conceptual VECW framework. Three key factors were identified in the conceptual VECW framework; these were considered as three separate but equally important branches that together will create a sustainable longterm collaborative working environment. The first factor identified was the People factor; the main output from this was the development of a Collaboration Charter. The Process factor developed a business process model for ServQ while the Tools factor was established through scenario planning. The output of this research was a development of a VECW framework. The research work progressed chronologically by first developing a conceptual VECW framework followed by the development of each of the People, Process and Tool factors in further detail with the help of mechanisms such as Collaboration Charter and business process models. Eventually the framework recommended how all these three factors together enhance the value of collaboration in ServQ. These outputs established the mechanisms to balance all the three factors within ServQ resulting in development of a sustainable collaboration environment. The research has contributed to knowledge by providing a VECW framework in an industrial setting that can be replicated in similar organisations with required changes. In addition, it complements the wide array of literature pertaining to Collaborative Working, SMEs, services organisations and Value