Wonders Knowledge Portal

In 2002, Wonders Information Co., Ltd., a software company headquartered in Shanghai, China, started building a knowledge management system. The system, called Wonders Knowledge Portal (WKP), appeared to be well intended, well planned, and well designed. Its functionalities seemed useful and should have appealed to employees. Nevertheless, the usage of the system by the employees had been limited, and the company risked wasting its investment in the KMS

Building Organizational Knowledge Quality: Investigating the Role of Social Media and Social Capital

To the extent that knowledge is the most strategically important resource for sustainable competitive advantage, organizations must consciously and systematically manage their knowledge asset. In this paper, we explore how social media and social capital at organizational level help organizations benefit from their knowledge management initiatives through improving organizational knowledge quality. A research model was developed and survey data were used to test the model. The preliminary results show that social media helps to provide the technical environment conducive to knowledge exchange and social capital enables the actual knowledge sharing between businesses. Both facilitate an organizational emphasis on knowledge management, which leads to organizational knowledge of higher quality

Fostering Comparability in Research Dissemination: A Research Portal-based Approach

In this paper, we address the problem of lacking consistency andcomparability in the dissemination of research information. Weseek to solve this problem using research portals, which arecommunity-based research information systems on the Internet.The idea of our solution is to customize research portals to betterfit to individual application scenarios. To this end, we propose aconceptual specification of a generic portal structure allowing forsemantic standardization. For a given application scenario, thisbasis has to be customized regarding portal structure andsemantics of textual descriptions. We demonstrate such acustomization for an exemplary research portal addressing designscience research. Furthermore, we describe an exemplary researchprocess using the customized portal definition. We conclude thatour approach has the potential to increase the consistency andcomparability of research dissemination with research portals.This goal is achieved with a) an individually customizable portalstructure, which is able to reflect the nature of a specificapplication scenario better than generic structures and b) asemantic standardization of textual descriptions, which enforcesthem to be precise, compact, and apply the vocabulary of thedomain