J.K. Suresh

Knowledge criteria for organization design

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual and practical basis for developing new organization structures by augmenting the old through virtual knowledge based structures. While organization structure has a major impact on knowledge exchange, its design nevertheless continues to be governed by criteria that are often in conflict with the needs of knowledge management. In an era where knowledge is increasingly acknowledged to be a central factor of production in the modern enterprise, the resulting deficiencies in the design often lead to sub‐optimal capability for organizational performance.Design/methodology/approach – Borrowing from Druckers elucidation of the characteristics and determinants of a successful organization in the new economy, the consequences of the transition from an economy of goods to that of knowledge are analyzed briefly in the background of KM. The study highlights an enduring deficiency in present day organizations, wherein structure is relatively uninfluenced ...

Enterprise search through automatic synthesis of tag clouds

In a large organization, finding the right expert who can provide knowledge needed in a particular work context is critical to achieving higher levels of quality and productivity especially in the present scenario of a rapidly evolving technology and business environment where knowledge plays a vital role in value creation. Previous approaches to the problem of reliably finding experts in an area of knowledge focus on mapping employees to their knowledge based primarily on voluntary data inputs by users and minimally supplemented by data derived from enterprise systems. However, the generation of employee profiles through inputs is usually not based on a controlled vocabulary and therefore results in poor precision and recall in expertise search in addition to posing difficulties in integration with content search. In this paper, a novel approach that addresses some of these limitations is described wherein tag clouds for members are automatically generated from enterprise data. The paper also outlines the use of such tag clouds in an integrated search system that aims to provide an optimal set of experts as well as relevant content corresponding to a knowledge need.