Susu Nousala

One Company – Two: Outcomes Knowledge Integration vs. Corporate Disintegration in the Absence of Knowledge Management

Purpose – To learn to avoid pitfalls there is need to accept and understand failures. This anonymous case study aims to report a major organisational failure due to the absence of effective knowledge management, where both the reasons for, and organisational consequences of, the failure are fairlyclear.Design/Methodology/Approach – Within a theoretical framework of organisational autopoiesis, the case study compares knowledge management styles from two eras in the history of one engineering project management company: as it grew from an acquired site with a single project to a multi-divisional leader in its regional market, and then as it failed in its original line of business to the point where it divested most of its assets.Findings – In the first era, the executive and line managers were permissive, allowing project teams to work out local solutions for business problems as they arose producing successful and profitable solutions. The decline began and accelerated when management strengthened hierarchical command and control that stifled knowledge sharing and solution development at the work face and exceeded line managers’ limits of rationality.Research limitations/implications – This study has the limitations of any historical study of a single case, exacerbated by a need to maintain the anonymity of the surviving company.Originality/value – Few studies so clearly highlight the critical importance of personal knowledge and its sharing in knowledge intensive organisations for maintaining successful operations. Success may have many parents, but in this case the internal comparisons identify specific factors that caused a successful organisation to disintegrate.

Social Networking Tools for Knowledge-Based Action Groups

Urban bureaucrats are often overburdened with limited time and little genuine knowledge relating to decisions they must make within their briefs that impact community members. Consequently, bureaucrats often work at what Herbert Simon called the bounds of their rationality. Community groups concerned with particular issues may emerge that have issue-related local knowledge; and probably also the time and effort to share and assemble such knowledge into practical and informative group proposals. This chapter considers knowledge-based roles and dynamics of community groups, looks at revolutionary socio-technical capabilities able to support and extend group aims effectiveness, and presents a template based on social computing technologies to demonstrate how the technology can be deployed. Properly used, the tools can connect bureaucrats with the power to decide and act with the local knowledge and motivation to make rational decisions about allocation of resources, etc., to deal with various kinds of situations. The template developed for this project demonstrates the capabilities of the cloud computing tools.

Complex collaboration, knowledge sharing and interoperability

Inter-organizational collaboration is often viewed through the lens of computer-mediated projects, leading to an understanding of the needed infrastructure and environment as requiring primarily software interoperability. This has been extended in recent efforts by the European Commission and others to include enterprise interoperability and aspects of knowledge interoperability. Here it is argued that further extensions are needed, in particular, more robust understandings of knowledge in a collaborative context and of enterprise interoperability, and identification and creation of collaborative structures, especially for more complex collaborative projects and ventures. The nature of robust inter-organizational collaborative behaviour relies upon several layers of hard software development integrated with the soft engineering knowledge processes. Long-lived interoperability activities expose the need for systemic, collaborative awareness to achieve continual, emergent survival. The successful exchange between platforms and tools with collaborative structures and policies is an activity that can only succeed with approaches that do not attempt to reduce the working mechanisms that separate working parts of a whole.

Design Process as Communication Agency for Value Co-Creation in Open Social Innovation Project:

Within the context of social innovation, this paper, builds on the established principle of ‘positive deviance’. The purpose of this approach was to identify design processes and tools that improved the communication within the QuYang Community, one case among many creative communities. In this practical context, the design process was conducted as the communication agency for decoding and recoding socio-space components as well as stimulating, externalizing, integrating and co-creating value in the creative elderly community. Open social innovation paradigm can be considered as one way to mitigate some of the risk associated with social innovation. Emerging “creative community [1] ” cases were seen as the grounded dynamic laboratories for clarifying the emerging open social innovation paradigm.