Puzzle

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2. The fundamental to the success of the General Knowledge Trading model.

Ans:Navigation.

The fundamental to success in this model is members are provided with advanced search and navigationcapabilities ennabling them to locate the knowledge they need in shot time among the plethora of knowledge assets available.

3. Elements that should be taken into consideration for efficiently conducting knowledge networks.

Ans:Trust.

The elements that should be taken into consideration for efficiently condunting networks is 1) The development and delivery of true value-added services that are offered in both digital and physical delivery systems through the evolution of trusted trading communities. We should not expect that selling offerings in the digital domain include only explicit knowledge. With careful planning the selling of tacit knowledge could be accommodated, in terms of offering expert advice through physical (e.g. selling consulting time) or virtual (e.g. through on-line collaboration) channels.

Trust is a critical component to true partnering to create long-term, knowledge-intensive solutions to industry pain points and to create new forms of value as the critical dependency of highly customer-specific knowledge product and services increases, the need for trust and established relationships increases proportionally. It is imperative that a trust relationship be forged either through the knowledge network or that established trust relationships be given a safe pathway to expand through "knowledge hubs".

Factors such as quality, expertise proven in previous cases, consistency or timely delivery weigh heavily in the decision for a knowledge purchase. Negotiated commerce with multi parameter bidding allows this type of purchases. Negotiated pricing models may include auctions, requests for quotation and exchange/matching. Furthermore, a direct benefit of negotiated commerce is the simplification of the process to screen and select buyers.

4. Competitive advantage of knowledge networking.

Ans:Flexibility.

The competitive advantage of knowledge networking is:

- the basis of financial saving due to transfer of best practices

It was because base on the nice stories provided managers who participated identified the number of products/process taht have been tranferred from one unit to another and calculated the development costs saved.

For example, transferring from Russia to the UK a solution to optimize transport cost showed a saving of €1 million.

- direct increase in the product/market development as well as new product and market

The knowledge network encourage to transfer of succesful products or processes and help develop new markets. The implementation of new ideas in some cases increased sales dramatically.

For example, when GoodFood Germany replicated from the UK division a method to stimulate the sales of beverages in gas station via the installation of lance chillers, the turnover for drinks in German gas stations immediately increased by approximately 35%.

Tranferring the communication campaign from the french to the Nordic division created an entirely new market for what in France was considered to be "breakfast" buscuit.

The impact of the Knowledge Networking also on increased market share was calculated on the basis of the comparision of that year's increase with the average increase over the past ten years.

- networking benefit extent far and wide

Strategic flexibility can be evaluated on the basis of the time-to-market which the number of the month seved by the company in the process of lauching new products. By adopting solution developed in other business units, time-to-market has been reduce.

For example, Biscuit Benelux decreased time-to-market by applying a "supply chain solution" developed at GoodFood Asia. The buscuit entity found teh tool developed in Asia particularly efficient because it helped to save more than three months time-to-market.

The strategic flexibility also be measured by taking into consideration the time necessary to respond to competitive threat which the firm's capacity to react quickly to all sorts of competitive threats.

For example, when GoodFood's main competitor launched a revolutionary 0% fat dessert product in France, GoodFood French division had fewer than 3 months to respond without losing the first mover advantage. GoodFood Brazil division, which already had the technology to produce a diet version of teh dessert product, transferred it to their French colleagues and provided with an opportunity to react in less than 2 monts. In this cases, the transfer is not only the technology but also the idea for an advertising slogan of "pleasure without guilt".

- motivation and corparate culture

An annual "managers" survey developed by the GoodFood's human resources department, 97% of the participants considered the networking project relevant and 68% decleared that the project result the positive change in their work context.

Through the project the people began to communicate more freely and cooperate with colleafues from distant geographical locations.

The managers clearly began to appreciate exchanges with each others and participate in diverse social events organized to enhance motivation and social cohesion across the company(increase from 46% to 74% between 2004-2005).

At the same time, in 2004, only 72% of first line managers claimed to know what their Business Unit's strategic orientation, in 2005 increasing to 93% showing the incraese interest in coherence between their specific tasks and objectives as well as the business unit's overall strategy and the culture become a more freely communicate and cooperate with colleagues from distant geographical locations.

5. The characteristic of knowledge networkers in conducting knowledge network.
Ans:Leadership.

The characteristic of knowledge networkers includes experiences gain as well as willingness to share the knowledge in the dimension of the "push" process in the Knowledge Marketplace. However, in the "pull" process the networkers must be identified their prolem and ask other to help such as teh Message in a bottle project. Leadership also is a important characteristic as the manager have to lead other participants to participate in the knowledge network. The way to comminicate also important as the need to have interaction with the participants in the knowledge netwrok.

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1. One of the critical characteristic of knowledge networks.

Ans: Commitment.

There are five critical characteristics of knowledge networks:

1)knowledge networks are responsible for creating, sharing, protecting and cultivating

common knowledge assets;

2)knowledge networks are working networks and they are purpose-driven;

3)knowledge networks require organisational commitment beyond the commitment of their

participating members;

4)knowledge networks are built on expertise, not just interest – or common practice – alone;

5)knowledge networks aim at the development and strengthening of the learning capacity.

6. The elements in promoting the knowledge networks.

Ans:Motivation.
As state in the paper,"The more troublesome issues almost exclusively regardthe lack of time and the absence of good incentivesand rewards for the sharing and reuse of knowledge,which all negatively impact the motivationfor searching and sharing knowledge". Hence, in promoting the knowledge networks the supervisors of the users must be convinced that it is at all rational for their organizational members to dedicate time to knowledge sharing. However, in order to get members to share knowledge to a larger extent it will be necessary to persuade managers that their employees should dedicate time to something that their own organization will not necessarily benefit from. Beside, to allocate time for organization members share the knowledge no matter the knowledge is useful in the organization, award also can provided as a motivation to promote the knowledge networks.

The below is alternative explanation for question 6.
"The start of most KN initiatives, it seems as though organizational members need to be pushedor strongly attracted to use the initiative. A factor contributing to this is certainly that users of KN initiatives experience a lack of time that they candedicate to these activities. This underlines theimportance of incentives and that the personalreward systems must support the sharing ofknowledge, as stressed by Martensson (2000). Furthermore, she argues that it is necessary to createtime and opportunities for people to learn andto have a system for evaluating KM attempts inorder to promote knowledge sharing."

7. The role of management.
Ans:Facilitator.
The role of management is mainly to keep the system updated and in order, by assuring information quality and facilitating knowledge retrieval.

In ESAP, management has more of a coaching role, trying to convince the members that participation in the knowledge network is more important than other more urgent tasks.

KN initiatives that an active and direct leadershipwas sometimes needed at the outset, overtime becoming more of a facilitating and supportingkind. The implication of this is that there isneed for situational adaptation regarding thedesign and management of KN initiatives, basicallydepending on the desired outcome, the key knowledgeprocesses involved and the time frame of theactivities. This underlines the critical role of managementin finding a suitable balance betweenautonomy and control.

8. An important aspect of the composition of communities.
Ans:Time.
Important aspects of the composition of communities:
- Time, it was because the lack of time for organization to share knowledge.

- IT solutions constitutean important component of several directories,but an equally important part is to find new ways of organizing human interaction, which increasethe possibilities for companies to both create newknowledge and leverage existing knowledgethrough sharing and combination. It is noted that even though the creation of large global repositoriesof knowledge may be appealing, it is difficultto find functional solutions. When the number of users increases, problems related to quality, actualityand structure of the database will show up.

- Suitable balance between autonomy and control. As theobjectives of communities may be poorly alignedwith the goals and strategies of the firm, however,a certain managerial influence may be necessary toachieve positive effects at the firm level. This indicatesa difficult task, as too much control may putlimits to the knowledge dynamics in the communities.Brown and Duguid (2000) refer to this as aneed to balance the organizational tension betweenprocess, i.e. the formal organization of tasks, andpractice, the way things are really performed. Ifcommunities are forced to follow formal processes,some of their value as nodes for knowledge creationand transfer is lost. To deliberately designthe interface between the community and the formalorganization in order to get wanted outputfrom the communities therefore appears to be difficult.

References:
1) Knowledge Networking in Extended Enterprises written byDimitris Apostolou, Kostas Kafentzis, Gregory Mentzas, Wolfgang Maas.
2) Networking inside the organization:a case study on knowledge sharing written by Nicolas Rolland and Renata Kaminska-Labbe.
3) Managing the Knowledge Landscapeof an MNC: Knowledge Networking at Ericsson written byMats G. Magnusson.

Managing the Knowledge Landscape of an MNC: Knowledge Networking at Ericsson, by Mats G. Magnusson.

Managing the Knowledge Landscape of an MNC: Knowledge Networking at Ericsson, by Mats G. Magnusson.

There are 7 different strategy knowledge networking initiatives in Ericsson

1. Knowledge networking for network design/ network process improvement (KStool):
- Provides support and a contact network through three basic services included in the
program: human networking, library service, and net-based group activity.
- Let users can access experience reports and notes from other users, make more easily
finding solutions to problems they encounter.
- Organized in three communities: radio access network, core network and transmission.
Interaction mainly takes place virtually, but sometimes the different user communities are
brought together to strengthen the relationships between the users.
- The users are network planners and service technicians at Ericsson worldwide.

2. Ericsson System Architecture Program (ESAP)
- Brings some of Ericsson’s most skilled system architects together on regular basis and lets
them share knowledge with each other in order to facilitate inter-project learning, avoid
redundant development work, and induce innovation.
- The programme consists of four parts: technical training and development of interpersonal
skills, networking, mentoring and job rotation.
- The technical training sessions usually take place at well-known universities and include
presentations by leading authorities in relevant scientific and technical fields.
- Each participant in ESAP is supposed to stay with the programme for 5 years. Almost all
interaction takes place face-to-face.
- The users are system architects at Ericsson worldwide

3. Competence Groups
- A total of 14 Competence Groups, each with one participant from every flow control centre,
have been formed around the different functions involved in the order fulfilment process.
- Facilitated the implementation of a global change programme.
- To assure each flow control centre had the capability to implement suggested
improvements and additionally to create commonality between flow control centres
around the world by sharing process knowledge.
- Kept after the change programme and are today a part of the regular business activities.
- The users are Personnel at Ericsson Flow Control centres.

4. ePartnership (this is not the official name, but is used for confidentiality reasons)
- A joint e-business platform for Ericsson and one of its main customers.
- The shared portal include the interaction between marketing and sales, planning and
engineering, supply and project management, implementation, operations and
maintenance, and management.
- The most used features in ePartnership are product manuals, joint collaboration spaces
and online ordering. By using a joint collaboration space, inter-company teams working
with tasks that demand intense interaction and shared documentation can create an arena
to which only project members have access.
- The users are sales and purchasing personnel, and designers within Ericsson and one key
customer.

5. Experience Engine
- A call-centre function to which all employees at Ericsson Software Technology can turn
with any kind of job-related questions.
- The requests are received by one of five experienced knowledge brokers, whose task is to
answer the question directly, when possible, or make sure that the person with the inquiry
gets in contact with someone in the brokers’ personal contact network who can provide an
answer.
- The knowledge brokers help people to tap into existing networks of specialists and
communities in order to get a very quick answer to their questions.
- The users are all employee categories at Ericsson Software Technology.

6. Knowledge management system at Intracom (KMS)
- IT tool for software designers and system architects working at the engineering
department at Intracom.
- System is based on Autonomy’s ‘Portal-in-a-box’, a ready-to-use package for the
Autonomy search engine.
- Aims to provide easy access to technical knowledge by
1) a search function using active agents that alert the user when new documents within a
chosen area are added to chosen sources;
2) channels consisting of dynamic knowledge maps that categorize certain kinds of
documents automatically; and
3) ‘Autonomy active knowledge’, a function which dynamically monitors the typing of texts
and tries to find relevant, matching documents in the index.
- The users are software designers and system architects at Ericsson Intracom.

7. XPERTiSE
- Structured approach to the design and implementation of a number of communities of
practice.
- The different communities are found within both technology and business domains and
have very different foci for example configuration management, Mobile Internet
applications, Java Tool Enterprise Edition, and knowledge management.
- The users are managers, designers, researchers, specialists and business developers at
Ericsson Research Canada


From the above we can see that the knowledge networking initiatives are all very different when it comes to design, user groups, interaction mode and management.

The number of topic- or profession- based knowledge nuclei, consisting of communities of knowing in its stricter sense, or by other groups of people with an explicit knowledge focus and the dynamic knowledge directories are the two important components in the knowledge initiatives.

Basically, knowledge sharing culture at Ericsson is to be very positive. But, the more troublesome issues almost exclusively regard the lack of time and the absence of good incentives and rewards for the sharing and reuse of knowledge, which all negatively impact the motivation for searching and sharing knowledge. The significant challenges to handle for Ericsson are in terms of design of user groups in terms of extension and focus, the role of management in KN initiatives and the promotion of knowledge sharing behavior.

Networking inside the organisation: a case study on knowledge sharing by Nicolas Rolland and Renata Kaminska-Labbe

Networking inside the organisation: a case study on knowledge sharing by Nicolas Rolland and Renata Kaminska-Labbe

The following is my understanding of “Networking inside the organisation: a case study on knowledge sharing” by Nicolas Rolland and Renata Kaminska-Labbe.
The paper is study on a Multinational corporations (MNCs) namely GoodFood. GoodFood is a French multinational food and manufacturing and selling dairy products, baby food and bottled water.

Speed and agility is the mainly factors in the new “capabilities-based competition”. By means of sharing knowledge across geographically dispread organizational units has become more vital to shorten the time-to-market, improve their products’ quality, following and satisfy evolving customer needs.

In 2002, the executive vice president of human resources initiated the Networking Attitude Project to facilitate and speed up knowledge-sharing across business units in distant geographical location based on two tools namelyKnowledge marketplace and Messages in the bottle sessions.

Knowledge marketplace – gathering that involve both managers and non-management employees in exercises to share knowledge on methods to resolve specific business problems. It is enhance management and non- management employees’ communications.

Message in a bottle – small meeting that for participants asked to talk about their problems in front of selected peers. Provide a brief description on a bottle shaped post-it which stick on a board, the listeners will proposes solutions using lifebelt shaped post-it that affix to corresponding problem on the board.

An effective communications routines and motivation to exchange good practices are the essential element in GoodFood knowledge sharing culture. Thus, GoodFood is now focusing on the specific operational problems and connecting people.
The basis thoughts of Knowledge marketplace and Message in a bottle is to avoid reinventing the wheel every time a manager encountered a difficulty, to motivate managers to share their innovate ideas and to ask their colleagues for help, to connect first-line managers and create a true intra-firm network.

The project had a positive impact on the firm’s performance and beneficial GoodFood ‘s economic, product/market development, enhanced flexibility as well as motivation and corporate culture performances.

Overall, the Network Attitude Project is help GoodFood in the process of knowledge creation, transfer and integration, developing a truly learning organization, capable of improving GoodFood performance and sustaining GoodFood ‘s competitive advantage.

Knowledge Networking in Extended Enterprises by Dimitris Apostolou, Kostas Kafentzis, Gregory Mentzas, Wolfgang Maas.

Knowledge Networking in Extended Enterprises by Dimitris Apostolou, Kostas Kafentzis, Gregory Mentzas, Wolfgang Maas.

My understanding in this paper is as below:

This is a paper to evaluate the increase in inter-organisational knowledge sharing capabilities brought about by the Internet-driven "new-economy" technologies and the resulting managerial implications and presents typology of knowledge sharing networks; discuss the benefits as well as the challenges associated with inter-organisational knowledge sharing.
The knowledge networking in the organisation is complex networks because their connection is not only stick in supply chain or financial connection only. The organisation networking is intimate sharing both information and knowledge with both customers and partners.

Existing Theories & Work
All the way through many knowledge management initiatives, the challenge of developing and supporting network based communities. On the other hand, networking in which companies may improve their internal collaboration and work more closely with their partners and customers.
In the network, co-ordinated and integrated is needed in the activities, but the integration relies on knowledge and relationships and a clear common sense of purpose.
Thus, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) state the ideas about “work as a network of conversations” and the “hypertext organization”. There is various organisation form of network. For example, their sharing culture is within external or internal.
Knowledge networks are relationships among individuals, teams and organisations working on a common concern and embed dynamism for collective and systematic knowledge asset creation and sharing.
There are five Knowledge networks critical characteristics which is differentiating them from other similar organisational structures and generally from communities of practice by Wenger (1999) and Wenger and Snyder (2000).

The following is the characteristics:
1. Knowledge networks are responsible for creating, sharing, protecting and cultivating common knowledge assets;
2. Knowledge networks are working networks and they are purpose-driven;
3. Knowledge networks require organisational commitment beyond the commitment of their participating members;
4. Knowledge networks are built on expertise, not just interest ¨C or common practice ¨C alone; and
5. Knowledge networks aim at the development and strengthening of the learning capacity of all members by Seufert et al (1999).

Research Approach
The paper classifies knowledge networks consist of a qualitative mapping of five types of knowledge networks along two dimensions.
Openness of the community model is the first dimension, which is whether the approach is essentially a variant of existing knowledge based intranets or whether it has more open market character.
The second dimension namely extent of commercialisation. This dimension is concern about how much the “productizing” of knowledge within the electronic medium has succeeded.

The following is the type of knowledge networking and the elaboration:

Open Knowledge Source
· Open communities.
· Free resources of knowledge, communities and networks as well as arise and gathered around topics of common interest from individuals and experts.
· The participation in these communities is free of charge for the members.
· Information objects shared in this model can be readily available or be created by its member by answering to a knowledge need.

Intra-Organizational Knowledge Networks
· Within organizations
· The need for continuous access to knowledge has spurred the development of various knowledge initiatives.
· People search for knowledge because they expect it to help them succeed in their work.

Membership-based Knowledge Networks
· Closed communities with a varying degree of commercialization.

Knowledge Supply
· Closed knowledge communities and provide the means for relationship and trust building as well as for the frictionless transfer of expert knowledge whose codification level is relatively low.
· Expert knowledge provided in the form of professional services.
· Ad hoc specialized knowledge provision or constant knowledge flow by experts into organizations calls for close interaction and deep collaboration between the trading parties.
· The number of participants and the potential relations between them less than the open market business model but closer mutual relations are much easier achieved.

Learning Networks
· Great amount of knowledge and expertise accumulated by the different organisations with similar needs.
· Arguably the experience of regional clusters of small firms provides important piece of evidence.
· To explore the learning potential of this novel approach, an innovative knowledge-sharing.
· The inter-organisational learning networks where structures and systems have been formally established to increase the participants’ knowledge and innovative capability.
· Offers members the opportunity to interact and exchange knowledge with like-minded professionals and to both create and consume knowledge relevant to a topic of professional interest.

General Knowledge Trading
· Community is an open and commercial marketplace.
· Play the role of the only knowledge provider.
· Information objects traded are not too complex and sophisticated but easily codified and similar to commodity goods.
· Many-to-many model, offers significant opportunities for on-line collaboration between knowledge providers in order to fulfil specific information needs otherwise impossible to be met by a single provider.
· Members are provided with advanced search and navigation capabilities enabling them to locate the knowledge they need in short time among the plethora of knowledge assets available.

Findings
To professionally carry out knowledge networks there are a number of elements that should be taken into consideration.
Firstly, the development and delivery of true value-added services that are offered in both digital and physical delivery systems through the evolution of trusted trading communities must selling offerings explicit and tacit knowledge equally.
Secondly, to create long-term, knowledge-intensive solutions to industry pain points and to create new forms of value, trust is a critical component to true partnering. An established trust relationship is important in given a safe pathway to expand through “knowledge hubs”.
Finally, the paper state that price is not the only driving factor in knowledge transactions.

Greetings

Hello everyone. This blog is created special for the Knowledge Networking subject.