Research Collaboration Between Universities

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Research Collaboration Between Universities

• Dr Lorna Uden
• Faculty of Computing, Engineering, and
  Technology,
• Staffordshire University,
• The Octagon, Beaconside,
• Stafford, ST18 0AD, UK.
• Phone [phone]
• E-mail l.uden_at_staffs.ac.uk
• Dr. Kimmo Salmenjoki
• University of Vaasa
• Department of Computer Science
• P.O. BOX 700, FIN-65101 VAASA
• Phone [phone]
• Email kimmo.salmenjoki_at_uwasa.fi

• Dr. Marjan Hericko
• University of Maribor,
• Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer
  Science,
• Smetanova 17, SI - 2000 Maribor, Slovenia
• Phone [phone]
• Email marjan.hericko_at_uni-mb.si
• Dr. Gurumusamy Arumugam
• Department of Computer Science Madurai Kamaraj
  University,
• Madurai-625021,
• Tamilnadu, India.
• Email gurusamyarumugam_at_yahoo.co.in

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Why Knowledge Management in Organization (KMO)

• Knowledge is increasingly recognized as the most
  important asset in organizations and a key
  differentiating factor in business today.
• Knowledge management (KM) is referred to as the
  process for creating, codifying and disseminating
  knowledge for a wide range of knowledge-intensive
  tasks
• It is increasingly being acknowledged that KM can
  bring about the much needed innovation and
  improved business performance in many
  organizations.

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• Future trends for Knowledge Management
• Semantic Web
• enables automated information access and use,
  based on machine-processable semantics of data.
• Web Services
• The Semantic Web will enable the accessing of Web
  resources by semantic content rather than just by
  keywords. Resources (in this case Web Services)
  are defined in such a way that they can be
  automatically understood and processed by
  machine.

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• Data mining
• Goal of knowledge management is to have a
  systematic process that can capture and enhance
  such organizational knowledge over time.

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Why KMO?

• Knowledge management research requires expertise
  from many different disciplines.
• Impossible for small or medium universities to
  have the necessary skills to cater for all
  aspects of the research.
• Effective management of Knowledge Management
  Research requires that we establish a network of
  knowledge researchers working together.

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• The KMO group acts as a community of practice
  (CoP), which is institutionalised, informed
  networks of professionals managing a shared
  domain of knowledge.
• KMO enables us to foster knowledge development
  and creative innovations amongst highly
  specialised experts and help to channel our
  efforts to where they are most needed.
• To help in the sharing of knowledge and expertise
  between the various geographically distributed
  institutions, a structured process of knowledge
  management (KM) is needed to assure the
  efficiency of our activities and groups.

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• KMO includes giving support and synergy between
  the individual PhD researchers and their
  supervisors and attracting the interest of
  various companies working on information service
  business and applications.
• For effective KMS, it is necessary to understand
  the interrelationship of cultural, technical and
  organisational elements.
• Activity theory can provide a structured account
  of work and cooperative work to understand
  context and development.

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Aim of the group

• Is to explore the use of technology in knowledge
  sharing between the various partners.
• To understand how a virtual team works together.
• Much literature exists about KM, but there is
  little specific theory to be found about KM in
  communities of practice.
• Solution is to use activity theory, a cultural,
  historical theory, which can be used as a
  candidate for this study.

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Important research questions are

• How do the dispersed, cross functional and cross
  cultural teams engage in sharing knowledge?
• How do we use available technologies in sharing
  knowledge?
• What is the role of technology in such engagement?

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Why Activity Theory?

• AT is a philosophical and cross-disciplinary
  framework for the study of different forms of
  human practices as development progresses, with
  both individual and social levels interlinked at
  the same time
• AT will be used as a theoretical lens to examine
  the questions of what key role processes play in
  the development of KM.
• KM processes do not take place in a vacuum, but
  in an organisational context.
• Effective processes require clear links to be
  made between processes, the knowledge sources and
  organizational goals and workflows.

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Conclusions

• Knowledge management research embodies
  multidisciplinary expertise.
• We have established a research network based on
  Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM).
• We believe that by working together as a group,
  we will also able to identify issues in knowledge
  sharing, the use of tools to support the
  collaborative enterprise using activity theory.

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