The 20th century was the age of an industry-based as well as knowledge-based economy. In a knowledge-based economy, knowledge plays an essential role to produce wealth compared with other tangible and physical assets. The purpose of this research is to identify and rank different aspects of knowledge management based on the Hicks model using the fuzzy TOPSIS technique for one of the most prestigious universities in Iran. The proposed model considers four main criteria of knowledge including creation, distribution, storage, and application along with 17 sub-criteria. The Chi-square correlation test indicates a positive and meaningful correlation between four mentioned criteria and knowledge management implementation. Using the fuzzy TOPSIS technique, the results also indicate that “Need for new and updated information and knowledge” was selected as the most important sub-criterion and “Sharing or distribution of knowledge” was selected as the most important main criterion on Hicks model.

This study investigates organizational structure, culture, and information technology as knowledge management (KM) infrastructural capabilities, and compares their significance and status quo in five medical research centers in Tehran, Iran. Objectives of this research were pursued by employing two statistical methods, regression analysis and Friedman test. Included in the study were 135 people (researchers and support staff) from five medical and healthcare research centers of Tehran. A survey questionnaire including 23 questions was utilized to examine organizational structure, culture and information technology indicators. And another 12 questions examined KM effectiveness. The Friedman test indicated that in terms of their status quo, the three studied KM enablers are at different conditions, with organizational culture having the best (mean rank=1.79) and IT the worst (mean rank=2.14) status. Moreover, it was revealed by regression analysis that organizational structure is believed to have the most significant impact (Beta= 0.397) on the effectiveness of knowledge management initiatives, while information technology gained the least perceived impact (Beta= 0.176).

Knowledge management plays an important role in business development specially in educational system. The proposed study designs and distributes a questionnaire among experts who are involved in education systems in province of Tehran, Iran. The population of this survey includes 1680 people who are enrolled in administration levels of this province and using a simple sapling technique is calculated as 313. The questionnaire consists of 30 questions in Likert scale and there are six categories for the proposed study of this paper including the concept of knowledge, management, knowledge tools, knowledge measurement, change management, knowledge content. We have used LISREL software package to find the relationship between entrepreneurship and knowledge management components. Based on the results of this survey, knowledge content is number one priority followed by knowledge tools and concept of knowledge. The other factors including management, knowledge measurement and change management are in lower levels of importance.

This paper presents an empirical study to learn more about challenges in carpet industry using factor analysis. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire consists of 51 questions in Likert scale and distribute it among experts in Carpet industry. We have analyzed the data using factor analysis and deleted 10 most redundant questions. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.88 for the remaining questions, which is well above the minimum desirable limit. We have also managed to remove six more questions using principal axis factoring leaving 8 basic components including 35 different questions. The proposed study of this paper has categorized eight factors including specialized relationships, knowledge coordinator, knowledge tool, knowledge organization, knowledge processes, knowledge chain, knowledge hardware and Knowledge feasibility study. Investigating details of the results of each eight items could help us build better strategies to help this industry grow faster and more reliable in today & apos; s business world.

The objective of the study is to examine the relationship between knowledge management practices and the organizational performance of Pakistan’s telecommunication. The study is based on primary data collected from two hundred and ten (out of three hundred questionnaires) middle level managers of different telecommunications located in Rawalpindi & Islamabad cities of Pakistan. A self designed questionnaire was used for data collection. The data was analyzed using the techniques of multiple regression analysis. All the findings were tested at 0.01 and 0.05 level of significance. The result demonstrates that knowledge management practices have positive and significant impact on organizational performance, which reflects that organizations that prefer knowledge management practices get beneficial outcomes than their competitors. The commencement of the five facets formulates it easier for the management to centre their attentiveness on them, assuring the particular behaviors to bring out to commence them.

Organizational intelligence plays an important role developing business units and organizations. Understating the barriers surrounding an organization helps us take possible actions to remove any issues. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to find barriers in university located in Province of Semnan, Iran. The proposed study of this paper first detects important barriers and then prioritize them using analytical hierarchy process. Based on the results of this paper, structural barriers are considered as the most important issue follows by legal barriers, cultural and executive barriers. The results of our survey indicate that lack of organizational knowledge management relation with daily activities, project complexity, lack of the knowledge exchanging and sharing in the organization, lack of suitable business context and absence of a documented program for the organizational intelligence dismounting are among the most important barriers according to our AHP implementation results.


DOI: 10.5267/j.msl.2012.09.006
Keywords: , Organizational intelligence dismounting barriers,

Knowledge management incorporates the systematic management of vital knowledge resources and the associated processes of creating, organizing, gathering, utilizing, diffusion and exploiting data. A key challenge emerging is learn to encourage knowledge sharing (KS) within firms because knowledge is an organization’s intellectual capital and plays an important role in gaining a competitive advantage. Isolated initiatives for promoting KS and team collaboration without taking into consideration the limitations and constraints of KS can halt any further development in the KM culture of an operation. In this paper, in addition to individual and social factors, an effect of individual perception, which is an important factor for any behavior, is studied. We first identify effective factors in KS behavior through the theory of planned behavior, six factors of trust, knowledge power, organizational motivation, organizational culture, IT and Communities of Practice (COP) as effective factors in three categories of behavioral beliefs, subjective norms and perceived behaviors are analyzed for an Iranian research center. The results of this research helps develop KS behavior and enhance performance and creativity of research in this center.

Knowledge management plays an important role on the success of organizations but there are several reasons that many organizations fail to talk a full advantage of the benefits of knowledge management implementation. In this paper, we perform an empirical investigation on supreme audit court organization of Iran. The survey uses a standard questionnaire and distributes 116 questionnaires among 228 people who worked for this organization. Cronbach alpha yields 0.817, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. Kolmogorov–Smirnov test has been performed to examine the normality of the data and yields 1.71 for management attributes, 1.78 is for resource factors and 1.73 for environment factors and P-value for all three factors is 0.000. The preliminary results of our survey indicate that management is the first important factor followed by resources and environment factors.

Effective planning and management of workforce for new product development (NPD) projects is a great challenge to many organisations, especially in the presence of engineering changes during the product development process. The management objective in effective workforce management is to recruit, develop and deploy the right people at the right place at the right time so as to fulfill organizational objectives. In this paper, we propose a dynamic simulation model to address the workforce management problem in a typical NPD project consisting of design, prototyping, and production phases. We assume that workforce demand is a function of project work remaining and the current available skill pool. System dynamics simulation concepts are used to capture the causality relationships and feedback loops in the workforce system from a systems thinking. The evaluation of system dynamics simulation reveals the dynamic behaviour in NPD workforce management systems and shows how adaptive dynamic recruitment and training decisions can effectively balance the workforce system during the NPD process.

Knowledge management (KM) plays an important role on increasing organizational performance especially governmental agencies where there are different skills and knowledge within the organization. In this study, we present a study to investigate the effect of KM on having more customer oriented organizations. We use a standard questionnaire among 146 randomly selected employees out of 170 people who work for four governmental organizations in city of Chahbahar, Iran. The collected information is analyzed using structural equation modeling and by validating the results using Cronbach alphas of more than the minimum desired level of 0.70, we determine the positive relationships between KM and three other variables including customer absorption, customer retention and customer relationship management. The results of this survey reveal that an increase of one unit in KM yields almost the same increase in three mentioned variables accordingly. In addition, an increase of one percent in KM will increase customer orientation by almost one percent.