Editorial : Learning, teaching and disseminating knowledge in business process management

Process-oriented thinking has become the major paradigm for managing companies and other organizations. The push for better processes has been even more intense due to rapidly evolving client needs, borderless global markets and innovations swiftly penetrating the market. Thus, education is decisive for successfully introducing and implementing Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives. However, BPM education has been an area of challenge. This special issue aims to provide current research on various aspects of BPM education. It is an initial effort for consolidating better practices, experiences and pedagogical outcomes founded with empirical evidence to contribute towards the three pillars of education: learning, teaching, and disseminating knowledge in BPM.

The moderating effect of knowledge sharing on the relationship between manufacturing activities and business performance

This paper investigates the critical role of knowledge sharing (KS) in leveraging manufacturing activities, namely integrated supplier management (ISM) and new product development (NPD) to improve business performance (BP) within the context of Taiwanese electronic manufacturing companies. The research adopted a sequential mixed method research design, which provided both quantitative empirical evidence as well as qualitative insights, into the moderating effect of KS on the relationships between these two core manufacturing activities and BP. First, a questionnaire survey was administered, which resulted in a sample of 170 managerial and technical professionals providing their opinions on KS, NPD and ISM activities and the BP level within their respective companies. On the basis of the collected data, factor analysis was used to verify the measurement model, followed by correlation analysis to explore factor interrelationships, and finally moderated regression analyses to extract the moderating effects of KS on the relationships of NPD and ISM with BP. Following the quantitative study, six semi-structured interviews were conducted to provide qualitative in-depth insights into the value added from KS practices to the targeted manufacturing activities and the extent of its leveraging power. Results from quantitative statistical analysis indicated that KS, NPD and ISM all have a significant positive impact on BP. Specifically, IT infrastructure and open communication were identified as the two types of KS practices that could facilitate enriched supplier evaluation and selection, empower active employee involvement in the design process, and provide support for product simplification and the modular design process, thereby improving manufacturing performance and strengthening company competitiveness. The interviews authenticated many of the empirical findings, suggesting that in the contemporary manufacturing context KS has become an integral part of many ISM and NPD activities and when embedded properly can lead to an improvement in BP. The paper also highlights a number of useful implications for manufacturing companies seeking to leverage their BP through innovative and sustained KS practices.

Efficiency of knowledge integration in enterprise systems implementation

Recent literature has emphasized the pivotal role of knowledge integration in Enterprise Systems (ES) success. This research-in-progress paper, building upon Knowledge Based Theory of the firm (KBT), examines the efficiency of knowledge integration in the context of ES implementation and identifies the factors contributing to its enhancement. The proposed model in this paper suggests that the efficiency of knowledge integration in an ES implementation process depends upon the level of common knowledge and the level of coordination in the ES adopting organization. It further suggests that the level of common knowledge can be enhanced by proper training, improving ES users’intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and business process modeling and the level of coordination can be improved by articulating a clear unified organizational goal for the ES adoption in the organization, forming a competent ES team, enhancing interdepartmental communication and the cross-functionality in the organization structure.

Management issues in developing a sustainable model for supporting entrepreneurs in Africa

Small and micro-enterprises play a significant part in economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing African countries. There are, however, a range of management issues that arise when looking at the support required for local enterprise development, the role and management style of the local support agency and the role and style of the, usually Western, funding body. This paper explores the management philosophy required to establish and resource micro-enterprise development and compares the local management processes with those expected by a Western funding body.

Project management office a knowledge broker in project-based organisations

Current research into project management offices (PMOs) has stressed the PMOs' potential to act as knowledge brokers between projects, and between project and top management. Nonetheless, the literature does not provide sufficient evidence of the brokering role of PMOs. The research reported here aims to examine PMO's functions from a knowledge sharing perspective and explore whether or not these functions reflect the knowledge sharing needs of project managers (PMs). These issues are investigated through a cross-case analysis of seven organisations. The main contribution is insight into how PMs share knowledge and awareness of the need to structure PMOs to align with PMs' nature, needs and expectations in order to improve knowledge sharing in PBOs. Finally, some practical steps for helping PMOs to better adapt their functions to the needs of PMs and their learning and knowledge sharing style are proposed.

The affordances of social technology : a BPM perspective

Increasingly, organizations are looking to employ Social Technology (ST) to enhance their capability with Business Process Improvement (BPI). However, little is known about how the characteristics or qualities of ST actually influence an organizations' capability at Business Process Improvement (BPI). This paper discusses the potential role of ST in process improvement by presenting an a-priory model derived by an investigation of extant research. First, the qualities of social technology that potentially support high level action possibilities related to BPI are presented (we refer to these as affordances), next these affordances are mapped to the De Bruin (2009) BPM Maturity model as a first step to understanding how ST influences BPI. This work is expected to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the relationship between ST and BPI, and will extend existing theory on Business Process Management capability and maturity.

Creativity management : the new challenge for BPM

Besides classical criteria such as cost and overall organizational efficiency, an organization’s ability to being creative and to innovate is of increasing importance in markets that are overwhelmed with commodity products and services. Business Process Management (BPM) as an approach to model, analyze, and improve business processes has been successfully applied not only to enhance performance and reduce cost but also to facilitate business imperatives such as risk management and knowledge management. Can BPM also facilitate the management of creativity? We can find many examples where enterprises unintentionally reduced or even killed creativity and innovation for the sake of control, performance, and cost reduction. Based on the experiences we have made within case studies with organizations from the creative industries (film industry, visual effects production, etc.,) we believe that BPM can be a facilitator providing the glue between creativity management and well-established business principles. In this article we introduce the notions of creativity-intensive processes and pockets of creativity as new BPM concepts. We further propose a set of exemplary strategies that enable process owners and process managers to achieve creativity without sacrificing creativity. Our aim is to set the baseline for further discussions on what we call creativity-oriented BPM.

Challenges to ES Success : A Critical Need for Knowledge Integration

Recent literature on Enterprise System (ES) implementation projects highlights the importance of Knowledge Integration (KI) for implementation success. The fundamental characteristics of ES - integration of modules, business process view, and aspects of information transparency - necessitate that all frequent end-users share a reasonable amount of common knowledge and integrate their knowledge to yield new knowledge. Unfortunately, the importance of KI is often overlooked and little about the role of KI in ES success is known. In this chapter, the authors study the KI impact on ES success that is relevant to the ES post-implementation in support of organizations' returns on their ES investments. They adopt the ES post-implementation segment of ES utilization to explore whether the KI approach is causally linked to ES success. The research model was tested in a multi-industry sample in Malaysia from which data was gathered from managerial and operational employees spread across six large organizations. Consistent with the explanation by knowledge-based theory, the results show that KI was valid and significantly related to the outcome of ES that relates to an organization's performance, which the authors refer to as ES success. The KI positive impact on the success of ES drives one to highlight the importance of ontological KI in the complexity of the ES environment. The authors believe that focusing on an ontology through the KI perspective can make significant contributions to current ES problems.

Antecedent factors of knowledge sharing in research supervision

Today’s economy is a knowledge-based economy in which knowledge is a crucial facilitator to individuals, as well as being an instigator of success. Due to the impact of globalisation, universities face new challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, they ought to be more innovative and have their own competitive advantages. One of the most important goals of universities is the promotion of students as professional knowledge workers. Therefore, knowledge sharing and transfer at the tertiary level between students and supervisors is vital in universities, as it decreases the budget and provides an affordable way to do research. Knowledge-sharing impact factors can be categorised in three groups, namely: organisational, individual, and technical factors. Individual barriers to knowledge sharing include: the lack of time and trust and the lack of communication skills and social networks. IT systems such as elearning, blogs and portals can increase the knowledge-sharing capability. However, it must be stated that IT systems are only tools and not solutions. Individuals are still responsible for sharing information and knowledge. This paper proposes a new research model to examine the effect of individual factors, organisational factors (learning strategy, trust culture, supervisory support) and technological factors on knowledge sharing in the research supervision process.

Conceptualising the learning organisation : creating a maturity framework to develop a shared understanding of the library's role in literacy and learning

Although they sit outside the formal education sector, libraries are intrinsically centres of learning where people can engage with knowledge and ideas and acquire the literacy skills that are essential for active participation in an increasingly digital society. In Australia, National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA) has acknowledged the need to not only better understand the general concept of the library as a learning institution, but also to help the individual NSLA libraries specifically identify their capabilities in this arena. The NSLA Literacy and Learning project aimed to improve the members' organisational comprehension and practice as learning institutions and to help them conceptualise their ability to deliver literacy and learning programmes that will benefit their staff and their communities. The NSLA concept of learning institution encompassed two discrete lenses: the internal lens of the library's own organisational understanding and practice, and the external lens of the clients who engage in the literacy and learning programmes delivered by the library. The ultimate goal was to develop a matrix which could enable libraries to assess their perceived levels of maturity as learning institutions along a continuum of emerging to active capabilities. The matrix should also serve as a tool for shared understanding about the NSLA's own strategic directions in the literacy and learning space. This case study documents the evolving process of developing a learning institution maturity framework for libraries that considers individual, team and organisational learning, as well as clients' interactions with the organisation, with the goal of producing a framework that has the potential to measure the value of learning and growth in both the library's staff and the library's communities

Medical semantic similarity with a neural language model

Advances in neural network language models have demonstrated that these models can effectively learn representations of words meaning. In this paper, we explore a variation of neural language models that can learn on concepts taken from structured ontologies and extracted from free-text, rather than directly from terms in free-text. This model is employed for the task of measuring semantic similarity between medical concepts, a task that is central to a number of techniques in medical informatics and information retrieval. The model is built with two medical corpora (journal abstracts and patient records) and empirically validated on two ground-truth datasets of human-judged concept pairs assessed by medical professionals. Empirically, our approach correlates closely with expert human assessors ($\approx$ 0.9) and outperforms a number of state-of-the-art benchmarks for medical semantic similarity. The demonstrated superiority of this model for providing an effective semantic similarity measure is promising in that this may translate into effectiveness gains for techniques in medical information retrieval and medical informatics (e.g., query expansion and literature-based discovery).

Conceptualising social media support for tacit knowledge sharing: physicians’ perspectives and experiences

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the potential contributions of social media in supporting tacit knowledge sharing, according to the physicians’ perspectives and experiences. Design/methodology/approach – Adopting a qualitative survey design, 24 physicians were interviewed. Purposive and snowball sampling were used to select the participants. Thematic analysis approach was used for data analysis. Findings – The study revealed five major themes and over 20 sub-themes as potential contributions of social media to tacit knowledge flow among physicians. The themes included socialising, practising, networking, storytelling and encountering. In addition, with the help of the literature and the supporting data, the study proposed a conceptual model that explains the potential contribution of social media to tacit knowledge sharing. Research limitations/implications – The study had both theoretical (the difficulty of distinguishing tacit and explicit knowledge in practice) and practical limitations (small sample size). The study findings have implications for the healthcare industry whose clinical teams are not always physically co-located but must exchange their critical experiential and tacit knowledge. Originality/value – The study has opened up a new discussion of this area by demonstrating and conceptualising how social media tools may facilitate tacit knowledge sharing.