"Virtual word of mouth":a case for the adaptation of existing word of mouth theory to virtual community environments

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Knowledge management in support of enterprise risk management

Risk management and knowledge management have so far been studied almost independently. The evolution of risk management to the holistic view of Enterprise Risk Management requires the destruction of barriers between organizational silos and the exchange and application of knowledge from different risk management areas. However, knowledge management has received little or no attention in risk management. This paper examines possible relationships between knowledge management constructs related to knowledge sharing, and two risk management concepts: perceived quality of risk control and perceived value of enterprise risk management. From a literature review, relationships with eight knowledge management variables covering people, process and technology aspects were hypothesised. A survey was administered to risk management employees in financial institutions. The results showed that the perceived quality of risk control is significantly associated with four knowledge management variables: perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing, perceived quality of communication among people, web channel functionality, and risk management information system functionality. However, the relationships of the knowledge management variables to the perceived value of enterprise risk management are not significant. We conclude that better knowledge management is associated with better risk control, but that more effort needs to be made to break down organizational silos in order to support true Enterprise Risk Management.

Keyboard warriors in cyberfights:conflict in online communities of consumption and its effects on community resources

Conflicts are very common in Online Consumption Communities (OCC) and numerous expressions have developed to describe them. Prior research indicates contradictory effects on community resources, namely social capital and culture. One stream finds that online conflict dissolves social capital and community culture (cf. De Valck 2007) while another stream finds it enhances them (cf. Ewing, Wagstaff, and Power 2013). Therefore, the effect of OCC conflict on community resources is unclear. In this paper, we (1) investigate conflict in OCC to develop a typology, and (2) delineate how each type of OCC conflict impacts community resources. This research contributes to our understanding of OCC conflicts and to the literature on value formation in OCC.

Keyboard warriors in cyberfights:conflict in online communities of consumption

Nowadays, with the use of social media generalizing, increasingly more people gather online to share their passion for specific consumption activities. Despite this shared passion, conflicts frequently erupt in online communities of consumption (OCC). A systematic review of the literature revealed that a lot of knowledge has developed on OCC conflict. Different types of conflicts unfolding in an OCC context have been distinguished, various drivers of conflict identified and various consequences outlined at the individual level (experiential value) and the community level (collective engagement and community culture). However the specificity of conflicts unfolding in an OCC context has not been conceptualized. Past research is also inconclusive as to where and when does OCC conflict create or destroy value in communities. This research provides a theory of OCC conflict and its impact on value formation by conceptualizing OCC conflict as performances. The theory was developed by conducting a netnography of a clubbing forum. Close to 20,000 forum posts and 250 pages of interview transcript and field notes were collected over 27 months and analysed following the principles of grounded theory. Four different types of conflict performances are distinguished (personal, played, reality show and trolling conflict) based on the clarity of the performance. Each type of conflict performance is positioned with regard to its roots and consequences for value formation. This research develops knowledge on disharmonious interactions in OCCs contributing to the development of a less utopian perspective of OCCs. It indicates how conflict is not only a byproduct of consumption but it is also a phenomenon consumed. It also introduces the concept of performance clarity to the literature on performance consumption. This research provides guidelines to community managers on how to manage conflict and raises ethical issues regarding the management of conflict on social media.

Knowledge management in support of enterprise risk management

Risk management and knowledge management have so far been studied almost independently. The evolution of risk management to the holistic view of Enterprise Risk Management requires the destruction of barriers between organizational silos and the exchange and application of knowledge from different risk management areas. However, knowledge management has received little or no attention in risk management. This paper examines possible relationships between knowledge management constructs related to knowledge sharing, and two risk management concepts: perceived quality of risk control and perceived value of enterprise risk management. From a literature review, relationships with eight knowledge management variables covering people, process and technology aspects were hypothesised. A survey was administered to risk management employees in financial institutions. The results showed that the perceived quality of risk control is significantly associated with four knowledge management variables: perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing, perceived quality of communication among people, web channel functionality, and risk management information system functionality. However, the relationships of the knowledge management variables to the perceived value of enterprise risk management are not significant. We conclude that better knowledge management is associated with better risk control, but that more effort needs to be made to break down organizational silos in order to support true Enterprise Risk Management.

Capabilities and roles of enterprise wikis in organizational communication

How can technical communicators in organizations benefit from wiki technology? This article alerts technical communicators to the possibilities of wiki-based collaborative content creation. It analyzes 32 articles on the use of corporate wikis, and compares them to three media choice theories: media richness theory, theory of media synchronicity, and common ground theory.

The growing importance of inter-company collaboration

Guest editorial: This special issue has been drawn from papers that were published as part of the Second European Conference on Management of Technology (EuroMOT) which was held at Aston Business School (Birmingham, UK) 10-12 September 2006. This was the official European conference for the International Association for Management of Technology (IAMOT); the overall theme of the conference was “Technology and global integration.” There were many high-calibre papers submitted to the conference and published in the associated proceedings (Bennett et al., 2006). The streams of interest that emerged from these submissions were the importance of: technology strategy, innovation, process technologies, managing change, national policies and systems, research and development, supply chain technology, service and operational technology, education and training, small company incubation, technology transfer, virtual operations, technology in developing countries, partnership and alliance, and financing and investment. This special issue focuses upon the streams of interest that accentuate the importance of collaboration between different organisations. Such organisations vary greatly in character; for instance, they may be large or small, publicly or privately owned, and operate in manufacturing or service sectors. Despite these varying characteristics they all have something in common; they all stress the importance of inter-organisational collaboration as a critical success factor for their organisation. In today's global economy it is essential that organisations decide what their core competencies are what those of complementing organisations are. Core competences should be developed to become a bases of differentiation, leverage and competitive advantage, whilst those that are less mature should be outsourced to other organisations that can claim to have had more recognition and success in that particular core competence (Porter, 2001). This strategic trend can be observed throughout advanced economies and is growing strongly. If a posteriori reasoning is applied here it follows that organisations could continue to become more specialised in fewer areas whilst simultaneously becoming more dependent upon other organisations for critical parts of their operations. Such actions seem to fly in the face of rational business strategy and so the question must be asked: why are organisations developing this way? The answer could lie in the recent changes in endogenous and exogenous factors of the organisation; the former emphasising resource-based issues in the short-term, and strategic positioning in the long-term whilst the later emphasises transaction costs in the short-term and acquisition of new skills and knowledge in the long-term. For a harmonious balance of these forces to prevail requires organisations to firstly declare a shared meta-strategy, then to put some cross-organisational processes into place which have their routine operations automated as far as possible. A rolling business plan would review, assess and reposition each organisation within this meta-strategy according to how well they have contributed (Binder and Clegg, 2006). The important common issue here is that an increasing number of businesses today are gaining direct benefit from increasing their levels of inter-organisational collaboration. Such collaboration has largely been possible due to recent technological advances which can make organisational structures more agile (e.g. the extended or the virtual enterprise), organisational infra-structure more connected, and the sharing of real-time information an operational reality. This special issue consists of research papers that have explored the above phenomenon in some way. For instance, the role of government intervention, the use of internet-based technologies, the role of research and development organisations, the changing relationships between start-ups and established firms, the importance of cross-company communities of practice, the practice of networking, the front-loading of large-scale projects, innovation and the probabilistic uncertainties that organisations experience are explored in these papers. The cases cited in these papers are limited as they have a Eurocentric focus. However, it is hoped that readers of this special issue will gain a valuable insight into the increasing importance of collaborative practices via these studies.

Managing enterprise resource planning and multi-organisational enterprise governance:a new contingency framework for the enterprisation of operations

This research has been undertaken to determine how successful multi-organisational enterprise strategy is reliant on the correct type of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) information systems being used. However there appears to be a dearth of research as regards strategic alignment between ERP systems development and multi-organisational enterprise governance as guidelines and frameworks to assist practitioners in making decision for multi-organisational collaboration supported by different types of ERP systems are still missing from theoretical and empirical perspectives. This calls for this research which investigates ERP systems development and emerging practices in the management of multi-organisational enterprises (i.e. parts of companies working with parts of other companies to deliver complex product-service systems) and identify how different ERP systems fit into different multi-organisational enterprise structures, in order to achieve sustainable competitive success. An empirical inductive study was conducted using the Grounded Theory-based methodological approach based on successful manufacturing and service companies in the UK and China. This involved an initial pre-study literature review, data collection via 48 semi-structured interviews with 8 companies delivering complex products and services across organisational boundaries whilst adopting ERP systems to support their collaborative business strategies – 4 cases cover printing, semiconductor manufacturing, and parcel distribution industries in the UK and 4 cases cover crane manufacturing, concrete production, and banking industries in China in order to form a set of 29 tentative propositions that have been validated via a questionnaire receiving 116 responses from 16 companies. The research has resulted in the consolidation of the validated propositions into a novel concept referred to as the ‘Dynamic Enterprise Reference Grid for ERP’ (DERG-ERP) which draws from multiple theoretical perspectives. The core of the DERG-ERP concept is a contingency management framework which indicates that different multi-organisational enterprise paradigms and the supporting ERP information systems are not the result of different strategies, but are best considered part of a strategic continuum with the same overall business purpose of multi-organisational cooperation. At different times and circumstances in a partnership lifecycle firms may prefer particular multi-organisational enterprise structures and the use of different types of ERP systems to satisfy business requirements. Thus the DERG-ERP concept helps decision makers in selecting, managing and co-developing the most appropriate multi-organistional enterprise strategy and its corresponding ERP systems by drawing on core competence, expected competitiveness, and information systems strategic capabilities as the main contingency factors. Specifically, this research suggests that traditional ERP(I) systems are associated with Vertically Integrated Enterprise (VIE); whilst ERPIIsystems can be correlated to Extended Enterprise (EE) requirements and ERPIII systems can best support the operations of Virtual Enterprise (VE). The contribution of this thesis is threefold. Firstly, this work contributes to a gap in the extant literature about the best fit between ERP system types and multi-organisational enterprise structure types; and proposes a new contingency framework – the DERG-ERP, which can be used to explain how and why enterprise managers need to change and adapt their ERP information systems in response to changing business and operational requirements. Secondly, with respect to a priori theoretical models, the new DERG-ERP has furthered multi-organisational enterprise management thinking by incorporating information system strategy, rather than purely focusing on strategy, structural, and operational aspects of enterprise design and management. Simultaneously, the DERG-ERP makes theoretical contributions to the current IS Strategy Formulation Model which does not explicitly address multi-organisational enterprise governance. Thirdly, this research clarifies and emphasises the new concept and ideas of future ERP systems (referred to as ERPIII) that are inadequately covered in the extant literature. The novel DERG-ERP concept and its elements have also been applied to 8 empirical cases to serve as a practical guide for ERP vendors, information systems management, and operations managers hoping to grow and sustain their competitive advantage with respect to effective enterprise strategy, enterprise structures, and ERP systems use; referred to in this thesis as the “enterprisation of operations”.

The contradictions and complementarities of combining ERP systems with enterprise 2.0 supported informal systems

The chapter discusses both the complementary factors and contradictions of adopting ERP based systems with enterprise 2.0. ERP is characterized as achieving efficient business performance by enabling a standardized business process design, but at a cost of flexibility in operations. It is claimed that enterprise 2.0 can support flexible business process management and so incorporate informal and less structured interactions. A traditional view however is that efficiency and flexibility objectives are incompatible as they are different business objectives which are pursued separately in different organizational environments. Thus an ERP system with a primary objective of improving efficiency and an enterprise 2.0 system with a primary aim of improving flexibility may represent a contradiction and lead to a high risk of failure if adopted simultaneously. This chapter will use case study analysis to investigate the use of a combination of ERP and enterprise 2.0 in a single enterprise with the aim of improving both efficiency and flexibility in operations. The chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the combination of ERP with enterprise 2.0 based on social-technical information systems management theory. The chapter also provides a summary of the benefits of the combination of ERP systems and enterprise 2.0 and how they could contribute to the development of a new generation of business management that combines both formal and informal mechanisms. For example, the multiple-sites or informal communities of an enterprise could collaborate efficiently with a common platform with a certain level of standardization but also have the flexibility in order to provide an agile reaction to internal and external events.

A new dynamic framework for managing ERP development and enterprise strategy

The enterprise management (EM) approach provides a holistic view of organizations and their related information systems. In order to align information technology (IT) innovation with global markets and volatile virtualization, traditional firms are seeking to reconstruct their enterprise structures alongside repositioning strategy and establish new information system (IS) architectures to transform from single autonomous entities into more open enterprises supported by new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. This chapter shows how ERP engage-abilities cater to three distinctive EM patterns and resultant strategies. The purpose is to examine the presumptions and importance of combing ERP and inter-firm relations relying on the virtual value chain concept. From a review of the literature on ERP development and enterprise strategy, exploratory inductive research studies in Zoomlion and Lanye have been conducted. In addition, the authors propose a dynamic conceptual framework to demonstrate the adoption and governance of ERP in the three enterprise management forms and points to a new architectural type (ERPIII) for operating in the virtual enterprise paradigm. © 2012, IGI Global.

Ontology-based knowledge capture and sharing in enterprise organisations

Despite years of effort in building organisational taxonomies, the potential of ontologies to support knowledge management in complex technical domains is under-exploited. The authors of this chapter present an approach to using rich domain ontologies to support sense-making tasks associated with resolving mechanical issues. Using Semantic Web technologies, the authors have built a framework and a suite of tools which support the whole semantic knowledge lifecycle. These are presented by describing the process of issue resolution for a simulated investigation concerning failure of bicycle brakes. Foci of the work have included ensuring that semantic tasks fit in with users’ everyday tasks, to achieve user acceptability and support the flexibility required by communities of practice with differing local sub-domains, tasks, and terminology.