Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2001.

Thesis (MRes)--University of South Australia, 2000

Knowledge Management has captured the attention of management and IT vendors are hastily bringing products to market. The interest in Knowledge Management is understandable given the moves towards knowledge based economies and workplaces. Large organisations have begun to understand the value of the knowledge held within their organisation. Nowadays, the value of an organisation may be based on its intellectual capital and this is demonstrated by organisations being sold for many times its worth in terms of hard assets. The concept of being able to store and use the 'knowledge' that is generated inside an organisation has obvious appeal. However, the management of this 'knowledge' and the ability to use it for an advantage requires careful planning and an understanding of knowledge inside the organisation and its workers. This process requires a mix of organisational, cultural and technology understanding. Current research and vendor interest is focussing on large organisations. However, Small to Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) also have an explicit need to manage their intellectual capital. Research interest in large organisations is strong, but SMEs cannot always use the findings that are targeted to large organisations and will probably be unable to afford the specific Knowledge Management tools offered by vendors. Nevertheless, SMEs can use the knowledge in their organisations to gain an advantage. In particular, the tourism industry has a significant knowledge component and Knowledge Management could provide substantial benefits. Many Knowledge Management principles apply to organisations irrespective of their size. How these can be implemented within a SME is the subject of this thesis.

It is widely believed that with the transition from the industrial to information-based economics, organizational knowledge has emerged as the single most critical resource at both macro and micro levels, which promotes the creation, sharing, and leveraging of the organization???s knowledge in current Customer Order Driven Engineering (CODE) environment. Insufficient knowledge management, hence lack of a structured Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) in a CODE environment, whilst involved in New Product Development (NPD) process may result in several problems resulting in creating less successful products. This research establishes an ???Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) framework??? with focus on the Product, Process and Organizational issues related to the NPD process. The framework has three major stages, namely ???Knowledge Acquisition???, ???Knowledge Organizing??? and ???Knowledge Validating???. Various frameworks/methods/models are developed as steps for each of these stages. The framework may increase the effectiveness of product and process development as well as enterprise competitiveness through developing a system architecture to understand, analyse and map organisational, operational activities and business objectives; and increasing the ability of an organisation to establish an integrated partnerships to share efforts on the design, manufacture and delivery of products. In knowledge acquisition stage, a ???Knowledge Capture framework??? and the ???Relationship matrices??? are developed to analyse and link the generic knowledge items of a NPD process in concurrent engineering environment. Among the relationship matrices, Task versus Task (Design Structure Matrix - DSM) matrix is comprehensively explored and decomposed to structure and link several processes at different levels for effective representation of the overall enterprise representation. In knowledge organizing stage, the acquired knowledge (important relations identified in the Task versus Task matrices) is represented in the form of ???Questionnaires???. Best practices gathered from several manufacturing firms in NPD in CODE have also been used as knowledge resource base for the Questionnaires. For grouping and validation of these Questionnaires, an ???Assessment Model??? is developed, which consists of five performance indicators of the organization namely ???Marketing???, ???Technical???, ???Financial???, ???Resource Management???, and ???Project Management???. Industry applications are carried out in two Australian Manufacturing Companies for the validation of the acquired knowledge. Two tests are carried out; in order to assess the sensitivity of question categories followed by another test to observe whether the model can accurately display the overall performance of the company in the five categories of NPD phases. These two tests have identified possible improvement areas in the NPD process of manufacturing organizations involved in the validation phase. Up to 80% of the findings of the EKB framework and assessment model were found to reflect the actual practices of the organizations.

In my PhD thesis I raise the claim that a main ingredient to successful design collaboration in architecture and engineering is to make sense out of the information that is provided by designers and consultants as early and comprehensively as possible. The design of buildings has become a task with such a level of complexity that a social effort is required to coordinate and integrate the various worldviews of disciplines involved. In my research I first analyse obstacles to sense-making across collaborating disciplines by investigating the worldviews and priorities of the main parties involved in the design of buildings. I then propose novel ways for exchanging knowledge and generating common understanding between design professionals during early design and I introduce the process of optioneering as one possible method to assist architectural and engineering work practice. In order to address the above issues, I have embedded myself in the engineering firm Arup in their Sydney and Melbourne offices. There, I have examined methods for communicating and integrating aspects of building performance between designers and design consultants over a period of three years. As part of my research at Arup, I have gained an understanding about the everyday requirements of design professionals for sense-making in collaborative practice.

This thesis analyses the material and ideological dimensions of the knowledge economy with particular reference to New Zealand. The emergence of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of transnational capitalism precipitates the co modification of information, communication and knowledge. This process is obscured by the ideological construction of techno-futurism. Techno-futurism is a combination of technological determinism and futurism that appropriates notions of progress. In the pages which follow, historical analyses of this ideology inform the subsequent critique of knowledge economy discourse. In New Zealand knowledge economy discourse contained techno-futurist elements and deflected attention from the global absorption of national capitalism. In this context the Catching the Knowledge Wave Conference (KWC), held in Auckland in the first days of August 2001, is examined. I argue that the instigators and organisers of the conference were enmeshed within the business culture of finance capital and ICTs. Textual analysis of keynote addresses reveals the ideological dimensions to knowledge wave and knowledge economy talk. These dimensions are; entrepreneurialism, knowledge as (economic) progress, and globalism.

It is widely believed that with the transition from the industrial to information-based economics, organizational knowledge has emerged as the single most critical resource at both macro and micro levels, which promotes the creation, sharing, and leveraging of the organization???s knowledge in current Customer Order Driven Engineering (CODE) environment. Insufficient knowledge management, hence lack of a structured Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) in a CODE environment, whilst involved in New Product Development (NPD) process may result in several problems resulting in creating less successful products. This research establishes an ???Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) framework??? with focus on the Product, Process and Organizational issues related to the NPD process. The framework has three major stages, namely ???Knowledge Acquisition???, ???Knowledge Organizing??? and ???Knowledge Validating???. Various frameworks/methods/models are developed as steps for each of these stages. The framework may increase the effectiveness of product and process development as well as enterprise competitiveness through developing a system architecture to understand, analyse and map organisational, operational activities and business objectives; and increasing the ability of an organisation to establish an integrated partnerships to share efforts on the design, manufacture and delivery of products. In knowledge acquisition stage, a ???Knowledge Capture framework??? and the ???Relationship matrices??? are developed to analyse and link the generic knowledge items of a NPD process in concurrent engineering environment. Among the relationship matrices, Task versus Task (Design Structure Matrix - DSM) matrix is comprehensively explored and decomposed to structure and link several processes at different levels for effective representation of the overall enterprise representation. In knowledge organizing stage, the acquired knowledge (important relations identified in the Task versus Task matrices) is represented in the form of ???Questionnaires???. Best practices gathered from several manufacturing firms in NPD in CODE have also been used as knowledge resource base for the Questionnaires. For grouping and validation of these Questionnaires, an ???Assessment Model??? is developed, which consists of five performance indicators of the organization namely ???Marketing???, ???Technical???, ???Financial???, ???Resource Management???, and ???Project Management???. Industry applications are carried out in two Australian Manufacturing Companies for the validation of the acquired knowledge. Two tests are carried out; in order to assess the sensitivity of question categories followed by another test to observe whether the model can accurately display the overall performance of the company in the five categories of NPD phases. These two tests have identified possible improvement areas in the NPD process of manufacturing organizations involved in the validation phase. Up to 80% of the findings of the EKB framework and assessment model were found to reflect the actual practices of the organizations.

It is widely believed that with the transition from the industrial to information-based economics, organizational knowledge has emerged as the single most critical resource at both macro and micro levels, which promotes the creation, sharing, and leveraging of the organization???s knowledge in current Customer Order Driven Engineering (CODE) environment. Insufficient knowledge management, hence lack of a structured Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) in a CODE environment, whilst involved in New Product Development (NPD) process may result in several problems resulting in creating less successful products. This research establishes an ???Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) framework??? with focus on the Product, Process and Organizational issues related to the NPD process. The framework has three major stages, namely ???Knowledge Acquisition???, ???Knowledge Organizing??? and ???Knowledge Validating???. Various frameworks/methods/models are developed as steps for each of these stages. The framework may increase the effectiveness of product and process development as well as enterprise competitiveness through developing a system architecture to understand, analyse and map organisational, operational activities and business objectives; and increasing the ability of an organisation to establish an integrated partnerships to share efforts on the design, manufacture and delivery of products. In knowledge acquisition stage, a ???Knowledge Capture framework??? and the ???Relationship matrices??? are developed to analyse and link the generic knowledge items of a NPD process in concurrent engineering environment. Among the relationship matrices, Task versus Task (Design Structure Matrix - DSM) matrix is comprehensively explored and decomposed to structure and link several processes at different levels for effective representation of the overall enterprise representation. In knowledge organizing stage, the acquired knowledge (important relations identified in the Task versus Task matrices) is represented in the form of ???Questionnaires???. Best practices gathered from several manufacturing firms in NPD in CODE have also been used as knowledge resource base for the Questionnaires. For grouping and validation of these Questionnaires, an ???Assessment Model??? is developed, which consists of five performance indicators of the organization namely ???Marketing???, ???Technical???, ???Financial???, ???Resource Management???, and ???Project Management???. Industry applications are carried out in two Australian Manufacturing Companies for the validation of the acquired knowledge. Two tests are carried out; in order to assess the sensitivity of question categories followed by another test to observe whether the model can accurately display the overall performance of the company in the five categories of NPD phases. These two tests have identified possible improvement areas in the NPD process of manufacturing organizations involved in the validation phase. Up to 80% of the findings of the EKB framework and assessment model were found to reflect the actual practices of the organizations.

Doctor of Philosophy / Tacit knowledge represents a challenge to knowledge elicitation due to the assumption that this type of knowledge cannot be articulated. We argue that Polanyi's (1966:4) widely cited notion that “we know more than we can tell” represents a weak model of language that does not acknowledge the grammatical patterns in spoken discourse that we, as speakers, apply tacitly. We investigate the hypothesis that individuals articulate what they know through grammatical patterns, referred to as under-representation, without direct awareness. This thesis develops and pilots a grammar-targeted interview method aimed at unpacking specific grammatical features that occur in spoken discourse. The model of language from which these features are derived is Systemic Functional Linguistics. We report findings from three empirical studies of tacit knowledge in corporate organisations where we used the grammar-targeted interview technique to elicit tacit knowledge in the areas of knowledge management, requirements analysis and performance reviews. We compare this interview method with a content-targeted approach. The results show that the grammar-targeted technique produces less under-represented discourse thus allowing tacit knowledge held by the interviewees to be made visible. Based on the linguistic analyses undertaken in these field studies we propose that Polanyi’s expression “we know more than we tell” be reformulated to “we tell more than we realise we know”.