Information technology (IT) is considered as a driving force in the development of organizations but earlier research has shown that technology is not enough to build, improve and increase organizational capabilities and performances. This means that organizational learning (OL) is an effective theory to capture and nourish knowledge in order to create knowledge driven competitive advantage. IT, however, plays a major role to create and share new knowledge to promote organizational learning. In today’s competitive environment it is an urgent requirement that organizations must develop and utilize IT based applications or systems to create a learning environment so that both employees and organizations can learn in an innovative ways, but the question remains how IT impacts OL in such a way that organizations can improve performances and capabilities complying with organization’s strategic goals. This thesis deals with the use of IT in organizational learning at both levels; 1) learning at individual level to know that how individuals learn in an organization and how IT support learning at this stage and 2) learning at organizational level that focuses on how an organization learns and how IT affects it. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between IT and OL and describe the role of IT in promoting OL through the study of two selected companies, Accenture and ABB, employing the OL concept. To achieve the purpose of this study a qualitative approach has been used as it provides a thorough understanding about the role of IT in OL. The analysis presents a thorough insight of organizational learning dividing it into learning at individual level which is based on the Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995)’s SECI model for knowledge conversion and learning at organizational level using the Huber (1991)’s learning processes to develop as well as facilitate the organizational learning. The role of IT is analyzed through the knowledge management strategies from Hansen et al. (1999). The results show that information technology has an impact over organizational learning as IT facilitates OL at both the individual level and the organizational level in creating knowledge which ultimately enables organizations to improve capabilities and enhance performances to cope with change. Companies are using various IT application or tools to promote OL either through knowledge depository database, online training, staff rotation planning or various IT based communication channels. The use of knowledge management strategy and the role of IT on OL coincide with the strategic objective set by the company. Companies also use different combinations between tacit and explicit knowledge in respond to the strategic goal. Both tacit and explicit knowledge are always used in all companies but the mixture produces different results. It is the management that has to determine the right combination between them to create the maximum impact on OL. IT can be a tool help managing tacit and explicit knowledge but people are more important in the process of knowledge creation as it is individuals who possess the critical minds led to learning. It is important to realize a fact that organization will never learn if its people do not learn. The work is of great interest to the parties involved in organizational learning using information technology.

Flera forskare går så långt att de säger att kunskap kan vara den enda bestående konkurrensfördelen ett företag har i dagens föränderliga omvärld. Knowledge Management som begrepp tog fart i början av 1990-talet och har sedan dess varit föremål för omfattande forskning. Samtidigt sägs det att kunskap kan vara svår att kommunicera och överföra. Vi började fundera på vilka företag som kan tänkas använda strategier för att hantera kunskap, och om Knowledge Management är så utbrett bland företagen som forskarna ger sken av, är det en så betydelsefull komponent i utvecklandet av företags konkurrensfördelar? Vi valde att undersöka Saab Barracuda AB som är världsledande inom signaturanpassning och titta på hur de, som svenskt multinationellt företag, hanterar tillvaratagande och överföring av kunskap. Undersökningen genomfördes genom en intervju med ekonomichefen på Saab Barracuda AB på plats vid huvudkontoret i Gamleby. I uppsatsen presenteras teorier kring kunskap, Knowledge Management och multinationella företag med dotterbolag. Utifrån dessa teorier analyserades Saab Barracuda AB:s syn på och strategier för tillvaratagande, spridning och skapande av kunskap. I vår undersökning fann vi att man inom Saab Barracuda AB inte arbetar med strategier för kunskapsspridning, men att det ändå fanns en del inslag av spridning på det sätt det beskrivs i teorierna. Det var dock förvånande att se att ett så framgångsrikt företag, vars främsta resurs ansågs vara kunskap, enligt oss endast omedvetet hanterade kunskap. Kunskapsvinster var mer en bieffekt av andra strategier. Det framgick även tydligt av undersökningen att e-post är det verktyg som användes mest frekvent vid utbyten och interaktion.

Using web-based knowledge management systems has become the mainstream when enterprises adopt the strategy of knowledge management. With the accumulated amount of materials, the issue of information reuse is emphasized, and how to properly design a knowledge management system to improve the efficiency of information reuse is becoming extremely important. In the past there were two approaches for improving the efficiency of information reuse. One is knowledge map that focuses on information retrieval to promote the efficiency, and the other is usability of Human-Computer Interaction that focuses on the effect of different information representation styles and the user's liking. According to Task-Technology Fit, the greater the degree of adherence to an ideal fit profile, the better the performance. In this study we discussed the impact of information presentation styles on information reuse with different reuse tasks on knowledge management systems. The study is intended as an experimental design to investigate the impact of information presentation styles on information reuse within a knowledge management system. We use an experiment involving 83 subjects. The results of this study indicate that information presentation styles have a significant impact on information reuse. We found that for retrieval tasks, the impact on information reuse would be enhanced with the hierarchical presentation style. Additionally, the result also shows that when increasing the complexity of the task, information presentation styles have no differences to the impact on information reuse. And according to the results of two kinds of questionnaires, the users all had higher liking and partialities for the hierarchical presentation style. Finally, suggestions for the vision information design based on the results of this study are provided.

An Extension to the Composite Rule Induction System Discovering knowledge from data is an important task for knowledge management and development of intelligent systems, which is called knowledge acquisition or data mining. Many techniques have been developed for such purpose. For example, ID3, C4.5 (tree induction techniques) and Artificial Neural Networks are among the popular techniques in ¡§Classification and Prediction¡¨ area. However, these methods often use the same criteria to analyze nominal and non-nominal attributes, which is very likely to produce biased knowledge due to mis-match between data type and their algorithms. In Liang (1992), he proposed a composite approach called CRIS to inducing knowledge that introduces statistical concepts and data mining heuristics and found the composite method outperformed other methods including tree induction, discriminant analysis, and neural networks. However, the paper focuses on the classification of binary objects and did not describe how the approach can be applied to a problem with more than two classes in the dependent variable. In this research, we extend the previous approach to solve the problem with more than two classes. We also enhance the approach by adding steps to prioritizing attributes using their identification power and controlling the growth of generated hypothesis. In order evaluate the extended CRIS method, a prototype system, eCRIS, was developed and compared with a commercial data mining package, XLMiner3 (developed by Cytel Software Corporation) using three existing datasets in data mining research. The results indicate that the extended CRIS outperforms tree induction and backpropagation in neural networks in datasets that include both nominal and non-nominal data and performed equally well with them.

The management consultancy profession has shifted from being a deeply academically rootedprofession to a profession where the connection to academic institutions is more indistinct.Where the knowledge within management consultancy firms comes from is more and moreunclear. The gap between management practice and academic research is sometimesdescribed as unbridgeable for several reasons. Our purpose of this study is to see howimportant academic research and theory is to management consultancy firms’ knowledge baseand what impact obstacles and outer pressure can have on this.As our theory base for this study we have the “Three Basic Elements of theKnowledge System and their Interrelations” model by Werr and Stjernberg (2003). We haveredefined and also added some elements to this model and thereby designed our own model“The Knowledge Base System in an Institutionalized Environment” which functions as aground for our analysis.We have performed this study by using the quantitative method ofquestionnaires where we have used two types of questionnaire, one for the companies and onefor the consultants. The conclusions that we can draw is that academic research and theory isvery important to management consultancy firms’ knowledge bases. However, the consultantssay they have greater usage of their experiences in their daily work, even though they useacademic research and theory as a mean to communicate with each other within theconsultancy firm. A conclusion of this is that experience and academic research and theorymight not be in conflict but have different functions and complement each other.

This thesis deals with knowledge management at companies in the Falun-Borlänge region. The purpose is to create better understanding of which path companies have chosen and why, respectively. A qualitative survey seeks to discover if companies have chosen IT track or people track. This is a practical and useful model for an evaluative study. In the same context, a number of important models for evaluating knowledge management are presented. The result shows that the companies provide a multitude of training within several frameworks. Education is mostly provided in a traditional manner but there are many examples of interactive state-of-the-art training. Furthermore, most of the companies primarily focus upon people and processes, but some focus at technical facilities as well. In some cases are the technical frameworks used for support of core processes.

Sammanfattning Detta examensarbete undersöker hur ett globalt industriföretag arbetar med kunskapshantering utifrån ett Knowledge management-perspektiv. Målföretaget undersöks genom Talent management-konceptet People Equity. Vi baserar vår uppsats på empiri bestående av tolv kvalitativa intervjuer med medarbetare från företaget. Våra teoretiska utgångspunkter grundas primärt på Alvesson och Kärremans deskriptiva modell om hur företag arbetar med kunskapsstyrning, Model of managerial intervention. Utifrån analys av insamlad empiri placerar vi ut målföretaget på ovan nämnda matris. Resultatet visar att målföretaget har vissa svårigheter med kunskapsflödet mellan medarbetarna. Kunskapsdelning sker primärt genom social interaktion med kollegor på avdelningen samt genom nätverkande med nyckelpersoner på andra avdelningar. Den normativa kontroll som finns i kulturen på företaget obstruerar i viss mån kunskapen från att flöda fritt och på så sätt skapa maximal nytta. I diskussionen behandlas denna slutsats och förslag på framtida forskning ges.

The goal of this study is to describe and analyse the knowledge management and sharing in a project team. The brief results of the study showed that the investigated project team at Ericsson manages knowledge gained from their project within knowledge management systems. However, the practices used by the project team in order to manage knowledge have risks of inefficiency. The major shortcomings in project knowledge management were noticed in knowledge presentation, validation and distribution process. The main source for sharing knowledge within the project team is through project meetings before, during and after the completion of project apart from Scrum meetings, communities of practice, and pair programming. Additionally, the project specific factors showed their potential to really influence the knowledge sharing within the project team.

Abstract Date: January 17, 2013 Level: Bachelor thesis in business administration, 15 ECTS Institution: School of Sustainable Development of Society and Technology, Mälardalen University Authors: AZIZ Najibullah, GLEESON Darren and KASHIF Muhammad 28th August 1980, 29th November 1977, 22nd July 1984 Tutor: Eva Maaninen-Olsson Keywords: Knowledge, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Factors Affecting Knowledge Sharing Research Question: What hinders or enables knowledge sharing in Swedish-based multi-national corporations from a cultural, motivational and trust perspective? Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the barriers and enablers of knowledge sharing within multi-national corporations. Method: The research method chosen to fulfill the purpose of the thesis is a qualitative approach. In order to achieve the purpose both primary and secondary data was sought. In accordance with the qualitative approach, interviews have been carried out with senior managers in ABB, Bombardier, Ericsson and Siemens. Data collected from these interviews represents the primary data. Secondary data has been gathered from company websites. Conclusion: The results from the studied multi-national organizations suggest that knowledge sharing culture is influenced by communication, rules, regulations and routines (sub-factors of culture). This study shows that communication, rules, regulations and routines are enablers of knowledge sharing in the organizations. However, language and technology (sub-factors of culture) as collaborative tools are proven to be problematic; consequently creating hindrances to knowledge sharing. When it comes to motivational factors (rewards, power and reciprocity), this thesis shows that none of the studied companies offer rewards for knowledge sharing. This confirms the controversy connected with rewards which can either enable or cause hindrance to knowledge sharing. Reciprocity seems to enable knowledge sharing in the studied organizations whereas power remains controversial. The existence of power can either be a barrier or an enabler for knowledge sharing depending on the individual’s perception of power. This thesis also shows that the existence of trust enables knowledge sharing between employees, but the difficulties of building this trust is akey problem for management.

Although online social media have achieved spectacular success in some instances, the design of such systems remains an art. In some specialized areas, such as online deliberation systems for participatory democracy, experiences from many projects have been reported in the research literature. Designers can benefit from knowledge accumulated from these experiences. However, the knowledge is dispersed and not organized for ready access by practicing professionals. This thesis proposes a framework for structuring and codifying design knowledge from published studies to help designers make design choices that will attain design objectives.