Knowledge Management for Strategic Business Change
A Transdisciplinary Workshop
We would like to remind you that the Seventh SEBPC workshop of the
Business Processes theme will take place on the 28th January 2000 in
the Conference Centre of BG Technology, Loughborough.
Instructions of how to get there are now available on
http://www.bgtechnology.com/location.htm
We now have some 50 people who have registered for the workshop, and
we are running out of subsidised free places. To register, please
contact Jillian Dean by 24 Jan 2000, at the Centre for Management
Knowledge, School of Management and Economics, Queen's University,
Belfast BT7 1NN. http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/cmk/ Telephone (01232)
335126 (mornings only) or e-mail: [log in to unmask]
The workshop aims to bring together academics and practitioners in the
areas of systems engineering, knowledge management and industrial
information systems by establishing common agenda and thus engaging in
a process of dialogue and collaboration. For further details about
the workshop, please see http://sid.co.umist.ac.uk/kmbpc.html
We have synthesised the main topics of discussion we propose for
the day in the following:
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
Information Systems studies of businesses have traditionally focused
on three main aspects of a business:
(a) customer-facing value-adding elements such as products and
business processes
(b) the organisation of the business and its people
(c) information technology infrastructure that can support (a) and (b)
To succeed in today's environment of rapid change and
knowledge-intensive competition, we should optimise each of these
three aspects by considering the following four principles, based on
a work by Henderson and Venkatraman:
(1) Business Impact.
In relation to aspect (a) - processes and products, can information
technology help us create new products, for example WWW-enabled
dishwashers, or new business processes such as Just-In-Time delivery
to eliminate the need for stocks?
(2) Intelligent Networking.
Success in developing new processes and products will require us to
re-think our organisation, or aspect (b). We need to leverage the
knowledge existing within and even outside our business by creating
intelligent business networks - communities of practice linking people
and organisations with complementary expertise interconnected by
shared goals.
(3) Knowledge Infrastructure.
We will also need to transform our technology infrastructure (c) so
that it can support the change from "make and sell" to "sense and
respond". Indeed, current information infrastructures are designed to
support a quest for operational efficiency in an environment of
making, storing and moving physical assets. They are therefore not
suitable for managing intellectual capital and for creating, sharing
and using knowledge and expertise. We need to go beyond static
databases of structured numerical data to sharing of context-rich
information enabling "virtual working".
(4) Strategic Innovation.
Finally we need to achieve and extend the dynamic alignment of all
three aspects in a context of discontinuous change by considering the
mix of (1) to (3) in a coherent and integrated manner.
These four transformation principles can help us to organise and
structure the discussions on the day. We propose that each speaker
clarifies their position in relation to one or more of these
principles (and their interrelationship), and that in the afternoon we
split into four working groups to discuss in detail issues related to
each of the transformation principles and their relationship with the
others. The groups will then report back into a panel-session style
discussion.
Nikolay Mehandjiev and Paul Jeffcutt
Nikolay Mehandjiev
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Department of Computation e-mail: [log in to unmask]
UMIST, or: [log in to unmask]
P.O. Box 88, URL : http://www.co.umist.ac.uk
Manchester M60 1QD, UK Phone :+44 161 200 3319 Fax:+44 161 200 3324
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