Why do people share their knowledge? People choose their actions depending on their beliefs that originated from previous experiences. Motivating knowledge sharing behaviours is an important first step to instilling a knowledge-sharing culture. In this paper we present a Hungarian Knowledge Management Research, which defines factors that describe knowledge management practice of an organization and we present that certain organizational cultures are more receptive to knowledge management programs than other types.

This paper explores knowledge sharing within organisations and proposes a model to help improve knowledge sharing performance. The knowledge transaction is proposed as the basic mechanism by which knowledge is shared within organisations. This model is developed drawing together literature on knowledge markets, transaction cost economics and theories of knowledge. An empirical survey was conducted to evaluate and further develop the model. Five categories of factors influencing knowledge transactions are identified as; intrinsic motivation, authority, trust, price and technology.

The present paper discusses the basic characteristics of existing knowledge management and e-learning systems in order to define common features of both types of systems. An analysis is made comparing the main characteristics of such systems. The aim of the paper is to identify the possible integration and interoperability of systems functionalities and for better and more powerful integration of within organizations.

This paper presents the development of a Knowledge Management (KM) software tool designed to support the implementation of improvement projects, Manufacturing Excellence (ME) best practices and quality models. The application of the KM tool facilitates manufacturing SMEs to share the knowledge associated to those initiatives through virtual Knowledge Sharing Networks (KSNs). A survey indicated that the main barrier to adopt ME best practices in SMEs is lack of knowledge associated with the implementation of these initiatives. This is mostly due to resource constraints. This led to the development of an affordable KM tool to enable SMEs to develop and execute improvement projects efficiently and to facilitate knowledge sharing. SMES can become more competitive by expanding their knowledge base within a KSN environment.

Knowledge Management (KM) is a topic that is consistently underrated and poorly investigated in the Italian context, both from the academic and the practitioners perspectives. This paper tries to achieve some preliminary results on the state of KM initiatives in the Italian landscape starting from the identification of 53 success stories. The cross-case analysis of such success stories, conducted through the identification of the context in which each initiatives is developed and through the analysis of the alignment between target objectives and the degree of technological innovation adopted in KM initiatives, has lead us to underline two main tendencies of KM in the Italian landscape. On one side, we acknowledge the lack of technological experimentation in KM initiatives, which is particularly noticeable in the case of small and medium enterprises. On the other side, we underline that the efforts put in the implementation of advanced IT tools for KM, such as for collaborative work, remain often tentative and not aligned with the target objectives of KM initiatives.

Knowledge sharing is complicated. It is difficult to know the kind of knowledge needed in construction projects. This is particularly so when it is concerned with innovative working. There are different types of knowledge that can be shared among workers. These include offered, needed and wanted knowledge. It is not easy to know what kind of knowledge one needs. One of the problems is that people often filter out information they do not want to know. It is rare that people utilize all available resources such as people or tools that offer new knowledge. The offered knowledge may not be trustable or needed at the time. This paper describes a case study based on how knowledge sharing occurred on in construction projects in Finland using vision-building.

The research on KM in organizations is mostly focused on what happens within individual organizations, while we acknowledge a lack of empirical research on KM practices that involve networks of organizations. When we shift the focus to inter-organizational interactions for producing shared knowledge, we argue that competitive advantage can be obtained only by the adoption of common standards and tools for extracting, storing, and sharing knowledge. This research investigates the division of the benefits among the contributing actors and uncovers underlines a positive relation between the effort put in the knowledge integration, mediation, and filtering activities and the obtained benefits. Generally, the larger firm in the network, which endorses the main efforts of knowledge integration, becomes also the one that benefits most from the initiative. The larger company is also the promoter of knowledge standards and the owner of the technology tools supporting knowledge management processes. These results are obtained through the cross-case analysis of 3 case studies involving networks of SMEs in Italy.

This paper looks at some of the issues relating to the use of knowledge management (KM) in the National Health Service (NHS) and general practice in primary healthcare in the United Kingdom (UK). It contains an examination of two of the implementations and applications of KM in healthcare and discusses some of the KM strategies, systems and tools that are found in the sector. It is contended that healthcare is knowledge intensive and will benefit from the effective application of KM in improving its efficiency, improving its service and reducing its cost. Finally, the current approach to KM in healthcare is reviewed and recommendations for 'best practice' in the healthcare sector are offered, which can benefit organisations in other industrial and business sectors.

In this paper it will be introduced the bxModeller functional changes. bxModeller is an open source web-based application tool, that supports the Business Process modelling. These new functionalities will allow to widen the tool's modalities of use. A benchmark of different similar tools will be examined and motivations and their analysis will be discussed. The objective is to improve the bxModeller and to make it proper to a collaborative environment, this will allow to many users to contemporarily access at the same project, with an access mode defined by the affiliation profile, more over it will enable the user to work and to make changes visible to others team's partners in real time.

The importance of knowledge for the growth of organizations makes Knowledge Management a central focus for a number of disciplines that inform, and are informed by, the way of creating, sharing and applying knowledge. Starting from an "organizational view" of KM as a means to learn, the paper presents the recent contributions coming from learning theories, library and cognitive sciences, moving from the collective dimension of organizational learning toward the analysis of the individual dimension of learning, framing the affective, psychological and physical conditions of the KM system users, as useful insights to guide the drawing of KM architectures able to face each phase of the learning experience.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a theme of extreme actuality in Knowledge Management (KM) and Relational Marketing literature. Anyway, if the role played by KM in firms' CRM success has been largely discussed, the conditions in which this happens are still unknown. In this article we present the findings of a study on two cultural and national different firms' approaches at CRM. The results obtained offer interesting evidences in the strategic discussion about CRM success' key-factors and present several further research issues in the domain of customer knowledge management.

In today's software companies, different products are developed following different development processes (waterfall, evolutionary, agile processes, and so forth), making difficult for software assessors to produce uniform evaluations of enterprise-wide process preserving maturity and effectiveness. Traditional process modeling techniques associate specific measurement frameworks to each process; reports generated for different processes are difficult to reconciliate in a single company-wide vision.
Furthermore, achieving a certification, like CMMI or ISO 9001-2000, requires a uniform set of data to be evaluated by assessors or by companies themselves. It is important for managers to create a common environment, which allows controlling all aspects of the software development process, producing and giving consistent quality and maturity/capability oriented reports. For these reasons, a new trend in process modeling is emerging, decoupling the development process, the underlying data structure, and the measurement and reporting framework.
Such independence can be reached by adopting a common structure (a meta-model), for all aspects of process measurement activity. The definition of a meta-model for the development process leads to the instantiation of individual models for any specific development process, preserving relations consistence between specific instances of the measurement model.
Spago4Q (SpagoBI for Quality) realizes a new approach to software development process monitoring. Spago4Q integrates an advanced meta-model representation for the process which makes it fully independent from the specific development process, from the underlying data representation technique, and from certification/measurement frameworks.
The presentation provides an overview on the Engineering's SpagoWorld Initiative (www.spagoworld.org). The Initiative is a sample of a FOSS ecosystem based on the global sustainability of open source software development. Starting from a short presentation of SpagoBI (www.spagobi.org), the Business Intelligence Free Platform, main guidelines of the Spago4Q project (www.spago4q.org, a SpagoBI specialization) are outlined. A Spago4Q demo is also provided.

The role of human intervention in the production of goods and services has changed significantly in recent years. Land and labour are now deemed less significant than the combination of knowledge embodied in a product. Some writers (see Drucker 1993; Giddens 1993; Kessels 1996), suggest as a strategic priority the maximisation of knowledge productivity. This involves the signalling, absorbing and processing of relevant information, generating and disseminating new knowledge and applying this knowledge to the improvement and innovation of products, processes and services. Balasco and Stayer (1997) describe this stored information and value creating potential as intellectual capitalism, for which they suggest knowledge workers act as a repository. The recognition of knowledge capabilities is also embedded in the strategic literature and is recognised by some (see Easterby-Smith et al 1998; Garvin 1994; Applebaum & Goranson 1997) as representing an organisations only sustainable competitive advantage in turbulent unpredictable environments. This paper reviews the literature on knowledge management and learning organisations and investigates their conceptual foundations and inter-relationships. Developments in both fields of study will then be viewed from the lens of both organisational trainers and human resource development specialists.

This paper discusses the role of matching operators in Data Integration process. The paper proposes a categorization of matching operators, with the aim of distinguishing different relations to the possible goals of an integration process and their impact on the implementation of the mappings defining this integration. In order to lead the discussion some example.

An extended enterprise (EE) can be described by a set of models each representing a specific aspect of the EE. Aspects can for example be the process flow or the value description. However, different models are done by different people, which may use different terminology, which prevents relating the models. Therefore, we propose a framework consisting of process flow and value aspects and in addition a static domain model with structural and relational components. Further, we outline the usage of the static domain model to enable relating the different aspects.

This paper aims to introduce the bxModeller, an open source web-based application tool, to support a business user in the modelling of the Business Processes. The graphical notation used is Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), an OMG standard for processes modelling. Moreover, the tool allows to traduce Business Process Diagram in a business process execution language (XML Process Description Language), which can be understood by a workflow engine. In this paper, we describe the architecture, functionalities and potentialities of the bxModeller.