Self-Modelling Knowledge Networks

The necessity for managing knowledge is stressed bywide array of recent publications ranging from informationscience to strategic management substantiatingtheir proposition with the tremendous changes in thecontext organisations that are operating today. Althoughknowledge management (KM) literature and researchprojects are increasingly extending their attention fromintra-organisational to inter-organisational aspects (e.g.,Seufert, Back, van Krogh, 2000; Alpar Kalmring,2001; Schmaltz Hagenhof, 2003 ), the question ofhow inter-organisational knowledge management canbe realised is up to now not sufficiently answered(Carlsson, 2003). That is even more true for virtualenterprises, as the following specific characteristicsneed to be considered: short-term focus; focus on informationand communication technology; decentralisedinformation systems; and distributed ownership. As asolution approach catering for the issues mentionedabove, a prototype of a system called selfmodellingknowledge networks is introduced. Self-modellingknowledge networks could provide a mechanism thatfacilitates flexible knowledge retrieval across severalnodes in networked and virtual enterprises. Thus, thisapproach is ideally suited for situations where knowledgeresources need to be combined in a flexible wayand several levels of the network are comprised