In a variety of scenarios the transfer of knowledge between diferent organizations is aspired. There exist theoretical concepts that describe cyclic processes of knowledge management and knowledge transfer. In this work a conceptual symbiosis of both is presented. A semantic description of the knowledge transfer process is suggested extending accepted standards. A strategic concept of identifying characteristics to assess the chances of a successful knowledge exchange is presented. Theoretical concepts are undermined by a case study about the transfer of compliance knowledge between two international organizations for the safe and compliant handling of employees dogs at the workplace with the intention of improving the overall working atmosphere.
In this work a strategy for the semantification of a cyclic compliance knowledge exchange between organizations is presented. This strategy aims to create a semantic model that organizations interested in knowledge exchange can use to optimize this task. Naturally, it is important to respect the knowledge management culture of all organizations taking part in the exchange relationship. For this reason, the strategy is oriented at the knowledge management cycle of the participants. The process of knowledge exchange is cyclic because most often this is not a matter of one single exchange task but a relationship is built with ongoing mutual exchange. Figure 1 shows two organizations A and B that both have an own knowledge management culture represented by the two individual knowledge management cycles. The contribution of this work is to assess whether it is possible to unite them into a semantic model that helps to structure the process of a cyclic knowledge transfer and optimizing it by identifying chances and conflicts in the workflow.
After a research of examining the available literature connected to this work a theoretical
concept was developed that unites the theory of the knowledge management cycle [
Utilize
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in section two the theoretical concept of the cyclic knowledge transfer assessment matrix is presented. We explain the model with the help and its connection to the two diferent knowledge cycle models. In section three we describe the domain of workplace compliance of animals and its expected quality for evaluation purposes. We present an example of the application of the semantic model in this context. Section four presents a concluding review with a selection of related and ground laying work to this one, ifnished by future work.
Important characteristics that hold as a fundamental guideline for knowledge transfer processes are the elements of the knowledge management and the knowledge transfer cycle. We use these elements to construct a matrix structure to identify similarities and contradictions for a specific transfer task.
In Figure 2 the single transfer of knowledge from organization A to organization B is replaced by a cyclic process dividing the transfer into diferent steps. In this manner the cycle is passed through and with every passage the relationship between the two organizations has the chance of improvement.
The overall goal of the eforts is to find (tacit) generic patterns that aid to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. Therefore, we assume that the synergies and conflicts of a known transfer task are also likely to occur in other similar transfer tasks. This makes it interesting to gather information about past knowledge transfer processes. We thereby have the intention to find synergies that made the overall knowledge transfer successful and strategies that helped to solve conflicts.
Learn and capture Identify and value
Transfer and apply Validate and document
Publish and share
The matrix depicted in Table 1 matches knowledge management and knowledge transfer elements of both organizations for a specific transfer task. Synergies are marked with “+” and conflicts are marked with “-”. In this manner the characteristics of the transfer task are captured in a systematic way.
E
The approach we suggest for the semantification for the before described scenario is depicted by Figure 3. Transfer tasks (3) are marked with a property that describes the state of the task. For instance, the transfer task of legal knowledge sharing is in the state conflict (4). If an entity has done its part of solving the conflicts it passes the transfer task to the adverse entity B and vice versa (5). In this manner all of the conflicts are solved or the transfer process rests in the state with the least conflicts possible.
Conflicts are characterized by ofended compliance rules. A knowledge transfer process consists of many transfer tasks. To manage these transfer tasks they are hierarchically organized into sub-tasks. Organizational entities (2) and compliance rules (1) are handled analogously. At this point other semantic models can be integrated that are capable to express this internal structure.
The spark for this work was the question: What needs to be done to establish the possibility for corporate employees to take their dog with them to the workplace? Dogs are of great benefit for the well being of people. In this regard it is assumed that dogs can contribute to a good working atmosphere, also for employees that do not own dogs. Additionally, the life of employees who own dogs is facilitated because they do not need to arrange dog sitters on a regularly basis. Thus, big companies like Amazon and Google started to allow employees to bring their dogs to the working place. What might not be worth a discussion in a small company turned out to 4 hasState: Conflict
Compliance Rules
B Organisational Entity
E
B be a topic containing deeper impact than obvious at the first glance when it comes to medium sized and big companies.
In larger organizations compliance rules are necessary to guarantee a safe and convenient working together of animal and human. After all, what made this topic interesting for the research in the field of knowledge management are the following characteristics. ∙ Diversity: We observed that the topic is handled very diferently even in the same organization. Dogs are for instance allowed at Amazon in the United States but not at Amazon Germany. Whereas other major companies do not allow animals at the workplace at all. ∙ Public Knowledge: A lot of the knowledge concerning animal safety is available because institutions publish compliance documents on their websites. Additionally, there is a public interest in this topic. Especially in Northern America and Europe hundreds of millions of dogs are owned, for which reason, media and social discussions pick up the subject. ∙ Understandable Knowledge: At first sight the topic seems shallow in terms of content but we state that this makes it easy to observe on a simple subject how knowledge transfer can happen and later apply it to more complex domains. Similarly like to observe nerve functions in very simple animals like worms and use this knowledge to understand the functioning of more complex animals.
Figure 4 shows a graph describing diferent instances in the workplace animal domain with basic exemplary definitions of states. The instances were derived from an assessment matrix evaluating the scenario on the base of an internet research on the topic as described in previous sections. Therefore, diferent compliance documents, media articles, and social media discussions were analyzed.
Neutral state hasState
hasState Conflict state
Synergy state Dog Compliance Transfer Task hasUpperTask
hasState hasUpperTask hasUpperTask hasState
Dog Medical Transfer Task
Dog Legal Transfer Task Dog Behaviour Transfer Task
This work presented a feasibility study to estimate how cyclic knowledge transfer processes between organizations can be subject of semantification. A concept was presented to assess barriers and opportuinites for knowledge transfer via a matrix scheme derived from a combination of cyclic knowledge management and knowledge transfer models.
To get insight to available works relevant for this study we searched for accepted and proven
fundamental theorys of knowledge management and knowledge transfer. Additionally, we
investigated what up to date approaches require as characteristics of a knowledge domain
to make the approach work. A cyclic approach to systematize knowledge transfer processes
between factory workers and management is presented by Riege and Zulpo [
The first view on the presented domain is promising. Thus, we will extend the so far developed concepts and evaluate them more deeply by populating the developed ontology with instances extracted from the domain of knowledge transfer concerning animal work place compliance.