» Knowledge Networks and Lattices: A Framework for Intra and Inter-Organizational Knowledge Sharing

Umar Ruhi

DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Canada


Presented: January 2003.

As organizations begin to realize the value of knowledge in their day-to-day operations, they are trying to find ways to share this knowledge effectively, both within the firm and with business partners along its value-chain. One means employed by corporations to foster knowledge sharing is through Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) – computer-based applications dedicated to the acquisition, discovery, re-packaging, and distribution of knowledge. Unfortunately to date, most organizational efforts to implement KMS focus on mechanisms that enable knowledge sharing only between specific subsets of the organization. It is suggested in this paper that this is a serious impediment to knowledge sharing, and consequently, it is recommended that to share knowledge effectively, organizations need to develop and maintain a functional interface between all facets of its intellectual capital base – within and outside the firm – including its human, structural and relational capital. Adopting such a stance, a comprehensive framework for Knowledge Management Systems is presented for organizations to follow. The framework illustrates the requisites for knowledge sharing at both intra and inter-organizational levels. At the intra organizational level, the framework comprises a knowledge network that allows: 1) collaboration of knowledge between people; 2) discovery of knowledge between information systems; and 3) exchange of knowledge between people and systems. At the inter-organizational level, the framework can be extended to a knowledge lattice that enables people and systems to collaborate, discover and exchange knowledge beyond the confines of a single individual organization. Based on this framework, the requirements that underlie the successful implementation of intra-organizational knowledge networks and inter-organizational knowledge lattices are discussed, and features of the emerging ebXML standard as a promising technology for the implementation of such a framework are highlighted.

Keywords: Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Business-to-Business (B2B), ebXML, Knowledge Networks, Knowledge Lattices.