Page 225 - DCAP208_Management Support Systems

Management Support Systems

Notes a shared common goal. Management interferes to give sense in the company strategic
objectives and to give an official recognition, together with resources. The needs are then
for collaborative work.
4. Consolidation: The community works and produces on a regular basis, and this work is
integrated in the collective action. Management evaluates periodically its action and its
production. The needs are then for sharing and capitalisation.
5. Dissociation: The well anchored communities tend to withdraw into themselves, and
some outside signs are often there to show it (apparition of a jargon, gregarious mind,).
The management must clearly observe these phenomena and must facilitate cooperation
and transfer of knowledge between communities.
6. Know how to stop a community, as one can stop a project: This dissociation maybe
generated in intern by actors blocked in their creative capacity and who will find in the
emergence of another community the necessary rebirth to the expression of their knowledge
need.

To pilot cooperation it is necessary to define:
Indicators of cooperation: How to recognize that there is a development of cooperation
within the different types of collective work (team, project, process and network)?

Indicators of results of the cooperation: What are effects of the cooperation on the
knowledge capital? Several criteria seem useful to recognize that members of a network
cooperate:
They construct, from their individual representations, of shared representations of
problems to solve, of objectives to reach, of goals to achieve.

They communicate efficiently, using a common language, understanding the
language of the others and sharing the point of view of others.

They cross their domain (discipline, sectors, geographical…) by interdisciplinary
actions
They accept the existence of conflicts (of criteria, of points of view, of priorities…),
managing them in appropriate time, and proceeding to arbitrations.
They put some new applicable and evolutionary organization in place.

Supporting Technologies for Knowledge Communities

The new types of work described above are tightly linked to rapid adoption and dissemination
of systems and Technologies for Information and Communication (ICT) within the organisation.
The rapid increase and development of new ICT has a considerable influence on Knowledge
Management. There is sometimes confusion (maybe on purpose) between ICT and KM.

In classical information systems (data bases, data banks …) functionalities are well known: an
information system is by definition a system to process, store and present information. Coming
from computer networks, communication technology had the clear functionality of data
transmission. With the introduction of new types of tools, especially web based, those distinctions
are no longer clear; they are more complex and difficult to understand deeply from the user’s
point of view. In fact the new ICT products must be analysed regarding the notion of services,
and those services justify their use in Knowledge Management problems, especially cooperative
work, in the sense defined above.
There are four types of services attached to ICT:

Communication

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