Index evaluations and business strategies on communities of practice Index evaluations and business strategies on communities of practice Mei-Tai Chu *, Rajiv Khosla Business Systems and Knowledge Modeling Laboratory, School of Business La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria – 3086, Australia Abstract Business strategies and index evaluations on communities of practice (CoPs) could be the prevailing way for group learning and inno- vation building within firms. As firms grow in size, scope, and complexity, CoPs members who regularly engage in sharing and learning based on common interests, could improve organizational performance. Due to multi-criteria consideration and uncertain information handling, the purpose of this research is to use the fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to analyze various index pri- orities and strategy preferences of CoPs, by undertaking empirical studies of Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan. Fourteen units in survey case were given fifty-seven questionnaires about their priorities towards sixteen different pairs of criteria. Addi- tionally, they were also asked to estimate their four highest achievable business strategies. These evaluation criteria include satisfying multi-dimensions to capable operators. Under each of the four first-tier dimensions, four second-tier criteria are used to assess and echo their first-tier dimensions. The findings of this paper can promote performance value of implementing knowledge management systems and modelling of competitive strategies for CoPs. � 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Communities of practice (CoPs); Business Strategies; Fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM); Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) 1. Introduction CoPs simultaneously emphasizes storage and distribu- tion of explicit and tacit knowledge, enhances member interaction and knowledge sharing, enables organization learning, and induces innovation to maximize the value of Knowledge Management (KM). Global enterprises, such as IBM, 3M, Xerox, Cisco, and Dell, meet transfor- mation needs by operating CoPs in emerging economies, have taken CoPs as a new central role in the value chain (Chu, Shyu, Tzeng, & Khosla, 2007a, 2007b). As knowl- edge complexity increases, and cross-field cooperation grows, the knowledge lifecycle shortens. Therefore, CoPs tends to focus on important issues which face dynamic and evolving nature of organizations. ITRI is a non-profit organization dedicated to the research and development of industrial technologies, in order to promote Taiwan’s high-tech industry. ITRI’s vision for 2008 is to maintain the same scale but triple the revenue growth of 2002. They face an enormous chal- lenge reaching such a high target, especially if they rely on traditional work methods and cultural legacy (Buckley, 1985). ITRI with many knowledge workers wants to pro- vide industrial total solution and continue to innovate. CoPs could be the best practice to break the organizational fence and establish a sharing culture. From 2000, ITRI began implementing KM. In 2003, they focused on cus- tomer driven values and gradually generated KM benefits. Each ITRI unit’s resources are limited, and preferences and problems toward CoPs are different. Every unit will have varying index priorities and goals. Therefore, the maxi- mum benefit and impact of CoPs can be achieved with careful planning (ITRI, 2003, 2007). The purpose of this research is to use fuzzy MCDM method to identify the index priority and to measure the four-business strategies of CoPs. This evaluation fea- tures two distinct stages. First, we brainstorm with KM 0957-4174/$ - see front matter � 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2007.11.053 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 3 94793064; fax: +61 3 94795971. E-mail address: debbiechu0421@hotmail.com (M.-T. Chu). www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 1549–1558 Expert Systems with Applications mailto:debbiechu0421@hotmail.com consultants in ITRI to identify dimensions and criteria for the questionnaire. This research proposed four-dimen- sion architecture with objective and trade-off criteria as follows, with four criteria designed for each dimension, respectively. � Locus of Leadership: related to enforcement or volun- teer, whole or partial adoption. � Incentive Mechanism: related to award or punishment. � Member Interaction: related to sharing or security. � Complementary Asset: related to infrastructure and resource. Secondly, the questionnaire was distributed to a broad sampling of CoPs experts, to seek their views and calculate their index values. The aim is to provide a valuable refer- ence when choosing suitable CoPs business strategies. Although many scholars assert that CoPs create organiza- tion value, there has been relatively little systematic and quantitative study on the linkage between community out- comes and the underlying functional structure, the majority of papers focus on individual and subjective viewpoints, this research attempts to determine these insufficiencies, and aims at objective and trade-off driven criteria for future analysis. When evaluating business strategies of CoPs, many dif- ferent aspects could be taken into consideration. There are numerous evaluation indexes. Moreover, their struc- tures are hierarchical (Kerzner, 1989). Many scholars and experts have adopted the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) (Saaty, 1977, 1980) method to evaluate the prob- lems of relative level factors of hierarchy and to provide a more complete depiction of the structural and func- tional aspects of whole system. For instance, Hwang and Yoon (1981) discussed multi-attribute decision meth- ods and application, In addition, Cheng and Mon (1994) evaluated weapon system by AHP, Tsaur, Tzeng, and Wang (1997) analyzed tourist risk using fuzzy perspec- tives, and Tang and Tzeng (1999) researched e-business promotion strategy for information service industry. Other examples of AHP and fuzzy MCDM usage include: Yu and Lee (2002) evaluated the policy issuing for national 3G telecommunications license using the fuzzy multi-evaluation strategic method, Shyu (2003) used fuzzy MCDM to identify foundry factors and preferred location of IC design. In the questionnaire, dimensions were measured by pair- wise comparison, participants found it easier to decide dimension A is more important than B dimension instead of dimension A versus B is 5 to 1. Recently some scholars used fuzzy AHP (Buckley, 1985) to handle linguistic scale problems, which is more convenient to help participants to express opinion and concept precisely, just as Cheng and Mon (1994) applied to the choosing of weapon systems. This research uses the fuzzy AHP method proposed by Buckley (1985). The questionnaires and consultant inter- views were designed to reveal the perspectives of ITRI CoPs experts, in fourteen units. The questionnaires and interviews were also designed to weight their comparative importance of business strategies and indexes. Sixty-two surveys were returned out of the seventy-five distributed. For the purpose of the research, only five are deemed inva- lid. AHP, EXCEL, and SPSS were used to analyze the questionnaires, which were collected at different stages of the hierarchy and for different types of work. For CoPs dimension priority, the results show that par- ticipants chose Member Interaction, Incentive Mechanism, Complementary Asset, and Locus of Leadership in that order. For criteria importance, Emphasize Cross-Field Sharing scored highest, next Achievements Appraisal Basis, then Bottom-Up Teaming, and Independent IT Platform ranked lowest. For business strategies, Increasing Core Competency scored highest, next Enhancing Working Effi- ciency, Inducing Innovation Learning, and finally Promoting Responsiveness scored the lowest. Section 2 briefly introduces the literature review and comparison analysis used: the implications, benchmarks, and values as well as a description of expected benefits. The benefit assessment follows the firm’s missions and objectives, making a holistic understanding of managerial structure, a critical success index to evaluate benefits. Sec- tion 3 illustrates the characteristics of fuzzy MCDM with models. Section 4 designs a research model to meet analyt- ical needs. Section 5 conducts a questionnaire using above model to perform and verify the results from this study. Finally, Section 6 provides the conclusions and suggestions of this research. 2. Literature review and comparison analysis Most KM projects stress explicit knowledge. However, very little tacit knowledge of the individual or community is inquired upon. In the last two years KM projects empha- size people interface, especially cross organization bound- aries. As the tacit knowledge is transmitted in cross- regions, CoPs has become the critical concept in design and operation of KM systems. 2.1. CoPs implications There is different positioning and goals in various CoPs. Although the names differ, the different terms describe sim- ilar content and concept. In 2000, Verna thought knowl- edge should include and utilize KC to create organizational knowledge. In 1998, Wenger first proposed CoPs in the Harvard Business Review. He believes CoPs is an informal group sharing knowledge, points out CoPs is composed by three critical elements shown in Table 1. 2.2. CoPs benchmarking There is other team formation in an organization besides CoPs, including formal divisions, project teams, 1550 M.-T. Chu, R. Khosla / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 1549–1558 https://isiarticles.com/article/12638