This work brings together knowledge from many parts of the world to provide theoretical and applied concepts, methodologies, and techniques that help diffuse skills required to create intelligent enterprises of the 21st century for gaining sustainable competitive advantage in a global environment.

This book provides an up-to-date study of the fundamental facets of supporting information technologies: organisation and people, data and information, presentation of information, and process. To improve the effective use of human resources, it is necessary to capture the structure of an organisation and the knowledge of people within the organisation. Data can be processed to produce new information by either inferring hidden implications or summarising a large volume of information into more manageable information units. Information may also be required to be presented using different perspectives so as to meet individual needs and at the same time reinforce policy on data access rights. Routing of information and job tasks is paramount in ensuring that all necessary steps are taken for a given job. These complementary aspects are explored throughout the volume.The book is a selection of papers presented at the Industrial Session of the 9th IFIP 2.6 Working Conference on Database Semantics. It will be of significant value to researchers, teachers, students and practitioners. The scope embraces design methodology, implementation techniques, and applications development. Specific topics include knowledge management, intelligent enterprises, query transformation, information sharing and retrieval, data warehousing, and knowledge discovery.

In this penetrating study of how knowledge-based services and technology are revolutionizing the economy and every corporate strategy, James Brian Quinn argues that the successful companies of the 90's -- whether in manufacturing or services -- will derive their competitive edge not from ephemerally superior products but from a deep understanding of a few highly developed knowledge and service based "core competencies." Rarely will owning the largest raw materials resource, manufacturing plants, equipment bases, or integrated facilities provide a maintainable competitive edge for major companies. Such physical properties are too easily cloned or bypassed. From now on, Quinn documents, intelligent enterprises will derive sustainable advantage from knowledge and service based activities that leverage intellectual assets. They will increase value through technological sophistication, better knowledge bases, more creative customer responsiveness, and the unsurpassed management of human and intellectual capital that competitors cannot reproduce. Quinn analyzes the technological and economic forces that make such strategies essential. He shows in detail how to create and leverage knowledge and service based core competencies for maximum focus and effectiveness. Managers, Quinn asserts, must define each value-creating activity as a knowledge based service and determine whether or not they can perform that service -- be it research, design, inventory control, accounting, distribution, or advertising -- better than anyone else in the world. Using examples from companies such as Merck, Honda, Apple, Boeing, and Wal-Mart, Quinn describes how forward-looking companies can best perform needed analyses and implement strategies around selected core competencies. By eliminating or "outsourcing" less important functions to superior outside vendors, firms become more responsive, decentralized, and lean. They become the "intelligent enterprises" of the 1990s, leveraging human and capital resources much more than other firms. They may also take on radically new organizational forms, become "starburst," "inverted," "infinitely flat," or "spiders' web" configurations. By designing and benchmarking their knowledge and service based activities to be "best in world," managers can obliterate overhead costs, smash bureaucracies, motivate personnel, and create greater value for customers and shareholders alike.

If you are responsible for the management of an intelligence enterprise operation and its timely and accurate delivery of reliable intelligence to key decision-makers, this book is must reading. It is the first easy-to-understand, system-level book that specifically applies knowledge management principles, practices and technologies to the intelligence domain. The book describes the essential principles of intelligence, from collection, processing and analysis, to dissemination for both national intelligence and business applications.

Practical and comprehensive approach to enterprise portals and their relationship to knowledge management.

Creating Knowledge Based Organizations brings together high quality concepts and techniques closely related to organizational learning, knowledge workers, intellectual capital, and knowledge management. It includes the methodologies, systems and approaches that are needed to create and manage knowledge based organizations.

Price and quality alone are no longer sufficient to gain competitive advantage. It is high quality knowledge which provides the opportunities for adding exclusive value to products and services. At the same time, the development of knowledge is gaining momentum. Knowledge is becoming obsolete more quickly and becomes more complex. The danger of this development is that organizations will continue to play the same competitive game and are often unaware that they are lagging behind. This book provides organizations with a way to shift the knowledge ambition and realize it in practice. For this purpose, an intelligent business strategy is offered based on the experiences of seven market leaders in The Netherlands combined with modern insights from the organizational theory. The Netherlands is presently the country with the highest productivity in commercial services. The authors devote much attention to the tools available to the knowledge enterprise, such as lateral structures, personnel management and information technology.