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Future Challenges for KM 445

Bristol-Myers Squibb ’ s SMART-IDEA, for example, incorporates data repositories, data
integration technologies, data visualization, and data mining tools, as well as having
decision support functionalities. Finally, there are a growing number of doctoral theses
that address KM themes.
Some sample KM research topics include:
• What are the exact mechanisms by which knowledge and learning are institutional-
ized and embedded in the corporate memory?
• How can communities of practice support and enhance professional education?
• When do stories work best and why? Is there a best practice for creating and telling
stories?
• What drives employees to share their knowledge with each other or hoard it? What
can management do to increase knowledge sharing among employees?
• How can blogs be used in KM research? What types of data can be collected and
how can they be analyzed?
• Evaluation of knowledge generation methods within companies, information
sharing in multinational companies, reward structures, and commitment in global
teams, cultural differences (cross cultural communication problems) within global
teams, defi nitions of knowledge (e.g., cultural relativity of defi nitions, temporal insta-
bility of defi nitions), effects of organizational identity on defi nition of core knowledge
competences
• Language (genre-specifi c analyses of stories, argumentation, conversation, computer-
mediated) as used in organizations and practical applications or theoretical contri-
butions of strategy development, language coherence, language contingency,
organizational rhetoric, impression management, language and organizational
identity
• The gap between theory and implementation of knowledge management systems
and principles
• Do top-down knowledge management initiatives meet bottom-up organizational
learning?
• Business ethics as it relates to the use of IT; methods of effectively assessing ethical
quality in business systems and processes
• Evaluating and improving the facilitation of group workshops
• The implementation of strategy (or change programs), and the adaptability of
strategy to new pressures
• Search engine use patterns. How do employees interact with intranet search engines?