Comprehensive analytical case study
Topic: Comprehensive analytical case study
1. Overview
In the past decade of this century a lot of research has been carried out in Knowledge Management discipline and, a number of technologies have been developed and introduced into the market to facilitate various Knowledge Management tasks. Thus, Knowledge Management has been adopted and used in a wide range of organizations and businesses with the start of this millennium to create, share, manage and maintain knowledge assets.
In this assignment students are required to explore the promising areas of Knowledge Management in organizations. Students are thus required to explore at least one technology that facilitates the Knowledge Management by reading at least two relevant papers published in the year 2006 onwards. Then reusing solutions and findings from these researches as well as their own proposal to apply on their organizations (it could be their workplace, their academic institution, or an organization they have dealt with). Exploring of the technology should be in the form of listing the related features that supports or implements Knowledge Management principles and applying them in the selected organization(s) or domain.
Students are required to produce a written report in the format of a BUiD’s research paper (no more than 30 pages) on or before the due date. It is a group assignment; a division of work must be clarified in the report. However, a student might opt for complete the assignment individually.
The objective of this assignment is to: 1) allow for exploration of state-of-the-art of Knowledge Management solutions for actual organizational problems, 2) develop student analytic and problem solving skills, and 3) allow student to apply new knowledge and skills learned to an organization.
2. Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. Content Management System (CMS)
2. Business Process/Workflow Management System
3. Distributed Collaborative Work (Collaborative Software Systems)
4. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
6. Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Student may propose (i.e., come with a proposal, see Section 3) any other relatively new topic related to Knowledge Management but it should be approved by the module coordinator.
3. Proposal Guidelines (0 % of total mark)
Each student should hand in a 1-2 page proposal of the domain selected. Alternatively, students may negotiate a time for the submission of this proposal. This proposal should include
•A short title
•The name of the student
•Topic Selected
•Citations of the selected research papers
•Domain/organizational issues and role of Knowledge Management to solve
these issues
•Status/role of Knowledge Management in the domain/organization
•Any other details you may wish to include.
4. Guidelines for the Report (100% of total mark)
Below are guidelines on how to write-up your report for the case studies of chosen topic. Of course, for a short term paper, all of the sections may not be relevant. However, you may use it as a general guide in structuring your final report. You may break down any part into sub-sections and you may deviate from this structure based on your need. It is compulsory to include Conclusion/Summary at the end of each section.
Executive Summary
This un-numbered section is used to highlight all the major points covered in the report and serves as an abstract or overview for the readers. It should answer the following questions: What are the research topic(s) that the research papers cover? What are the aspects of the orgnisation under study? What are the problems or knowledge gaps? What is the role of knowledge management to address these issues?
1. Introduction
Introduce the student target organization/domain that s/he selected, its culture, its nature of business number of employees, … etc. Briefly discuss the operational issues and other relevant aspects of the selected organization. Highlight how the
organization/domain manages knowledge. Explain briefly the selected topic (from research papers) you are going to apply for highlighted issues.
2. Problem Identification and Analysis
Motivate and abstractly describe the problems in the organization (not in the research papers), that you are addressing and how you are addressing them. What are the problems? Why are they important? How are they affecting organization performance/profitability with regard to Knowledge Management? What are the conceptual and practical causes for the problems? Notice that the problems in the research papers could be different from the problems in the target organization. This is not a problem at all we are looking at a solution that could be used across domains or organizations.
3. Major Problems
Identify major problems faced by the target organization. State the problems in order in which they need attention. Only consider problems related to Knowledge Management which you are going to address later in the report as well.
4. Identification and Evaluation of Alternate Solutions
For each major problem identified in previous section, show how solutions from your reading can be reused, suggest and evaluate different possible solutions. Based on the merit you may classify which solutions are cost-effective and easier to implement. Compare your suggestion with the findings in the papers. In other words, you are not only going to reuse solutions from the research paper but also suggest additional solution(s).
5. Recommendations
In this section you may recommend best solutions in term of cost, effectiveness and efficiency … etc. from the solutions listed in previous section. You may report the details of the topic/technology selected in this section. Discuss the tool/application selected, its applicability in Knowledge Management domain, how it solves the problems in question and other technical details and features you want to include.
6. Implementation Plan
This section explains in detail the suggested solution, i.e. technology that will be implemented. Which resources and experts are required for implementation? When and where the plan will be carried out? What is hardware and other infrastructure required? A tentative detailed timetable for each task should be listed. Roughly estimate the cost for each action/resource as well. Licensing issues and other legal issues should also be addressed in this section. If applicable discuss briefly the stages in KM project. Plan should be realistic and achievable.
Bibliography & Citations
Be sure to include a standard, well-formatted, comprehensive bibliography with citations from the text referring to previously published papers in the scientific literature that you utilized or are related to your work. Always use a consistent
citation style for your references. The standard style used around the university is the Harvard Style. However, I will accept any other standard style (e.g. APA style) as long as it is used consistently.
Try to make your report EASY to read.
•Be sure to include an overview in the beginning, which outlines what the report will be describing, in a section-by-section fashion.
•Include simple examples (or better, a single simple example throughout), to help illustrate the ideas.
•A picture is worth (at least) a thousand words. Use figures, flow-charts, graphs, whenever appropriate.
•The material should be structured, and flow. It should NOT be a core-dump of everything you happened to read when you were looking at things related to X. Readers (read “the people who will assign your grade!”) get annoyed by having to wade through irrelevant material.
•Also, proof-read your report. As a grader, I find it very irritating to read a report that has pages of easy-to-fix typos, illegible figures, missing citations, etc. And you really don’t want to irritate the person who is assigning your grade…
•Your report should be self-contained. You are allowed to copy figures from other sources (if they are properly credited). But if you do, be sure to define the terms that appear in that figure!
•Save trees — hand in a 2-sided version. And use section numbers, and page numbers!
5. Academic Integrity
Copying or paraphrasing someone’s work (code included), or permitting your own work to be copied or paraphrased, even if only in part, is not allowed, and would result in a disciplinary action according to the university policy. Any resources or ideas borrowed from other sources should be explicitly referenced in text and bibliographies.
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