Evaluating knowledge management capability of organizations: a fuzzy linguistic method

Knowledge management capability (KMC) is the source for organizations to gain the sustainable competitive advantage. KMC evaluation is a required work with strategic significance. However it still has not been addressed in the existing literatures. So the objective of this study is to investigate a fuzzy multiple attributes decision-making method (FMADM) for evaluating KMC. In this paper, a framework for evaluating KMC is presented, which includes two parts, one is an evaluation hierarchy with attributes, the other a judgment matrix model with two dimensions to identify the evaluation results of KMC. Then, a fuzzy linguistic approach is proposed to evaluate the KMC of organizations. The evaluation results of KMC obtained through the proposed approach are objective and unbiased due to two reasons. Firstly, the results are generated by a group of experts in the presence of motile attributes. Secondly, the fuzzy linguistic approach employed in this paper has more advantage to reduce distortion and losing of information than other fuzzy linguistic approaches. Through evaluation result of KMC, managers could judge the necessity to improve the KMC and determine which dimension of KMC is the most needed direction to improve. Additionally, an example is used to illustrate the availability of the proposed method.     

General and specific formalization approach for a Balanced Scorecard: An expert system with application in health care

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) presents the essentials of strategic and performance management in clear, straightforward manner which is also usable in health care. If a BSC for a clinical department is an agreement, the first question to consider is the method by which it can be ascertained whether a strategy has been accomplished. There are many different techniques like AHP (analytic hierarchy process) and fuzzy systems to calculate indices.However, how does a formalized mathematical groundwork looks like that integrates current approaches and is still general enough to incorporate future expert systems with applications?The purpose of this paper is the formalization of BSC evaluation by respecting current research. The formalized expert system was implemented in an information system for health care management.     

Integrated model of hot spring service quality perceptions under uncertainty

Integrating service quality perceptions from customer expectation and employee performance groups in subjective and objective functions are the main concern of service business today. However, to evaluate service quality criteria in linguistic preferences are difficult to present as exact numerical values. Hence, this study proposes a fuzzy extension of Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) in perceptions to address intertwined criteria by applying fuzzy set theory to evaluate the subjective and objective functions and applies extension of DEMATEL to evaluate the model for strategic goals. The empirical result shows that two groups of perceptions can be combined into a visual model to further develop the strategic concerns.     

A new evaluation model for intellectual capital based on computing with linguistic variable

In a knowledge era, intellectual capital has become a determinant resource for enterprise to retain and improve competitive advantage. Because the nature of intellectual capital is abstract, intangible, and difficult to measure, it becomes a challenge for business managers to evaluate intellectual capital performance effectively. Recently, several methods have been proposed to assist business managers in evaluating performance of intellectual capital. However, they also face information loss problems while the processes of subjective evaluation integration. Therefore, this paper proposes a suitable model for intellectual capital performance evaluation by combining 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic approach with multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) method. It is feasible to manipulate the processes of evaluation integration and avoid the information loss effectively. Based on the proposed model, its feasibility is demonstrated by the result of intellectual capital performance evaluation for a high-technology company in Taiwan.     

A hybrid approach based on SERVQUAL and fuzzy TOPSIS for evaluating transportation service quality

Managing service quality is vital to retain customer satisfaction and augment revenues for any business organization. Often it is difficult to assess service quality due to lack of quantifiable measures and limited data. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach based on SERVQUAL and fuzzy TOPSIS for evaluating service quality of urban transportation systems. The proposed approach consists of three steps. The first step involves development of a SERVQUAL based questionnaire to collect data for measuring transportation service quality. The participants provide linguistic assessments to rate the service quality criteria and the alternatives. In step 2, the linguistic ratings are combined through fuzzy TOPSIS to generate an overall performance score for each alternative. The alternative with the highest score is finally chosen. In step 3, sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate the influence of criteria weights on the decision making process.The strength of the proposed approach is its practical applicability and ability to provide solution under partial or lack of quantitative information. An application of the proposed approach for evaluation of service quality of metro in Montreal is provided.     

Designing a knowledge-based system for strategic planning: A balanced scorecard perspective

First developed by Kaplan and Norton [Kaplan R. S., & Norton D. P. (1992). The balance scorecard – measures that drive performance. Harvard Business Review, 70(1), 71–79], balanced scorecard (BSC) provides an integrated view of overall organizational performance and strategic objectives. BSC integrates financial measures with other key performance indicators to create a perspective that incorporates both financial and non-financial aspects. BSC has proven a powerful tool for strategic planning and communicating strategy that assists in strategy implementation. Successful strategy implementation is based on effective strategic planning. Owing to the strategic planning being a virtual necessity in business, this work proposes an integrated approach for the balanced scorecard tool and knowledge-based system using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method, and then develops an intellectual BSC knowledge-based system for strategic planning that sets or selects firm management or operational strategies based on the following perspectives: learning and growth, internal/business process, customer, and financial performance. This system can help determine specific strategy weights. The intellectual BSC knowledge-based system facilities efficient automated strategic planning.     

An information technology trilogy: business strategy,technological deployment and organizational performance

The objective of this empirical study is to identify various profiles of technological deployment specific to various types of business strategy that best support organizational performance. Top managers from 223 organizations completed two questionnaizres analyzed using a Partial Least Squares tool (PLS graph). Profiles of technological deployment based on the strategic impact of the information system department, the technological architecture, the information system performance evaluation and technological scanning were identified. Using Miles and Snow's typology to characterize business strategy, an outward technological profile contributes directly to organizational performance for the analyzer strategic activities, while an inward profile of technological deployment contributes indirectly to organizational performance for the prospector strategic activities.     

Evaluating new product development performance by fuzzy linguistic computing

New product development (NPD) is indeed the cornerstone for companies to maintain and enhance the competitive edge. However, developing new products is a complex and risky decision-making process. It involves a search of the environment for opportunities, the generation of project options, and the evaluation by different experts of multiple attributes, both qualitative and quantitative. To perceive and to measure effectively the capability of NPD are real challenging tasks for business managers. This paper presents a 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic computing approach to deal with heterogeneous information and information loss problems during the processes of subjective evaluation integration. The proposed method which is based on the group decision-making scenario to assist business managers to measure the performance of NPD manipulates the heterogeneous integration processes and avoids the information loss effectively. Finally, its feasibility is demonstrated by the result of NPD performance evaluation for a high-technology company in Taiwan.     

A study of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system performance measurement using the quantitative balanced scorecard approach

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been used in integrating information and accelerating its distribution across functions and departments with the aim to increase organizations’ operational performance. Thus, it is worth measuring ERP system performance based on its impact to critical performance of an organization: this requires a systematic method that bridges ERP performance measurement and key organizational performance. The hierarchical balanced scorecard (HBSC) model with respect to multiple criteria decision-making is such a systematic approach to ERP performance measurement. An ERP evaluation framework that integrates the balanced scorecard dimensions, linguistic variables, and non-additive fuzzy integral provides an objective approach to measuring both the performance level of the ERP system and its contribution to the strategic objectives of high-tech firms. Taking Taiwan’s high-tech firms as an example, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of this integrated approach to measure the performance of ERP systems at the post-implementation stage under evaluators’ subjective, uncertainty, and vagueness judgments.     

Resilience analysis of service-oriented collaboration process management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies, it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should, however, be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e., overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and runtime.     

A fuzzy-logic-based approach for new product Go/NoGo decision at the front end

New product development (NPD) is both a complex process and a substantial business risk. It still requires 6.6 ideas to generate a successful product. Thus, researchers claim that inferior new products should be eliminated at the front end. Limited by both the nature and the timing of NPD, managers often perform screening in uncertain environments and based on incomplete information. Furthermore, the conventional evaluation approaches, which encapsulate or merely discard the ambiguity and multiplicity of possible concerns, make a screening economically sound but dysfunctional as well. Since most assessments are described subjectively by linguistic terms, a comprehensive method for new product screening using fuzzy logic is proposed, in which the criteria ratings and their corresponding importance are assessed in linguistic terms described by fuzzy numbers, and fuzzy weighted average is employed to aggregate these fuzzy numbers into a fuzzy-possible-success rating (FPSR) of the product. Finally, the FPSR is translated back into linguistic terms to derive at a new product screening decision. Furthermore, a case study is cited to illustrate the performance within an actual decision process. The result shows that this approach can efficiently aid managers dealing with ambiguity and complex environments in achieving relatively realistic and informative results, as well as give managers a high degree of flexibility in decision-making. In addition, the variations in linguistic values and levels of linguistic variables have an effect on the ranges of the FPSR which ultimately, affect the selection of the NPD project.     

Inter-organizational success factors: a cause and effect model

Inter-organizational systems form the basis for successful business collaboration in the Internet and B2B e-commerce era. To properly design and manage such systems one needs to understand the structure and dynamics of the relationships between organizations. The evaluation of such inter-organizational relationships (IORs) is normally conducted using “success factors”. These are often referred to as constructs, such as trust and information sharing. In strategic management and performance analysis, different methods are employed for evaluating business performance and strategies, such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method. The BSC utilizes success factors for measuring and monitoring IORs against business strategies. For these reasons, a thorough understanding of success factors, the relationships between them, as well as their relationship to business strategies is required. In other words, understanding success factors allows strategists deriving measurements for success factors as well as aligning these success factors with business strategies. This underpins nowadays close relationship between business strategy, IORs and their realization by means of inter-organizational systems. In this paper, we present (1) a systematic literature review studying success factors and their impact on IORs as well as (2) an analysis of the results found. The review is based on 177 publications, published between 2000 and 2012, dealing with factors influencing IORs. The work presented provides an overview on success factors, influencing relationships between success factors, as well as their influence on the success of IORs. The work is somehow “meta-empirical” as it only looks at published studies and not on own cases. Consequently, it is based on the assumption that studies in scientific literature represent the real-world. The constructs and relationships found in the review are grouped based on their scope and summarized in a cause and effect model. The grouping of constructs results in five groups including Relationship Orientation, Relational Norm, Relational Capital, Atmosphere, and Others. Since the cause and effect model represents a directed graph, different network analysis methods may be applied for analyzing the model. In particular, an in- and out-degree analysis is applied on the cause and effect model for detecting the most influencing as well as the most influenced success factors.     

Unleashing the Power of mCRM: Investigating Antecedents of Mobile CRM Values from Managers’ Viewpoint

Mobile technology together with Internet-based electronic commerce has transformed the way businesses operate. Mobile Customer Relationship Management (mCRM) combines mobility and CRM (customer relationship management) to enable organizations to increase their business performance by delivering better products/services to their customers. Incorporating location-based information into CRM systems has created new values and business opportunities. Using location information, for example, businesses can offer more personalized and real-time location-based services (LBS) to their customers. In this study, we investigate how the IT infrastructure and LBS support of mCRM, as technical resource capabilities, and mCRM knowledge and education, as human resource capabilities, can enhance business performance of the organization by improving mCRM’s quality dimensions. We propose a research model that integrates the resource-based view (RBV) of a firm and DeLone and McLean IS success model to investigate the effects of mCRM quality dimensions on business performance. To validate the proposed research model, we collected a set of empirical data from managers in a wide range of organizations that use mCRM in South Korea. The results indicate that the IT infrastructure of an organization as a technical resource, along with mCRM users’ knowledge, as a human resource capability can significantly influence managers’ perceptions of quality along various dimensions of mCRM: customer data quality, system quality, and service quality. Consequently, improving these quality dimensions will significantly influence the performance of an organization in terms of financial performance, productivity, and customer satisfaction. The present study would help both academic and professionals to understand and improve business performance by employing the appropriate resources that can harness the full potential of mCRM.     

Measuring e-business performance: Towards a revised balanced scorecard approach

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a management system that enables executives and managers to map their strategic objectives onto a set of performance measures in four inter-related areas, known as the financial, customer, learning and growth, and the internal process perspectives. Based on research into leading and lagging e-business companies and their measurement practices, this paper introduces an approach to modifying the balanced scorecard, applicable to the management of e-business units in which the customer perspective of the traditional balanced score card is supplemented by the incorporation of four additional perspectives (brand, service, market and technology) that have been found to be critical to the development and execution of e-business strategies. This approach facilitates a clearer understanding of the customer perspective, which consequently benefits the process of selecting the goals and measures associated with the other three perspectives, improving the quality of the overall decision-making and managerial processes as a whole.     

EXECUTIVE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Strategic necessities are information systems that have been widely adopted; their use is to maintain parity with competitors rather than to offer strategic advantage. Executive information systems (EISs) exemplify a type of information technology that has become essential to doing business in many organizations. A new and expanded role for EISs is to help managers improve product and process quality and, ultimately, customer service. This article looks at how one organization is using an enterprisewide executive information system to achieve these business objectives.     

Balanced scorecard: evening the odds of successful BPR

To realize the benefits of costly business process reengineering, companies need a control mechanism that links performance evaluation to strategic objectives. Researchers have long addressed how to control, measure, and evaluate this business process reengineering (BRP), but many so-called solutions continue to focus almost exclusively on the technical aspects of change. In this article, we present a control and evaluation framework, BSC-IS (balanced scoreboard-information system) that integrates BSC and BPR in the context of an IS or ERP (enterprise resource planning) project. BSC-IS is viewed as the roots of a solid evaluation tool for companies struggling to make costly BPR pay off.     

Defining the relationships between IT service management and IT service governance

IT service provider organizations need both IT service management (ITSM) and IT service governance (ITSG) to ensure successful service provision for their customers. However, current service science literature has not adequately addressed how these activities differ from each other. Focusing solely on IT service management and ignoring service governance aspects may cause difficulties in measuring the performance of service management, defining and deploying the roles and responsibilities of service management, allocating the resources for right service improvements and adopting the service-oriented process culture. The research problem of this study is: How does IT service management differ from IT service governance? The main contribution of the study is a framework for IT service governance and a roadmap of IT service management frameworks and standards that can be utilized in establishing IT service governance activities. The theory-based framework is validated in an IT service change management case study with five Finnish IT service provider organizations. The results of this study may be used by top management, service directors and the IT service managers of IT service companies to better identify different aspects of IT service management and IT service governance.     

Communities of practice model driven knowledge management in multinational knowledge based enterprises

Existing research in intelligent manufacturing literature has highlighted the need for linking organizational culture, business strategy with Knowledge Management (KM) as well as measuring the performance of knowledge management systems for best practice. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are accepted as best practice and distinct from organizational structures while implementing KM. Besides, employing CoPs as an approach for linking business strategies with KM design, CoPs can be the prevailing way for group learning and innovation 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. The purpose of this work is to design a CoPs model for KM which addresses issues related to organization culture, business strategy and performance measurement reported in earlier publications in intelligent manufacturing. A CoPs evaluation hierarchy for KM is developed. It includes four dimensions and sixteen criteria for studying and evaluating organizational culture and business strategy. Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach has been employed to quantitatively analyze various criteria priorities and business strategy preferences of CoPs. In order to validate the CoPs model, a case study has been undertaken in two multinational knowledge based organizations and the results are compared to differentiate strategic preferences. The contributions of this paper include: a) Definition of a CoPs model based on sixteen criteria which helps to understand an organization’s KM culture or CoPs; b) Employing these criteria to link an organization‘s KM culture with four business strategies; c) Develop a quantitative method for measuring KM performance in the context of four business strategies, and d) Validating the CoPs model through its application in two multinationals in Taiwan and Japan. The CoPs model thus can be used by organizations to understand their KM culture, allocate resources towards the chosen business strategy and measure KM performance in the context of the chosen business strategy.     

Using Cpk index with fuzzy numbers to evaluate service quality

Service quality is measured by customers' satisfaction. Traditionally, the degree of satisfaction is calculated from the data obtained from questionnaires that have been filled by customers directly. The percentile of each different level of a customer's satisfaction is employed to summarize and compare the quality of service provided by different enterprises. This approach does not consider the consistency of the customers' perceptions, thus making comparison difficult. This paper introduces the concept of a process capability index that considers both the average and the consistency of the data simultaneously. Evaluations of service quality are usually vague and linguistic. We use the fuzzy numbers of linguistic variables developed in fuzzy set theory to modify the process capability index, and then apply it to evaluate the quality of a service. The average and consistency of the data obtained from a service quality evaluation are thus considered simultaneously, making the comparison of the performance of service quality easier. Moreover, the value of the index can be applied to help to point out the direction for improving the performance of service quality whenever it is lower than some default value.     

Implementing Fuzzy Logic and AHP into the EFQM model for performance improvement: A case study

In the current volatile and demanding business environment, managers are so eager to demonstrate that their organizations are excellent which can mainly be achieved through continuous performance improvement. The most applicable and suitable tools that by the assessment of organizations shows how successful they are in the organizational excellence path is European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model. This study aims at presenting a new integrated approach based on EFQM model using Fuzzy Logic, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique and Operations Research (OR) model to improve the organizations’ excellence level by increasing the quality of business performance evaluation and determining of improvement projects with high priority. A case study in Yazd Regional Electricity Co. in Iran is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. In a way that, primarily, performance assessment by crisp method and the proposed method, Fuzzy method, is carried out. Then, strength points and the areas for improvement are identified by defining the scores for sub-criteria. Next, sub-criteria are prioritized to define the improvement projects by using AHP technique and Operations Research model. Finally, improvement projects with high priority are determined and some action plans for improvement projects are defined.