„The 10th International Conference on Knowledge Management: Projects, Systems and Technologies”
Throughout the last decades, a wide variety of organizational practices have been proposed to support the acquisition, storage, retrieval, application, generation, and review of the knowledge assets of an organization in a controlled way; despite this, it is often unclear how these practices relate to one another in their contribution to organizational performance.
In the information age, rather than physical assets or resources, knowledge is the key to competitiveness. What is new about attitudes to knowledge today is the recognition of the need to master, manage and use it like any other asset. This raises issues not only of appropriate processes and systems, but also of how to account for knowledge in the balance sheet.
The management literature of these last few years suggests a variety of practices meant to support the creation, storage and transfer of information and knowledge. Knowledge Management (KM) is a relatively new subject matter, being integrated in the curricula of some North-American universities and debated in a few dedicated journals starting with 1995, and our university curriculum has recently included the subject matter of “Knowledge Management”.
As a new scientific area, there are at present quite many schools of thought referring to Knowledge Management, which therefore accounts for the difficulty or even impossibility to set the conceptual framework of this domain, starting from a unanimously accepted definition of it. As a consequence, the approach to the matter differs with each school or even author.
KM can be regarded from the following perspectives:
• The technocentric perspective, stressing technologies, especially those contributing to knowledge enlargement and sharing;
• The organizational perspective, seeking to answer questions such as: How should the enterprise be designed to facilitate the knowledge processes inside it? or, Which organizations work best and based on what processes?
• The ecological perspective, regarding the human interactions, the identity, knowledge and environment factors as a complex adjustment system.
In addition to the above, as the subject matter becomes more consistent and gains ground, more and more academic debates are taking place in the epistemological area, emerging both at the theoretical and practical level of Knowledge Management. Outstanding standardization institutions in the United Kingdom and Australia produced reference documents in a common attempt to outline the conceptual framework and scope of the subject, but so far all of them have been only slightly accepted or insufficiently grasped and adopted.
The papers gathered in this volume are all meant to facilitate communication between international multidisciplinary teams. This year’s Knowledge Management Conference itself provides – as its organizing committee has stated – a forum for discussion of topics related to the development of Knowledge Management and related subject matters.
This event follows the 7th KM Conference hosted by CAROL I National Defense University in Bucharest in November 2012, and the papers submitted to the conference in 2012 will be published in the 2013 Proceedings.
The mission of the International Conferences on Knowledge Management is to facilitate communication between international multidisciplinary teams. The Conference provides a forum for the discussion of topics related to the development of knowledge management and related disciplines.
The main areas of interest proposed for the submission of the papers are the following:Knowledge, Learning and Cognitive Systems, K-Organizations, KM Projects, Knowledge Dynamics.
The Proceedings of the conference include the full text papers. The 8th Conference’s active participants came from different parts of Europe.
The conference attracted over 55 papers but, in the end, after careful evaluation, 27 papers were accepted. We had 49 evaluators from over 20 countries, approximately 80% from outside Romania. 50% papers were rejected, 30% accepted with amendments, and 20% papers accepted as such.
The papers are very interesting, of high quality and address a wide range of key issues. To them very different individuals, organizations and countries have contributed, involved in Knowledge Management issues. The authors bring forth extensive experience and diverse views of the state and local governmental institutions, universities, small businesses, private industry and research institutes from all over the world.
We do hope that the conference will keep up the tradition and will continue to be organized every other year in the future.
Finally, we would like to thank all participants who shared their expertise with colleagues during the conference. We also hope that the papers included in this volume will give new ideas to the readers in their quest to solve various problems.
The conference would not have been possible without the joint effort of the organizing committee (the Academy of Economic Studies, “Carol I” National Defense Universityand the Project Management Romania Association) and the evaluating board, to whom we are deeply grateful.
ISSN 2069 – 1920
