What are the effects of Globalisation on Requirement Engineering?

Introduction

Globalisation is about interconnection of economic, social, culture, technology, commercial among the organisations and peoples, which bring them together to form one interdependent community .The development made by human beings in the last century, is the greatest ever made in the history of mankind. This is mainly due to Globalisation and Information Technology. Globalisation enables us to exploit the vast natural and human resources of the world where as, information technology provides tools to help us achieve with progress. Due to Globalisation, software development units at Western is most shifted in the Eastern parts of the world, such as India, China and Pakistan, the reason mainly being inexpensive labour and recourses. This is because of rapid growth of IT education, due to which talented software developers and system analysis are easily available in eastern parts of world. This is also helpful for the developing countries in turn of employment generation and new review stream. Teams are working simultaneously from different parts of the world to develop software, resulting in satisfying the rapid demand of the software market in short time. “Reduce the development duration by 50% if there are two sites and by 67% if there are three sites” (Carmel E. at el, 2009).this is the main reason which compel western software industry to open development houses in the east.
Software is the essential part of Information systems, which help us to interact with IT infrastructure. Unlike other engineering fields, software engineering is not fully evolved. New methods and techniques of constructing software are introduced very frequently, but they still need lots of improvement and development. Requirement Analysis is the first and major process of Software Development, which help software developers to understand the real requirement and problem domain of the end user. This essay consist of two parts: first part explains the process of requirement engineering and the second describes the risk involved in requirement engineering due to by globalisation of software industry and finally the conclusion.

Requirement Engineering

Requirements are the needs of the user. In other words, these are the problems which need to be attended. In the software engineering context, it provides the justification of' “why” and “what” of software (Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000) .The requirement engineering commences in the beginning of the software engineering process. If there are any mistakes or confusions in understanding the requirement, either by the software engineer or by the user, it is very difficult to resolve it after the development of the software. So it is suggested the requirement should be clearly communicated to both user and software developer so the end product will reflect the user needs.
Some examples of real systems which have failed due to poor requirement engineering are: (Bray, 2002)
• Performing Rights Society, PROMS project 1992
• London Stock Exchange TAURUS project
• London Ambulance Service Despatch system
The role of the Requirement Engineering in software engineering is very essential; it is like the foundation on which the software is built. According to Zave (1997):
“Requirements engineering is the branch of software engineering concerned with the real world goals for, functions of, and constraints on software systems. It is also concerned with the relationship of these factors to precise specifications of software behaviour and to their evolution over time and across software families.”
According to this definition, function and constraints of software should based on ‘real world goals’ and requirement engineering is used to translate these goal in to a software system.
A requirement engineer performs many tasks: first to identify the stakeholder/users as there could be many stakeholders and each with the different requirement: second to extract the tacit requirement of each of the stakeholder by close coordination and understanding of the work performed by each users effected by the new system, the third task is to list all the requirements for further examination and validation. It is necessary to confirm gathered requirement from the end user whether gathered information is actual account of stakeholder’s real requirement or not and finally negotiating the enlisted requirement with the stakeholder for further development of the software (Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000)

Processes involved in Requirement Engineering

The input and output in requirement engineering process are “existing system requirement”, “stakeholder needs”, “organization standards” and “domain information”. As a result output are”agreed requirement”, “system specification”, “system models” (Kotonya and Sommerville, 1998) each of these outputs defines and states the user’s requirements, inform of a documents which helps software developers to understand who, what, how of problems faced by stakeholders.
The main actors involved in this process are domain experts often called End Users, System End User person who will administer the system after it is delivered, requirement engineer ,software engineer and project manager: each of them have specific role and deliverables. (Kotonya and Sommerville, 1998)
The processes involved in Requirement engineering are:
• Requirement Elicitation
• Requirement Analysis and Negotiation
• Requirement documentation
• Requirement validation

Requirement Elicitation
Requirement elicitation is the first step in requirement engineering. It is all about information gathering, identifying the correct source and method used to gather these requirements (Bray, 2002). The activities performed by the Requirement Engineer in requirement elicitation are
1. Establishes the objectives by identifying the business goals and understanding the problem to be solved.
2. Understands the background of the organization by analyzing the structure of the organisation, exploring the application domain and gathering knowledge about the existing system used in the organization
3. Gathers the knowledge about stake holder which includes the end user who will directly be affected by the system, customer or client “who pays for the system”, developer who will manage the system after deployment (Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000) :
4. Extracts the “goal prioritisation” (Kotonya and Sommerville 1998).
5. Collects the stakeholder requirements because different stake holders may have different requirement.
6. Establishes the knowledge of domain in which system will work as no system works in vacuum, there must be other systems which will provide the inputs or extract output from this system.
7. Categorizes the organization requirement; this could be global policies of the organization. (Kotonya and Sommerville 1998).

There are many types of requirement which are necessary to collect during requirement elicitation process. Functional requirements are the ones which identify the core functionality of the system. Without them, the system will not complete or system will lose its basic needs. Performance requirements may be regarded as the “parameters” of the functionality which determine how fast or how reliable the system will work. Bray categorized it into “response times”, “quality of data”, “user friendly” (2002) .Design constraints are procured in requirement. It restricts the developer to perform the activities within limitation like system will only use client specified Object Oriented methodology, operation system, GUI or data base limitation.
Requirement Analysis and Notation
Requirements which are elicited earlier are analyzed and consensus of stakeholder on gathered requirement are required .This is performed because most of requirements may be ambiguous, incorrect, incomplete or might be incomparable with the budge allocated for development (Kotonya and Sommerville 1998). Requirement negotiation is vital because different stakeholders have different requirements and may disagree with requirement of different features of the system. Requirement negotiation is the process of discussing the conflict into the requirement and finding suitable consensus between stakeholders and developers .The main activity in Requirement Analysis is the analysis of check list which describes key feature such as “Premature design”,” combined requirement”,” unnecessary requirement” ,”non standard software and hardware”, “conformance with business goals”, “requirement ambiguity”, “requirement realism” and “requirement testability” (Kotonya and Sommerville 1998). Meeting is the most effective tool for requirement negations. Requirement analysis and negotiation is a time consuming task
Requirement documentation
Once the requirement is analyzed and all the ambiguities removed and all the stake holder are satisfied, then the gathered requirement are documented, as the standard defined in IEEE for further reference and traceability .This can used as a legal agreement of client and supplier about the characteristics and functionalities of developed software . The qualities of good requirement document as explain by IEEE are “Unambiguous”, “Complete”, “Verifiable”, “Consistent”, “Modifiable”, “Traceable”, “Usable during the Operation” and “Maintenance Phase” (IEEE Std 830-1984)
Requirement validation
Requirement validation is the last step in requirement engineering. As the name states, it is used to check the requirement document for any incomplete, ambiguous and inconsistent requirement in the document. The actors involved in the requirement validation are stakeholders, requirement engineer and system design engineer. The input required in the requirement process are “Requirement Document”, “Organization Knowledge “,”Organization standard” as the result of requirement validation output are “list of problem” and “agreed actions” (Kotonya and Sommerville 1998).Requirement Review is the technique used to validate the requirement. Prototyping is used to represent the gathered requirement in a small less function-able copy of the system required by the end user .It is another good technique to show the end-user how the system will work.

What is Globalisation?

Globalisation is the phenomena of making the world more connected interdependent, share the knowledge and resources. As definition suggests, it is a rapid increase in cross-border economic, social, technological exchange (globalisation guide, unknown). Globalisation started in the 19th century when the industries started producing commodities which were higher than the needs of local population and people started searching new markets to sell their products. The new ways of transportation aided globalisation to spread across the world. One of the reasons for globalisation is open, free markets. In the 80s “Structural Adjustment Programs” forced many third world countries to open their markets for foreign investors and trade. This encouraged them to spread their services and goods to developed countries. Free trade agreements like “North American Free Trade Agreement” and economic unions like the “European Union” led to higher rates of spread of money and ideas across the world. The growing cost of manufacture and labour in the industrialized nations compels them to seek other sources for cheap labour and resources. Developing countries give them perfect platform for both and help them to move the manufacturing plants to their countries. (SG Legal Solutions, 2008)

Information Technology and Globalisation

Information Technology (IT) is the driving from of globalisation. IT provides the communication and data services which help organizations to spread and connect their offices and peoples. In the context of the software industry, the most significant achievement of globalisation is Global Software work (GSW) (Shay at el, 2003) in other words distributed software development. In GWS software development team are collaborating with each other by using electronic collaboration site, email and video conferences to create the software collectively and development work follow the technique. called “Follow The Sun (FTS)” (Carmel E. at el, 2009) in with two or more team are situated at different geographic location and round the clock work is achieved by the difference of time zone between the two, when one team finishes one module at the end of the day it sends it to the other team in a region where the day has just started. Hence they just test the module and send it back for update. In this manner software are created in a much faster rate than before and this is all due to globalisation. (Shay at el, 2003)
These entire advances in the technology cannot help us to generate automated software like automobile industry where robots are used to manufacture automobile. We need human interactions in each process of software development from requirement to deployment, which leads us to failed software and cause disaster in financial, reputation and human life .There are many international standard which help us in maturing this process but error happen and mostly due to Human interaction.
It this section we are analyzing the effect of globalisation on one of the software engineering process i.e. Requirement Engineering which is elucidated briefly in previous section.
Requirement engineering in context of Distributed Software Development
Globalisation has change the nature of software development process ( Šmite , 2006), now teams which are located at vast geographical distance and different time zone can work on the same project ,this trend of developing software enable is resources “mobility “,knowledge sharing , “speeding time-to-market” , increase in “operational efficiency” (Smite, 2005).of software and this rapid development help the software industry to increase in production and effectively fulfil the requirement of customer. Many organizations from US and Europe form an alliance or partnership with software house in South Asia (India, Pakistan) and Far East to utilize the cheap resource and labour of these countries. The companies in US or Europe gather requirement by communicating with the customer and send the detail requirement document to the development in these countries .Some of these problem are explained by Berenbach (2006) the requirement engineer don’t have “time to read the requirement” from the customer and send the requirement document to developer, these types of problems are due to incompetence and are not analyse in this article. But according to some recent publications on effect of distributed requirement engineering we can categorize the effects of globalisation into three categories
Communication
Culture
Time
These categories are derived from the academic case studies performed by Edwards and Sridhar (2005) and real life projects and case studies described in articles by Damian and Zowghi (2003), Šmite, (2006), Berenbach (2006), Bhat, Gupta, Murthy (2006) and Hanisch & Corbitt (2004)
Communication
Communication is most important aspect in distributed requirement engineering (Hanisch & Corbitt, 2004), Success of any project depends on how the requirement is communicated to the developer and in the situation of distributed software engineering it becomes more difficult due to the geographical distant and mode of communication used (Gupta, Murthy 2006).Different formal and informal communication techniques are used in requirement engineering process (Hanisch & Corbitt, 2004),but major cause of project failure in Siemens Corporate are due to lack of communication Berenbach (2006) between the team members located in different offices of the company and even some fail due to movement of RE team of vendor from “onshore to offshore” and they reduce the communication between RE team of client (Bhat, Gupta, Murthy 2006). Electronic communication like Email is one of the most common asynchronous way to connect users with requirement engineers but it is found that email is less effective because email get lost or forgotten or misinterpret and end user may come up will same problem again, Damian and Zowghi (2003), so one of the most effective way to gather requirement in distributed environment is video conferences and live calibration software which enable you to interact with the end user directly and effectively (Damian and Zowghi, 2003).
Culture
Culture plays a critical role in any work and effect the requirement process in two ways, first differences in language of clients and development team can cause ambiguity in requirement and requirement document (Bhat, Gupta, Murthy, 2006). Language differences of client and vendor’s organization which is very common in outsourcing projects between Europe and India or Pakistan could lead to requirement document based on the “assumption derived from brief conversations” conducted between client and vendor .This can be overcome by using the standard language i.e. English throughout the project and define a glossary of terms used in that requirement document. Second most important aspect is Trust between the teams; this becomes more vital when the teams are distributed.”There is a wealth of research that systematically examines the effect of trust in the context of electronic commerce” (Cheung & Lee, 2001 cited in Edwards & Sridhar 2005) Virtual team project conducted by Edwards & Sridhar (2005) between student located in Canada and India clearly identify that trust level increase as the celebration between to team increase due to the use of synchronized method as Video conference Šmite, (2006)
Time
The differences in time zone is treated as a positive in the distributed requirement engineering because two teams located at different time zones can work for 24 hours a day on the project,since there is always a wide gap in the working hours of each team. This will increase the development and shorten the delivery time of the software. This time lapse gives extra time to both teams to utilize it in some useful way
On the other hand, there is a drawback is this, due to this difference in time the requirement engineer might not be in high spirits at dawn. According to Berenbach (2006) “if reviewers must be up at 3 am to conduct a Telco review, they may not be at their physical best, and might lack some enthusiasm.

Conclusion

Requirement engineering is all about understanding the right needs of right stockholders and translates them into system which will truly reflect the business value. In case of globalised distributed environment whether stakeholders or software developer are distributed on a geographical area, there are many obstacles in the requirement engineering process which need to addressed, for example one essential component of requirement elicitation is to identify the stakeholder, this process become difficult when the stakeholders are located in different geographical location and speak different language, to identify the correct stakeholder communication plays important role and project manager should use the standard language like English or some interpreter to identify or translator the real requirement . Difference of Time zone plays significant role in requirement negotiation with reference of both client and software developer because both have to either wake up or stay awake at wrong timings due to time zone different to negotiation and analysis the correct requirement.
Overall globalisation changes the conventional method of gathering requirement and new techniques are available which address communication, culture and time differences while gathering the requirement, but in overall globalisation increase the production of software and many developing countries are generating larger revenue due to shift in industry.

Reference List

Berenbach, B., 2006, Impact of Organizational Structure on Distributed Requirements Engineering Processes: Lessons Learned International Conference on Software Engineering 2006 international workshop on Global software development for the practitioner table of contents Shanghai, China Pages: 15 - 19 ISBN:1-59593-404-9
Bhat J. M., Gupta M, and. Murthy S. N, 2006 Overcoming Requirements Engineering Challenges: Lessons from Offshore Outsourcing, Software, IEEE Volume: 23, Issue: 5 On page(s): 38-44 ISSN: 0740-7459
Bray I.K. 2000, an Introduction to Requirements Engineering, Publisher by PEARSON EDUCATION (US) Date Published: 2002 ISBN-13: 9780201767926
Carmel E., Dubinsky Y., Espinosa A., (2009), Follow The Sun Software Development: New Perspectives, Conceptual Foundation, and Exploratory Field Study, International Conference on System Sciences, 2009. HICSS'09 42nd Hawaii
5-8 Jan. 2009
Damian D. E., Zowghi D.2003 Requirements Engineering challenges in multi-site software development Requirements Engineering Journal, 8, pp. 149-160, 2003
Edwards, H. K; Sridhar, V. 2005 Analysis of Software Requirements Engineering Exercises in a Global Virtual Team Setup Journal of Global Information Management, Vol. 13, Issue 2
Globalisation guide, Unknown viewed from http://www.globalisationguide.org/01.html on 25 February 2009
Globalization 2008 SG Legal Solutions viewed from http://sglegalsolutions.com/pdf/GLOBALIZATION.pdf on 25 February 2009
IEEE Guide to Software Requirements Specifications 1984 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc 345 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017, USA -1984
Nuseibeh B. and Easterbrook S., 2000, Requirements Engineering: A Roadmap, ICSE 2000, 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, June 4-11, 2000, Limerick Ireland.
Sahay S., Nicholson B., Krishna S., 2003, Global IT Outsourcing:Software Development across Borders Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: December 2003 ISBN-13: 9780521816045
Šmite, D. 2006, Requirements Management in Distributed Projects, Journal of Universal Knowledge Management, vol. 1, no. 2 (2006), 69-76
Šmite, D., 2005 ,A Case Study: Coordination Practices in Global Software Development Product Focused Software Process Improvement, book series Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 3547/2005 Springer Berlin / Heidelberg 1611-3349
Sommerville I., Kontonya G., 1998 Requirements Engineering: Processes and Techniques Publisher: Wiley Chichester Date Published: 1998 ISBN-13: 9780471972082
Zave P. (1997). Classification of Research Efforts in Requirements Engineering, ACM Computing Surveys, 29(4): 315-321.

Enterprise 2.0

Introduction

From last ten years web applications has changed significantly; earlier web site was composed of static pages. Companies use their website as a mean to market their product. Corporate intranets were used as a repository of publishing news, employee announcement and policies. With the introduction of new Web 2.0, which is second phase of architectural change in the web technology and a improved form of WWW. Web 2.0 is the combination of social networking system based on the open communication method; it allows decentralization of authority to publish context and freedom of sharing information, media and emotions. It is achieved due to the wide access of board band which allow people to use internet more frequently (O'Reilly, 2005).One of the main advantages of Web 2.0 is systems or web contents are updated frequently and on real time basis, rather than Web 1.0 where webmaster updated that site. Another difference between Web1.0 is about text but Web 2.0 is about music, images and videos. Web 2.0 revolutionized web for the consumer by introducing ideas of sharing and ease of access.

The use to Web 2.0 in enterprise for business users gave birth to new term Enterprise 2.0which is introduced by MacAfee (2006). It facilitate enterprise to use social software such as Blog, Wiki, Tag etc in corporate environment to enhance the productivity, efficiency of knowledge workers. Organizations are also exploring to use Web 2.0 technologies outside the organization to improve the revenue and customer base of their organization. Now the question arises what is the earlier phase of Enterprise 2.0? Next section try to explain this answer .Third section explains how to implement Enterprise 2.0 in organization specially Vosapa Inc. In the end we conclude with some open questions.

Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is the new turn coined by McAfee in his article "Enterprise 2.0: the Down of emergent collaboration" (2006). According to which use web 2.0 in business context to increase the collaboration in secure manner between employees, partner and customer is called Enterprise 2.0 but there is no explanation of what was enterprise 1.0 and there is not define example of the difference between enterprise 1.0 and enterprise 2.0. There is a chart which is available on

e2conf.com. Enterprise 2.0 Conference website which explains the concept in form of this chart and there is no other explain of enterprise model 1.0

Enterprise 1.0	Enterprise 2.0
Hierarchy Friction Bureaucracy Inflexibility IT-driven technology / Lack of user control Top down Centralized Teams are in one building / one time zone Silos and boundaries Need to know Information systems are structured and dictated Taxonomies Overly complex Closed/ proprietary standards Scheduled Long time-to-market cycles	Flat Organization Ease of Organization Flow Agility Flexibility User-driven technology Bottom up Distributed Teams are global Fuzzy boundaries, open borders Transparency Information systems are emergent Folksonomies Simple Open On Demand Short time-to-market cycles

Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Difference between enterprise 1.0 and 2.0 is much popular topic on blogs and there is no authenticated journal article on it. But there is a white paper "Business Management in the Age of Enterprise 2.0: Why Business Model 1.0 Will Obsolete You" by oracle (Buytendijk at el 2008) which explain the difference but at the end it emphasise on the oracle solution on Enterprise 2.0

If we analyze the information in the chart it emphasise the change in the social and business structure of organization like introducing flat organization structure, where every employees are participating in the decision making of organization. Organizations provide open access to information where employees could access and share information with partner, customer to make better decision. Feed back on the work of employees become ongoing process .In Enterprise 1.0 feedback from managers were given at the end of the business year but in Enterprise 2.0 appraisals are continuous and based on preference indicate and quality of work (Buytendijk, at el 2008)

The way organization work is changing, now the customer is driving the business, where knowledge become primary and good and product become secondary, this enable companies to provide the customized product. Feed back from the customer becomes primary input to drive the new product. The new method which engages the customer to manage self service was introduced as online banking, direct booking of flight, which helps in reducing the front end cost of the company and for the customer, there is no longer difference in front office and back office and Enterprise 2.0 make then transparent for the customer (Buytendijk, at el 2008). Enterprise 2.0 integrates the technology and experience to achieve the competitive advantage which clearly shows its difference from Enterprise 1.0

Enterprise 2.0 implementation in Organization

Common Applications used by organization or knowledge worker are email, instant messaging service, Intranet Portal. The problem with the email are they are asynchronous way to communicate and most of knowledge workers got hundreds of email every day ,which they simply send to junk or mark as read. Another disadvantage to email is it is shared by only few people which are included in the thread. Most of the Knowledge workers believe that email "are overused in their organization" davenport (cited in MacAfee 2006). On the other hand intranet portal are filled with all type of companies information and employees cannot find information they are looking for. To resolve this problem in Vosapa inc. (Vosapa, 2009) we used only two components from MacAfee's (2006) six component of Enterprise 2.0 technology which he named as SLATES as acronym for "Search", "Link", "Authoring", "Tags", "Extensions", "Signals" because we believe that Enterprise 2.0 technology need to be improved in the case of implementation in organization. Security and authenticity are challenges which still need to be addressed when using the Enterprise 2.0 in organization.

We use "Tags" to represent the key words in minutes of meeting of each project, which are posted in the forum (sections of eXperss for dissuasion form in intranet see more (Vosapa, 2009 ")). This will help the users to remember agenda of meeting and the key point highlighted during the meeting.

The second technology which is useful in the context of large organization is "Signals" or RSS feed. There are many discussions or projects happening simultaneously in organization. RSS feed help users to subscribe only those forums which are directly related to his work or the project he is supervising and all the updates are made in the forum will be send to him on his page of eXpress.

Conclusion

There are two main apprehension of Enterprise 2.0 which need to address before implementing in organization. First security and authenticity of information and data which is moving across the extranet or intranet of a company, this issue become essential in the case of company like banks and telecom with distributed office and people are allowed to connect from their home.

Secondly Wiki's are excellent example of collaborate data manipulation of Web 2.0 but the editable format of wiki, the work carried out by the individual can be modified by the other person, even if the idea of the first one is good for the organization. It shows that the there is no proper tracking facility to identify individual work, which is necessary to monitor the performance of the employee. Therefore enterprise 2.0 has to improve a lot in turn of value to the business context when creating business case to implement in Enterprise.

 

Reference list

Buytendijk F., Cripe B., Henson R., Pulverman K., 2008, Business Management in the Age of Enterprise 2.0: Why Business Model 1.0 Will Obsolete You, An Oracle Thought Leadership White Paper, Inform it online http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/docs/epm-enterprise20-whitepaper.pdf (accessed march 26, 2009).

McAfee A.P, 2006, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006.

O'Reilly T., 2005, what is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, Inform it online http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html, (accessed march 26, 2009).

TechWeb Live Events, unknown, what is Enterprise 2.0, inform it online http://www.e2conf.com/about/what-is-enterprise2.0.php (accessed march 26, 2009).

Vosapa, 2009, VOSAPA Inc. (group course work), Inform it online http://vosapainc.blogspot.com/2009/03/vosapa-inc-group-course-work.html (accessed march 26, 2009).

 

Knowledge Economy

Our economy is shifting from the industrial to knowledge economy, this shift is not direct and there are stages between, where meaning of product and workers changes gradually. In 18th century industrialization begun, where technology was first invented, mass production and production line was introduced. (Drucker, 1998) The farmers were brought in to the industries to do the work and they were taught to perform repeated task every days. At the end of 19th century, productivity set off, where knowledge was first introduced in work and workers; knowledge was used to find the better way to improve the work. "Frederick Winslow Taylor" (Drucker 1998) was the first to introduce the idea to improve the living condition of an ordinary worker by making education and knowledge necessary. In early 20th century, management era started and education became necessary for ordinary worker, knowledge is considered as essential resource in all the field and it became vital factor for the workers. The essential change happened in all these phase was the change in the meaning of knowledge .Now knowledge is in action and results are outside, in the society or economy. (Drucker, 1998) In the Industrial economy natural resources were the main resources. In Productivity, product was the key resource and management was the answer to the Management economy. In knowledge economy where knowledge of product, customer, partner and environment is essential resources.

It is very difficult to exactly pin point the definition of Knowledge Economy .Literature is lacking with the proper definition but we can get idea from the different definition given by (Powell & Snellman, 2004), (Leadbeater, 1999), (ESRC, 2005 cited in Brinkley, 2006) and form a definition according to their view.

Effective utilization of intellectual asset such as knowledge, skills and innovative in all manner of economical activities to create wealth

This definition explains that knowledge become more important than before as an input for the products and give rise to new form of trades. Codification of that knowledge will help in gathering wealth. This concept give birth to two type of knowledge in economy .First knowledge as product where it is used to earn wealth and second knowledge as a tool to gather intellectual asset, as it is believed that knowledge increases as we share, so organization use this tool to explore and excavate the knowledge and share it with partners and vendors to get competitive advantage on others. But in this article I am referring knowledge economy as a tool which is also called Knowledge based economy.

Factor that bring this change

It is argued that there are two main factors which cause this shift to new economy, first is Globalization and revolution in information and communication technologies (ICT).

Globalization is the phenomena of making world more connected, interdependent, share knowledge and resources of the world. It is about interconnection of economic, social, culture, technology, commercial among the organizations and peoples, which bring them together to form one interdependent community. The enlargement of globalization is due to the decrease in tariffs, foreign direct investment barriers and reduced power of national monopoly in telecom, air traffic (Houghton, Sheehan, 2000). Many western countries started investing in the developing countries where resources and cheaper, which also helps developing countries to generate the new revenue stream. Second main reason of Knowledge economy is rapid availability of information technology and communication. Internet was first introduced as for research bases but over few decades it developed in to necessity for every person. In economical term, ICT provide the easy was to store and transfer information which was not previously possible and the cost of storing this information is marginally zero. This helps the knowledge to apply and facilitate in all economical activities.

Knowledge Worker

Previously the term 'worker' was used for the person which uses their hand to perform work but now in knowledge economy workers mostly use their ideas and judgment to find new methods to improve their daily activity, they are consider as knowledge workers. They are benefiting companies by using their intellectual capability and experience for example software developers, system administrators, technical writers, lawyers, teachers, and scientists are knowledge worker in this new economy. Knowledge workers spend most of their time analyzing diagrams and chart to come up with new idea to improve the process of an organization. It is estimated that by the year 2000 there will be 59 per cent of work (Horibe, 1999)

Conclusion

Knowledge was always present whether in an industrialized economy or in knowledge economy, but now we start using it to get intellectual advantage because ability of the world to generate resources for us is a constant, for example consider circle as whole resources and every one wants to take their share, the only way to get a bigger share is to have competitive advantage on others, everyone is trying to get or increase their share of world resources, which is limited and in some cases declining. We are finding and introducing new ways to get our bigger chunk of share of the world economy.

Reference List

Drucker P., 'From capitalism to knowledge society' in Neef D. 1998, The Knowledge Economy, Butterworth Heinemann, p.15

Horibe F., 1999, Managing knowledge workers: new skills and attitudes to unlock the intellectual capital in your organization, Edition: illustrated Published by John Wiley and Sons

Houghton J. and Sheehan P., 2000, A Primer on the Knowledge Economy, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University February 2000

Leadbeater C., London D., 1999, NEW MEASURES FOR THE NEW ECONOMY, International Symposium Measuring and Reporting Intellectual Capital:Experience, Issues, and Prospects Amsterdam 9-10 June 1999

Powell W. W., and Snellman K., 2004, The Knowledge Economy, Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 30: 199-220 (Volume publication date August 2004) Viewed on 24th March 2009
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100037?cookieSet=1

What is the role of IT in supporting Knowledge Management Systems?

Introduction

For the last ten years, Knowledge Management System (KMS) has become one of the most significant topics in Information Technology and Business circles. Now it becomes a necessity for an organization to have KMS to show the world their intellectual capability. Still most of the companies think by deploying state of the art IT system will resolve their knowledge problems (Croasdell, 2001). According to McDermatt

"the Great trap in knowledge Management is using information management tools and concepts to design knowledge management System" (1999).

The question arises, what happens if the group of people does not have contact with each other and don't understand the information which will be helpful to perform their work better. Installing IT infrastructure will not help them in this situation. Most of the Knowledge managing efforts in an organization are based on Information technology improvement and consider culture and environment as secondary. Knowledge management in organization is about linking people to get knowledge flow and information technology could support to create this link. Second section will explain how different companies change their product name to knowledge product, third explains what when wrong when companies use just IT system in their KMS, last role of human resource development in knowledge management and finally conclusion

Renaming of IT System

Information system was developed to assist management and workers to process vast amount to data and information easily and quickly. It includes the MIS, DSS and EIS that interact with individual set of data and help in improving the organization process. But after the introduction of knowledge management or Intellectual Capital idea, the name of Information system has been reframed in to knowledge management system (Wilson, 2002). Data Base, Data Mining application and data warehousing software, market intelligence system, groupware and Intranet Web Portal are now renamed as knowledge management system and application. "Many existing business practices (such as information management and intelligence gathering) are coming under the knowledge management umbrella." (Skyrme, 1998) This branding of application divert focus on real purpose of Knowledge Management System, which was to help organization to access knowledge which was already there and help employees not to invent wheel again, during their daily activities .Furthermore, consultant of Knowledge management system also forcing IT and business related aspect rather than human related aspect .One of the top consultant Karl-Erik Sveiby in his paper "What is Knowledge Management?" 'First published in 1996' (2001) clearly suggests that Knowledge management got two tracks. "IT-Track" where knowledge is treated as an object and "People-Track" where knowledge is in processes .Despite these differences, we emphasize more on the IT part rather than People track.

What went wrong in Knowledge Management Systems?

Mostly KMS are designed on database, Information technologies and best practices. Due to the popularity of KMS, organizations are installing this system which codify, store, captures and shares the knowledge of individual and group within organizations. Despite the new technology used in KMSs, they fail with uncertainty because they could not fully understand the need, culture and environment of the organization. IT experts use complex system which is expensive to install and manage. But the end users do not have time to train and understand these systems due to this complexity. Another reason to KMS failure is trust of employees on information stored and the time required to retrieve this information. In most of the IT systems, the user downloads a file and finds that information is not accurate or useful. This could decrease the trust on the system that leads to its failure. In the example of Andersen Consulting (Benassi at el 2002) the first KMS was successful because workers were given freedom to manage their knowledge (Benassi at el 2002) according to their desire although they could not share document with other groups with the companies. Hence there were no rigid boundaries. Then they used second KMS which allow "peer to peer communication system"(Benassi at el 2002). This system was a success. But later it became crowded and people stopped using it. This shows that we cannot allow information to be shared with each other and there must be boundaries which allow user to have confidence in information store system.

Role of Human Resource Department in KMS

From above examples it is clear that Information Technology is not a key driving force in Knowledge Management Systems. These systems are all about people not technology and IT just has a supporting role. The second department which plays key role in organization KMS is Human Resource (HR) (Soliman & Spooner, 2000) because KMS is about business, people, environment and culture of organization. Many organization's culture is not knowledge friendly and often appraisals are judged on the basis of strict timelines, which force them to put aside knowledge sharing activities .In this situation HR department plays a significant role to improve the culture of the organization by

• Creating knowledge supported environment which allows social gathering of staff.
  
• Providing open office structure which enables frequent interaction of staff.
  
• Improving the trust with the employees and management by introducing the tolerance of error policies and involving senior management.
  

All this will provide addition motivation to staff (Soliman & Spooner, 2000). HR department encourages employees to initiate knowledge and share environment and IT provides service to capture that knowledge.

Conclusion

It is a delicate balance between the technology system and organization which must be understood to achieve successful knowledge management system. In our previous report KMS at VOSAPA Inc. (2009). We used new recruitment policy, improve reword system, brainstorming session with in organization and staff training to create the environment of trust to flourish knowledge .To support our KMS we use intranet, extranet, data mining technique to capture and codify tacit and explicit knowledge and use collaboration tools to make it available to improve tacit knowledge of our employees.

Reference List

Benassi M., Bouquet P. and Cuel R., 2002, Success and Failure Criteria for Knowledge Management Systems, Technical report, December 2002, Trento – Italy, Inform it online http://fandango.cs.unitn.it/rcuel/publication.htm (accessed march 26, 2009).

Croasdell, D.T., 2001, IT's role in organizational memory and learning, Information systems management, vol. 18, no1, pp. 8-11 (18 ref.) ISSN 1058-0530

Dr Skyrme D.J., Knowledge Management Solutions - The IT Contribution, Inform it online http://www.skyrme.com/pubs/acm0398.doc (accessed march 25, 2009).

McDermott R. 1999, why Information Technology Inspired but cannot deliver Knowledge Management, California Management Review, Vol 41 No4 summer 1999

Sveiby K. E., 2001, What is Knowledge Management? Inform it online http://www.sveiby.com/articles/KnowledgeManagement.html (accessed march 25, 2009)

Soliman F. and Spooner K., 2000, Strategies for implementing knowledge management, Journal of Knowledge Management, Volume 4, Number 4, P 337-P 345

Wilson T.D.2002, The nonsense of knowledge management, Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002, http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144, viewed on 23-march-2009