Practical Methods and Tools for Corporate Knowledge Managment

There is an ever-increasing demand for improved efficiency and better knowledge transfer and capitalisation within the telecommunication industry. Significant element of the industry’s future strategy will be the increased development and co-operation with external partners such as suppliers and sub-contractors in design and/ or manufacture of products and sub-systems, as well as with distributors introducing the developed products to the desired markets. Enhancing the flow of knowledge along the complete supply-chain, from suppliers to manufacturers, manufacturers to distributors, distributors to customers, and all the way back again, will be one of the major challenges of every company, and the network it is embedded in, to remain competitive in future. The objective of the CORMA project (http://www.corma.net) is to develop a systematic approach to support the introduction of knowledge management principles, methods and related tools in „Concurrent Enterprises” with the focus an the new product introduction process (NPIP) and the go-to-market-channel (GTMC) in the telecommunication sector (TLC). The systematic approach will be used to support single and co-operating companies in assessing their knowledge management capabilities for inter-organisational transfer, share and development of knowledge assets towards their own goals and intentions. This report summarises the approach taken and presents the results which were achieved within the project. Further, it provides useful insights into the experiences made during the piloting phase. Being written in co-operation with the industrial and academic partners, the book aims at covering both the practical and theoretical viewpoint of the project. This work has been partly funded by the European Commission through the project IST-1999-12685, CORMA, „Practical Methods and Tools for Corporate Knowledge Management — Sharing and Capitalising Engineering Know-How in the Concurrent Enterprise”.