Design and evaluation of a knowledge management system

To compete in the emerging knowledge-centric economy; business organizations around the world have undertaken various initiatives to manage knowledge. The authors describe their system's architecture design and highlight encouraging preliminary evaluation results in several areas, including knowledge-sharing support, productivity improvement, and customer relationship management enhancement. They concentrate on the design and evaluation of a KM system for an integrated circuit assembly and testing firm.

Responding to the Challenge

We concentrated on the design and evaluation of a KM system for an integrated circuit assembly and testing firm (see the related sidebar), where knowledge intensity, specificity, and volatility are comparable to those in software engineering and other knowledge intense industries. Generally, such firms offer services in semiconductor product assembly and testing and therefore add value to the overall IC production and manufacturing process at a late stage. For instance, upon a wafer's manufacture, machines automatically saw it into dies on which to perform particular functional tests. Subsequently, specialized facilities assemble and mount the dies that pass the required tests into packages.