A fuzzy GSS framework for organizational knowledge acquisition

Although the concept of viewing knowledge as a critical resource has been widely accepted in prior studies, it is not fully understood how to acquire available knowledge in order to improve organizational effectiveness. However, it is sure that organizational knowledge management should pursue the achievement of the business goal by delivering relevant and useful information to the right person at the right time. Group Support Systems (GSS) can play an important role in transfering scattered information into meaningful business knowledge for supporting strategic corporate decision-making. This study proposes a fuzzy GSS framework for acquiring workgroup knowledge from individual memory and aggregating workgroup knowledge into organizational knowledge. This study also proposes an architecture to support the fuzzy GSS framework. The architecture consists of user agents, information management agents, and a fuzzy model manager. To illustrate how the fuzzy GSS framework can be used to support the whole process of organizational knowledge acquisition, an Internet-based GSS was developed and applied in a marketing decision process. It showed that the framework was effective for acquiring organizational knowledge. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.