A fuzzy GSS framework for organizational knowledge acquisition

Although the concept of viewing knowledge as a critical resource has been w idely accepted in prior studies, it is not fully understood how to acquire available knowledge in order to improve organizational effectiveness, Howev er, it is sure that organizational knowledge management should pursue the a chievement of the business goal by delivering relevant and useful informati on to the right person at the right time. Group Support Systems (GSS) can p lay 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 fro m individual memory and aggregating workgroup knowledge into organizational knowledge. This study also proposes an architecture to support the fuzzy G SS framework. The architecture consists of user agents, information managem ent agents, and a fuzzy model manager. To illustrate how the fuzzy GSS fram ework 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. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserv ed.