to explore and demonstrate impact, necessity and effectiveness of knowledge management system to improve hotels productivity

First assignment :The main aim of this research is to explore and demonstrate impact, necessity and effectiveness of knowledge management system to improve hotels productivity in UAE and also propose a framework to implant and apply this system as well as this framework would consider nature and component of Bobco.

This research examine both short and long impact s of knowledge sharing on Bobco effectiveness in UAE and underlying an initiative to address that representing knowledge is difficult and time consuming. Bobco has been slow in adopting knowledge management and knowledge sharing due to lack of gearing between researches, as well as the nature and environment of Bobco makes it more difficult to implement, initiate and coordinate. This research aims to identify the gap of knowledge management and knowledge sharing in Bobco and also provide both insights and potential solution to fill this gap.

Knowledge is a powerful resource to help public and private firms to develop their productivity. Bobco is a large and unique industry segment of market. Utilizing knowledge management systems to manage customer information and staff knowledge to support the full range of knowledge needs in the hospitality process has become an important issue for hotelier. Hence, the objective of this research is to a deep research and investigation into recent researches in knowledge management and sharing knowledge in tourism industry, Bobco, entertainment and leisure industry to understanding of the knowledge management concept amongst Bobco, determine enablers and barriers to implement a knowledge management programme and to determine whether knowledge is seen as a source for competitive advantage.

This research begins with a critical discussion of current literature about knowledge sharing and Bobco, and how they may be connected with competitive advantage of hotels with investigate in depth recent years sound research papers in knowledge management and sharing knowledge in tourism industry and Bobco after that choose amongst of them, then capture the major concept, major points and major outcome in each of these recourses. Once those major elements collected it will try to identify and show the relationships between them and critically evaluate them.

Importance of knowledge management in enterprises:

Effective knowledge management could noticeably reduce the costs, makes the situation better and easier to extend enterprises, will help to increase the value and profitability of organizations, develop the products, improve services, makes leaning faster and provide potential to increase initiatives in private and public businesses (Brian, Janz, Pattarawan Prasarnphanich 2003). The role of knowledge management in competitive advantage of enterprises is not deniable, therefore knowledge management act as a strategic authorization for most organizations (Sang, 2002). The current global recession indicates that the Knowledge Economy (use of knowledge management to produce economic benefits as well as job creation) is the main key of future economy (Eurac, Bolzano, Bozen 2009).

As one of the main reason of employing knowledge management is increasing the profitably of enterprises therefore more and more organizations will be reforming themselves with the trading their knowledge to add even higher value, mostly on the World Wide Web (Brent Ritchie 2010).

Even some progressive advance organizations already started to develop and apply the knowledge they have about their industry, customers, partners and stakeholders, as they consider it as their major strategic asset, and look at it at the most important element in the value chain(Jessop 2009).

Second assignment :

Importance of Knowledge sharing in Bosco:

Approach of knowledge sharing as an idea is very smart and it delivers so many prospects for businesses that should not be ignored. It is a mechanism that converts knowledge into business value. An effective knowledge sharing plan expects to assist projects and could support modernization and innovation and also help in considering markets and customers needs (Small, Sage 2006). It also helps organizations to expand their product and services along with growth of their vision and strategies (Small, Sage 2006)

Talent management

Talent management was not regarded as a goal in most companies until the McKinsey consultants came up with an insight into the importance of talent management to the success of organisations in their book: War for Talent in 1997. Since then talent management has come to gain worldwide recognition as a strategic success tool in organisations thus prompting practitioners and academicians to develop renewed vigour in along forgotten field.

 Dufficy (52) argues that this also marked the beginning of a paradigm shift from the traditional HRM methods to inclusion of human characteristics in the race for competitive advantage; on the other hand this has prompted companies to adopt practices aligned to strategic management to address the emerging initiatives facing the general managers of the organisations on behalf of the company owners while ensuring that the talents of the company’s employees are not wasted but utilised in ways geared at the overall success of the organisation. On the other hand argues that the target is an efficient utilisation of the employee’s talents for the purpose of enhancing the performance of the organisation in the context of external environment. The preliminary steps towards the realisation of the intended goals relates to the alignment of the corporate mission, the vision as well as the general objectives of the organisation, followed by the development of plans together with policies in the form of projects as well as programs whose design is tailored towards the achievements of the intended objectives. Companies may employ some of the best practices in talent management in their search for organisational success.

 The performance of the organisations in the process of implementation of the best practices in talent management is usually subjected to the balanced scorecard for the purpose of evaluation of the business progress towards reaching at the anticipated objectives.  

According to Dufficy (62), talent management may therefore be defined as processes and activities aimed at identification of the key factors that contribute to a sustainable competitive advantage in an organisation by developing a talent pool of high performing individuals in the organisation. Organisations should develop a differentiated human resource plan geared at identifying, training and developing high performing employees to enhance their commitment to the organisation for sustainability and corporate advantage.

 Most organisations are having various activities aimed at talent management that are done under the banner of “implementation of talent management  strategies,” have become vague whether implementation of the strategies still has a particular core concept, as envisioned by the key founders of the concept who explains that the main purpose of an organisation is to remain in business, in order to promote its stability and produce products or services that satisfy customers as noted by Dufficy (1998. 71). Employees are the back bone of organisations so managing their unique characters can be utilised towards ensuring that the organisation maintains a competitive edge over other organisations.

Organisations in which their employees are unhappy and cannot get happy should not exist. Implementation of the strategies is founded on four integrated assumptions, which are quality, employees, organisations and the duty of top management. Implementation of talent management strategies requires that all top managers formulate clear and noticeable quality values as well as high expectations, which must be incorporated into the organisation’s culture. This is only possible if they are personally committed and take a greater participation in the whole process.

hird assignment:

2. 4. IT and Employee Training

Part of the core tasks of HRM entails the orientation and training of newly engaged employees (Alavi & Leidner, 2001) or known as knowledge management. Organizations adopt various strategies in achieving this objective, for instance the findings of a study carried out by Laudon and Laudon (2003) on the impact of Executive Information System (EIS) in an organization’s strategic planning indicated that organizations derive a substantial part of their competitive edge from how best they manage information. In essence, the creation of information, storage, protection, as well as putting such information into active use is a critical facet of EIS (Daniels, 2007). Apparently, these processes of managing information can only be made a reality through a highly unified and interactive IT system capable of tackling the day-to-day performance of an organization and presenting such data in meaningful forms to line managers as well as the HRM experts in an organization to enable for strategic planning and normal decision-making purposes (Choo, 1991).

Such integrative endeavors can be enhanced through the application of the tenets of HRM as well as sound knowledge management (KM) practices that are espoused by IT practices (Turk, & Jaklic, 1998). Since it has been advanced that employees’ morale is boosted by the use of modern IT tools (Skyrme, 1998), organizations can Endeavour to create positive and productive environments that will positively stimulate their employees and reinforce positive advancement of worthwhile skills and knowledge towards the achievement of the set objectives. Literally, how information and knowledge flows from one employee to another in an organization determines the overall productivity of an organization (Alavi & Leidner, 2001). No doubt a purposive integration of the best HRM and IT practices can elicit potentially rewarding results at the organizational level.

A fair number of existing studies support the importance of managing knowledge at the organizational level (Chen & Huang, 2007; Daniels, 2007; Tokar et al. 2007; Wang & Noe, 2010). This is an indicator that the concept of managing knowledge and/or information is not new at the organizational level. Indeed the practices of compiling information, and storing it in a manner that it can be easily retrieved and transmitted has a far reaching history, nonetheless, it is fair to assert that the knowledge-based management of information is precisely a contemporary practice. As a matter of fact, (Alavi & Leidner, 2001) assert that practices such as transfer of worthwhile organizational practices, knowledge audits, benchmarking, as well as personnel development and appraisal drills are all new practices allied to knowledge management. Both Rotter (1945) and Bandura (1977) in their respective advancements in social learning theory opine that, for learning to take place there must be an impulse behind it. In an organizational context these impulses comes in the form of sound knowledge management practices that enhances positive stimulation, reinforcements as well as the desire to want to excel as some else (colleague) did (Owen, 2001).

On his part, Skyrme (1998) opines that knowledge management plays a core role in keeping the acquired knowledge relevant to organizational challenges. This is very crucial to HRM given that organizational challenges are dynamic and diversified – rigid HRM departments are incapable of meeting contemporary organizational challenges. Modern IT equipments and services ensure that employees are imparted with new and versatile knowledge strands that can be applied in a variety of situations.

Perhaps to understand the application of information creation and management practices in a HRM context it is better to look at it deeply from a social learning theory. In his book Social Learning Theory, Bandura (1977) offers that for the process of learning to take-off successfully there must be sufficient and purposive attention to what is being observed. Such attention and leads to the actualization, retaining, remembrance, and ultimately the comprehension of what has been learned. Apparently, this can only be achieved if the acquired knowledge is put into active use and most importantly if real-time efforts are made to ensure that there are clear motives for engaging in a learning activity. For example, employees should have good reasons for engaging in collaborative activities at the workplace for them to learn the spirit of teamwork – maybe because such collaborative activities make work easier or even induce meaning to specific tasks. In this regard, employees should be made to yearn to fit into their organizational environments by learning the basic skills and knowledge inherent in the performance of the specific tasks entrusted to them. When utilized well, IT tools and services can certainly impart these skills and knowledge among the employees, through the employment of a barrage of work-specific bonding sessions, training workshops, constant evaluation of employee performance to identify their strong and weak areas.

8. References

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Brian D. Janz, Pattarawan Prasarnphanich 2003.

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Date of last visit 13 March 2012

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Jessop 2009. David. Mitigating the effects on tourism of recession. BBC Caribbean.com. Sang M. Lee 2002 .An enterprise wide knowledge management system infrastructure, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 102 Iss: 1, pp.17 – 25

Small Cynthia T, Sage Andrew P (2006). Knowledge management and knowledge sharing: A review . ISO Press.

Swanborn (2010). Peter .Case Study Research. London: SAGE. 12-35.

Tobin (2009). Lucy. Hotel bankruptcies soaring on recession, study says. London Evening Standard 27July.

Yang and Wan (2004). The effect of knowledge management resource inputs on organizational effectiveness in the restaurant industry. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology. 1 (2), 174-189.

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