A New Approach for Collaborative Knowledge Management: A Unified Conceptual Model for Collaborative Knowledge Management

With the advancement of new communication and virtualization technologies, various tools and models have been proposed for enabling effective management of the e-collaboration processes related to the creation, sharing, and presentation of collective knowledge. In the theoretical perspective, two significant aspects of collaborative knowledge management have been considered: (a) the internal processes of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing, which occur not only within the individual knowledge workers but also among them (collaboration); (b) the effective design of human-computer interfaces facilitating the internal processes, by providing functionalities for the knowledge workers to comprehend, conceptualize, and cooperate in knowledge creation and sharing through e-collaboration processes, including the effective presentation of the generated knowledge on the website. At the present time, although there exist several studies in the related areas, there is no unique conceptual model that can be applied toward assessing both the interface layer and the internal processes of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing in distributed ICT-based work contexts. This gap has been a great motivation for us to propose a conceptual model, namely the Unified Collaborative Knowledge Management (UCKM) model, which can be used to design and evaluate the overall knowledge management process, including the underlying sub-processes, the presentation of knowledge, and the human-computer interfaces.