DEVELOPMENT OF AN EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR PROFESSIONAL VIRTUAL COMMUNITY IN KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE SERVICE INDUSTRIES

With the advent of service-oriented knowledge economy in the 21st century, knowledge-intensive service industries (KISI) have become a trend nowadays for industrial development. In knowledge-intensive service industries, enterprise activities have highly creativeness. By performing and achieving each enterprise activity, the domain professional knowledge and experiences involving various ideas such as service innovation or service value-added are employed. Therefore, it is most urgent task for implementing knowledge management effectively, to quickly accumulate knowledge assets of enterprise and increase the efficiency of knowledge-intensive service industries. Professional virtual community is an interactive platform for enterprise experts to mutual creating and sharing empirical knowledge in knowledge-intensive service industries. The platform has recorded high-volume rubbish information and empirical knowledge during the expert discussion. Therefore, how to manage and share these useful contents of knowledge discussion has become an important issue for empirical knowledge management in professional virtual community. This study presents a systematic approach to developing a framework for empirical knowledge management to support professional virtual community in knowledge-intensive service industries. The approach presented in this study comprises three phases: (i) proposing an empirical knowledge management model for professional virtual community, (ii) designing an empirical knowledge management system framework for professional virtual community, and (iii) implementing an empirical knowledge management system prototype for professional virtual community. Results of this study facilitate efforts within the professional virtual community to extract, verify, store, and share empirical knowledge in order to effectively assist knowledge-intensive service industries enhancing service innovative abilities and creating the best services for customers' requirements.