Analysis of Knowledge Management in Industrial Sectors by Means of Neural Models

Abstract

It is required for an organization, before successfully applying a Knowledge Management (KM) methodology, to develop and implement a knowledge infrastructure, consisting of people, organizational and technological systems. Up to now, few approaches have been proposed for such technological systems supporting KM in organizations. Present paper advances previous work by proposing neural projection models for the analysis of the KM status of companies from two different industrial sectors. Exploratory methods are applied to real-life case studies to know and understand the structure of KM data. Subsequently, the application of such models generates meaningful conclusions that allow experts to diagnose KM from two different points of view: companies on the one hand and industrial sectors on the other hand.

A hybrid proposal for cross-sectoral analysis of knowledge management

“…2. It extends the seminal work (Herrero et al 2015) by considering a whole set of KM data and more sectors. Additionally, companies are not only diagnosed by means of a neural visualisation, but an interesting characterisation work is also developed, by means of classification trees.…”

“…The effect of this matrix is based on the relation between the distances separating the output neurons. This neural projection model has been applied in present work as it proved to be the one obtaining the most informative projections for this kind of data (Herrero et al 2015). From the KM data to be analysed (see Sect.…”

“…For the proposed analysis, the dataset previously applied in Herrero et al (2015) has been extended, gathering data from 62 companies in four different sectors (Electrical and Telecommunications, Timber, Food and Private Academies). The headquarters of all the studied companies are located in Burgos (Spain).…”

“…2.1). From the wide range of available projection models, CMLHL has been applied as it proved to obtain more informative projections than the other ones (Herrero et al 2009;Herrero et al 2010;Herrero et al 2015). On the other hand, for step 2, a model giving reasons about how the original features determine the structure identified in step 1 was required.…”