Collaborative work and knowledge management in electronic business

We are in an era of knowledge economy [3,4] and knowledge-based competition [2]. In this era, an organization must be able to secure various types of knowledge assets and maximize their strategic value. To do so, many organizations have begun to reexamine and rearrange their business strategies, process, information technologies, and organizational structures from a knowledge perspective [1]. This task has been complicated in the Internet-enabled business environment. With the advances of Internet-related technologies, the intricacy of the worldwide economy is fast changing. Lower cost, customized products/service, and quick response have become the critical success factors for most businesses. More and more competing firms are adopting collaborative work and knowledge management to create and maintain these critical success factors. Collaborative works within organization or between organizations could not only share the work based on each member's expertise, but also achieve a seamless information flow among the collaborative team members. Such sharing of knowledge has proven to improve productivity and decision quality of the participating organizations. In order to have effective collaborative work, the management of knowledge is essential and critical. The practice of knowledge management has been around us for many years. The advent of Internet digital economy has made it even more difficult to manage knowledge for one organization alone, not mentioning among partners or the entire supply chain network. As more and more companies are integrating electronic commerce into their businesses, collaborative work and knowledge management are increasingly important to electronic businesses. The purpose of this special issue is to explore effective and innovative use of collabora-tive work and knowledge management in the electronic business era. After our initial screening, 45 out of 60 submitted papers were chosen for the double-blind review process. With the help of over 60 reviewers, seven quality papers are selected to be included in this issue. The selected papers cover many knowledge management and collaborative work-related issues, such as organizational memory, virtual collaborative work, knowledge map, trust and conflict, intelligence of team, group support argu-mentation, and distribution network optimization. In the first paper, 'Organizational memory information systems: A transactive memory approach', Professor Dorit Nevo and Professor Yair Wand identify five difficulties for members of the organization in retrieving and using knowledge that resides in organizational memory. They propose the use of information technology to extend the transactive memory approach popular in small group research to large groups. Their new system contains a component …