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Top1. Introduction
The domain of Interlocking Institutional Worlds (IWs) is generally about mutual inter-agency collaboration involving many autonomous institutions (or players) to solve a common problem at a large scale level of the domain, and as such, it is complex and difficult (Colomb & Ahmad, 2007; Khantong & Ahmad, 2020; Sattar, et al., 2020). The theoretical foundation of the concept of IWs can be further found in (Colomb & Ahmad, 2007; Colomb & Ahmad, 2010), where the concept is rooted in Searle’s theory of institutional facts (Searle, 1995). Interoperation among the players would be able to generate huge data volumes, and the potential value of this data that can be transformed into valuable knowledge (Gil-Garcia, et al., 2019; Luo & Bu, 2016). In this paper, we look at the perspective of the Knowledge Management (KM) process, particularly at KSP, for the purpose of designing a CR for supporting knowledge sharing in the domain of IWs. Linking and sharing agencies’ data can reveal new opportunities that are not currently envisaged.
Designing a CR to support the IWs domain requires a new KM perspective, KSP in particular. Knowledge has been an integral component in the digital world. The power of knowledge is key to achieving goals and objectives. The KSP addresses the collection, organization and reusability of knowledge. Data that is organized becomes information. Information is transformed into knowledge when a person applies it into practice. It is essentially about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time to create benefits and competitive advantage (Drucker, 2008). Organizations often begin knowledge management efforts by building knowledge repositories. Additionally, there is an increased interest in sharing knowledge at the domain level, to support large-scale knowledge-bases, interoperability and knowledge sharing communities (Greco, et al., 2020).
The authors believe that the benefits of KSP in IWs can be addressed as; (i) KSP can assist IWs to solve issues in a connected world, as it can act as a centralized component in governing standards that are agreeable and have meaning in their interoperation; (ii) KSP can allow for quick and decisively mission critical decisions by performing collaboration of different integrated sources; (iii) It can minimize loss from personnel movement and help in securing knowledge from leaving experts, and; (iv) It can help in the reuse of knowledge and in generating new knowledge.
The discussion on KSP is limited in literature, especially in IWs domain. Additionally, KSP is often discussed in tandem with knowledge acquisition; where it is seen as a process to acquire and store knowledge for decision making (Wenlong & Liu, 2016), knowledge discovery; where it can be seen as the best source of data to extract useful knowledge related to technologies such as data warehouses, data mining and big data analytics (Kalaian, et al., 2019), knowledge sharing; as a platform to mutually exchange ideas (Tariq & Farooq, 2019), and knowledge retention; where it helps in forming strategies to manage knowledge throughout its lifecycle. To design a CR that support IWs, given the lack of discussion on how to participate (or commit) and how to govern the CR usage, gives rise to the need for a better understanding on CR at the domain level. Therefore, the concept of a new KSP that is introduced in this paper is important for designing a CR for the IWs domain.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the background with some key knowledge needed for CR design. Section 3 explores the review method (methodology), where we explain how the KSP processes for IWs are derived using three (3) major steps. Section 4 revisits the Malaysia flood management domain, mapping that with three case studies on how the pertinent ISSM model can be utilized or demonstrated. Section 5 is the discussion of the paper, and Section 6 contains the conclusions of this study.