Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Mohammad Mirkazemi Mood, Farhad Daneshga and Mona Mirkazemi Mood
intelligent institute, nurturing a creative and innovative circumstance and culture and cooperation
opportunities. Wu (2008), too, outlined <strong>the</strong>se goals as: Performance improvements, efficiency,
competitiveness, and developing such processes as knowledge acquisition, sharing and use.
However, Chong et al. (2006), having investigated <strong>the</strong> literature <strong>of</strong> KM, recognized five groups <strong>of</strong>
criteria that can be considered as <strong>the</strong> expected consequences <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> organizations as <strong>the</strong>y implement
KM. Chong et al. named <strong>the</strong>se criteria "KM Performance Criteria." Table 1 explains each one <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>
five groups.
Table 1: KM Performance Criteria (adapted from Chong et al. 2006)
Criteria
Systematic knowledge activities
Employee development
Customer satisfaction
Good external relationship
Organizational success
3. The Proposed approach
Definition
Includes <strong>the</strong> processes <strong>of</strong> creating, ga<strong>the</strong>ring, organizing,
distributing, utilizing, transferring and storing <strong>the</strong> necessary
knowledge <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> organization.
Creating a circumstance in which people, with different
expertise and from different fields, can share <strong>the</strong>ir
knowledge and, as a result, create new knowledge for <strong>the</strong>
organization.
Improving <strong>the</strong> satisfaction <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> customers through
interacting with <strong>the</strong>m; recognizing <strong>the</strong>ir needs and
expectations and so valuing <strong>the</strong>m more than before.
Maintaining an appropriate relationship with partners,
shareholders, and suppliers via sharing and transferring
knowledge, getting feedback, and <strong>the</strong>refore improving <strong>the</strong>
possibilities <strong>of</strong> innovation and creativity as well as new
knowledge creation.
The success <strong>of</strong> a knowledge oriented organization,
regarding <strong>the</strong>ir financial criteria and <strong>the</strong> intangible
resources and assets such as Intellectual resources.
The unique aspect <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> concept <strong>of</strong> "House <strong>of</strong> Quality" in QFD method is its connecting <strong>the</strong> two sets
<strong>of</strong> variables known as HOWs and WHATs. The House <strong>of</strong> Quality, in <strong>the</strong> proposed approach, is
combined with fuzzy set <strong>the</strong>ory. The reason for this is that in <strong>the</strong> traditional QFD, most <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> input
variables were considered as precise and were treated as numerical data (Kahraman et al. 2006)
whereas, in our proposed approach, needs and judgments are converted into linguistic data which is
inherently ambiguous. The point, however, is that since, instead <strong>of</strong> one, three groups <strong>of</strong> variables are
evaluated, two connected Houses <strong>of</strong> Quality are to be used. Using <strong>the</strong>se two units for <strong>the</strong> process <strong>of</strong>
decision making and choosing one <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> items was first used by Bottani (2009). FuzzyQFD method
has been used for such numerous purposes as Product Development, Agility, Strategic Management
and supplier selection (Bevilacqua et al. 2006, Bottani and Rizzi 2006). It, however, has never been
used for KM.
Also, Triangular Fuzzy Numbers, TFN, are used to convert <strong>the</strong> linguistic judgments into numerical
data. TFNs are in fact <strong>the</strong> most common type <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> Fuzzy Numbers. They are shown with three
points (Amin and Razmi 2011):
A = (a1, a2, a3)
And its membership function is:
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