TOWARDS A SYSTEM FOR MANAGING COLLABORATIVE

CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE

Maria Th. Semmelrock-Picej

eBusiness Institute, Klagenfurt University, Universitätsstrasse 65 - 67,9020 Klagenfurt, Austria

Judith Michael

Integranova GmbH, Lakeside Park, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria

Keywords: Customer Knowledge Management, System, Socio-Technical Approach.

Abstract: The effective and efficient management of explicit customer knowledge is a key factor for gaining

competitive advantages in current business environments. For this we consider the importance of customer

knowledge in this paper and possibilities to integrate it into company internal processes. Therefore we

develop a customer knowledge management system which we consider from an organizational viewpoint

and from the technology side. This socio-technical approach will be presented in the next step. We conclude

by suggesting specific areas of research which should be considered important for the implementation of

this customer knowledge management system in practice and raise some future research questions.

1 INTRODUCTION

If knowledge is power, customer knowledge is high-

octane power, says Davenport in one of his first

articles in the field of customer knowledge

management. It is widely known that the integration

of customer knowledge enables improved

innovations that bring a higher customer value and

thereby strengthens customer loyalty.

For the achievement of competitive advantages a

company internal orientation of activities is not

sufficient. In order to reach competitive advantages

from the viewpoint of a markt-based organization

(Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) and based on the

concept of ba (Nishida, 1970), (Shimizu, 1995),

(Nonaka and Konno, 1998) companies seek to create

unique competencies through knowledge creation.

For the purposes of the paper, following (Li and

Calantone, 1998), this includes taking into account

the customer knowledge and customer knowledge

competency. Therefore instead of Knowledge

Management the Customer knowledge management

approach is needed which should be organized and

is in need of being organized as systematic

management work in order to strengthen the

innovative capacity of enterprises. In comparison

with knowledge management this will also require

entirely new methods and approaches.

Following this a central issue facing every

organization is how the knowledge of the market

and the customer knowledge can be captured and

integrated into the companies knowledge base in

order to create value through a better understanding

of real needs of the customer and finally to gain

competitive advantage. Especially customer

knowledge as an intangible asset enables a company

to influence competition directly and determines a

company’s success.

The goal of this paper is to present a customer

driven process of designing and modeling a

customer knowledge management system. At the

end this paper summarizes some learnings of the

newly introduced customer knowledge management

system and will summarize with the next important

directions for future work.

2 LITERATURE ANALYSIS

2.1 Customer Knowledge

In literature, there are different meanings related to

the term customer knowledge and mostly it is used

300

Semmelrock-Picej M. and Michael J..

TOWARDS A SYSTEM FOR MANAGING COLLABORATIVE CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE.

DOI: 10.5220/0003070003000306

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2010), pages 300-306

ISBN: 978-989-8425-30-0

 2010 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

without being previously clearly defined. The most

relevant and thorough definition of customer

knowledge is the classification of (Stauss, 2002)

who defines customer knowledge as the systematic

knowledge from the customer, about the customer

and for the customer (Stauss, 2002).

While most studies and research focus on

analyzing and integrating only one or two of the

three categories and mostly deal with the two most

common categories of customer knowledge, namely

the customer relationship management driven

knowledge about the customer (Gibbert, Leibold and

Probst, 2002), (Lyu, Yang and Chen, 2009) and the

knowledge for the customer, this paper follows

Stauss (Stauss, 2002) who integrates all three

customer knowledge categories in a customer

knowledge management cycle with a focus on the

management of the knowledge from the customer.

However Stauss (Stauss, 2002) research on this

type of customer knowledge focuses rather on orga-

nizational human aspects than on how IT can be

used as an enabler and under which circumstances

the supporting use of information technology is su-

ccessful. This situation is surprising since it is

known that the support of the management of cus-

tomer knowledge through information technology

allows higher efficiency. In face of increasing

importance of information technology especially in

the context of knowledge management (Riempp and

Smolnik, 2007), (Gronau and Fröming, 2007) an

improved information technology-supported

approach of customer knowledge management is

needed which integrates all three kinds of customer

knowledge and leads to a new view and

understanding of customer knowledge management.

2.2 Customer Knowledge Competency

Customer knowledge competency refers to the

relevant processes that capture and integrate the

above mentioned three types of customer knowledge

into the companies knowledge base. These processes

provide customer benefit, are embedded in the orga-

nization, are unique to the way they are applied and

therefore not imitable for competitors (Prahalad and

Hamel, 1990).

Secondly, regarding the ability to create a

customer knowledge competency, not much research

work has been done that characterizes the challenges

that arise in this field. Campbell (Campbell, 2003)

proposes a theoretic framework of how to adapt or

change internal processes to develop the desired

competency. Campbell (Campbell, 2003) follows (Li

and Calantone, 1998) and conceptualizes four

components for integrating customer knowledge in

company: (1) a customer information process, (2)

marketing interface, (3) senior involvement and (4)

employee evaluation and reward system.

Compared with Stauss (Stauss, 2002)

Campbell’s (Campbell, 2003) approach which is

applied in five large Canadian firms is enabled with

a customer relationship management system (CRM)

so that in contrast to Stauss Campbell does involve

technical aspects but nevertheless this approach is

faced with the following limitations:

 In practice CRM systems have been widely

used and implemented by firms for targeted

advertising and customer-centric acitivities

such as customer service (Hsieh, 2009), (Bull,

2010) to primarily manage knowledge about

the customer and that knowledge for the

customer is provided. This is, indeed,

customer data and information, not customer

knowledge.

 In addition CRM sytems are faced with a relati-

vely high level of rigor in terms of

information and are not hindered by recording

of too much superfluous or redundant

information (Bull, 2010).

 Based on an empirical study Rigby (Rigby,

Reicheld and Schefter, 2002) demonstrated

that nearly 55 % of the CRM projects fail

because the biggest challenges and critical

success factor is not considered or im-

plemented sufficient that is the ability to

access all relevant customer knowledge ca-

tegories (Ernst, 2001).

 Customer knowledge is defined as the compre-

hensive customer knowing (Davenport and

Prusak, 1998), (Gibbert, Leibold and Probst

2002), (Stauss, 2002), (Silberer, 2007) which

primeraly requires the integration of the custo-

mer’s person. The existing research focuses

indeed on organizational and technological as-

pects, but rarely on the customer itself. If the

customer as person is not involved into the

process the ability of creating customer

knowledge competency with the help of the

customer and the learning processes which

could be enabled through technology will be

hindered.

 An essential component of a customer company

relationship are good interaction possibilities.

It has been found out that the main reason for

customers to leave a company is beside a bad

service a bad interaction with the company

(Hsieh, 2009).

TOWARDS A SYSTEM FOR MANAGING COLLABORATIVE CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE

301

Summarized, the need for a well-defined,

systematic and strategic oriented customer know-

ledge management system which integrates all

relevant knowledge categories and supports the

powerful customer knowledge competency process

is obviously. This allows us to deal efficiently with

growing requirements in a complex and dynamic

market. When this process is not managed effecti-

vely and efficiently referring to an empirical study

this can cause important negative effects on

innovation activities, strategic orientation and

quality aspects as also customer service and time

and cost increases.

2.3 Management Implications

With respect to customer knowledge management as

a management approach different streams of

research exist which differ regarding the

organizational orientation, namely internal and/or

external orientation of knowledge management, and

in addition in focusing on the degree of either human

or technical involvement.

In recent years research work in the first group is

still dominated from the viewpoint that the focus of

knowledge management is put on internal issues

(Haasis and Möllenstädt, 2007), (Shu-Mei, 2009) in

order to reach productivity and efficiency goals

(Probst, Raub and Romhardt, 1997), (Stauss, 2002).

The new understanding of customer knowledge

management focuses on strengthening the innovative

capacity of enterprises. The power of innovation as

the target is fairly new, there have been until now

primarily objectives such as the above mentioned

efficiency goals like cost and quality as it is shown

in figure 1:

Using this new definition of customer knowledge

management these findings indicate that an internal

orientation of companies is not sufficient. In this

sense customer knowledge management requires the

integrative treatment of internal and external

knowledge resources and can not be discussed only

from an inter-organizational viewpoint.

Customer knowledge value will be decided and

is produced only by the customer! Only the

customer itself produces value through externalizing

his/her experiences, expertise and familiarity. Since

customer knowledge which resides in the customer

is strongly connected to the successful development

of the companies innovative ability for new products

and a higher customer satisfaction, we focus on

integrating the external customer view into company

and combine it with internal knowledge.

Research work in the second group focus on the

Figure 1: Customer Knowledge Management Goals.

degree of information and communication techno-

logy use to make sure the right information is

delivered to the appropriate competent person at the

right time to enable right decisions. This gains

importance while customers do not always know

what they want or they can not express correctly

their demand so that employees has to propose cus-

tomer solutions which can be derived from former

customer solutions and lessons learned stored in an

information technology-based customer knowledge

management system. Information technology acts

like an enabler and following this in this paper we

specifically address customer knowledge trans-fer

and creation through information and communi-

cation.

It must be said that efficient and effective

customer knowledge management requires the

integration of both research directions and has to be

conceptualized as an integrated approach. Hence the

customer knowledge management approach of this

paper is a link between the research work of the first

group with the second group.

In the following we will describe the prototype

of the integrated Customer Knowledge Management

(iCKM) system. This iCKM is based and developed

on the recommendations of the TOMI-Model

(Semmelrock-Picej, 2010).

We start with the presentation of the used

technology for system design and implementation.

3 DESIGN MODEL ASPECTS

3.1 Introduction

A major challenge in the field of customer

knowledge oriented software system development is

to effectively link tools from both directions, human

and technology, in order to match customer know-

ledge with internal organizational needs (Shankar,

Acharia and Baveja, 2009). For that an effective and

KMIS 2010 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

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efficient customer knowledge management system

fulfills at least the following func-tionalities:

 Transparency about relevant customer

knowledge (“direct knowledge orientation”)

 Transparency about customer knowledge

experts (“indirect knowledge orientation”) and

 Transparency about relevant context (“context

or process orientation”).

Based on this a customer knowledge manage-

ment system is a supply chain wide systematic

attempt to generate, store and apply customer know-

ledge whereas this is needed and the system is not li-

mited to inter-firm knowledge sharing, moreover it

enables the direct integration of the customer. In ad-

dition all activities have to be summarized in this

system where every employee is encouraged to add

knowledge to further develop the organizational

knowledge base.

3.2 Technological Implications

Integranova is a future-oriented software producer

who succeeded in introducing the first software

system generating complete applications from

models with ONME® (Pastor et al, 2001), (Barberá,

2004). As this, the high-tech company is an

entrepreneurial organization which seeks to develop

differentiable competencies and organizational tech-

nology based techniques that provide differentiable

value to the customer.

Integranova uses the OlivaNova Model

Execution Set of tools (ONME®) to develop

Business Applications. ONME® fully supports the

MDA-based, conceptual model-centric software

development approach. It forms an implementation

of the initiative MDA developed by the OMG

(Object Management Group). By means of MDA it

is intended to develop software systems separating

the specification of the system functionality from the

implementation of that functionality (Barberá,

2004).

ONME® is the first system that generates a

complete and error free application from the Model.

In a first step the analyst creates a model of the

business process on three different layers (static,

functional and dynamic) and as a next step the

content of the user interface within the presentation

layer. Afterwards the programming machine

generates the source code in various languages (C#,

JSP/JSF, ASP.NET, Visual Basic) ready for

compilation. Applying this method, i.e. developing

by means of the model driven approach, has a series

of advantages (Barberá, 2004).

Figure 2: MDA & Model Execution within ONME.

The methodology of MDA (see figure 2)

requires the definition of a platform independent

model (PIM). First the customer decides on the

technology to be employed, adding further

information. Then the PIM completes the data into a

platform specific model (PSM). These steps

establish the transformation into the implementation

model (IM) represented in this case as application

code. OlivaNova (ON) Modeler allows these

operations, furthermore it offers the possibility to

construct, edit and validate conceptual models which

can be seen as PIM.

The tool provides the following models

(Kandutsch, Michael and Semmelrock-Picej, 2010)

which allow defining all necessary information to

the utmost detail in close collaboration with the

customer:

 Object Model: The starting point to specify a

conceptual model using the ON Modeler is the

Object Model, which gathers the static

properties of the information system.

 Dynamic Model: The Dynamic Model gathers

the dynamic properties of objects, i.e. the

behavior of objects and the communication

and interaction between objects.

 Functional Model: The Functional Model

illustrates how the execution of events

modifies the state of the different objects of

the system.

 User Interface or Presentation Model: ON

Presentation Model provides the possibility of

specifying how the user interacts with the

system. This model that is not included in

UML distinguishes ON Modeler from other

modeling tools in that it allows the analyst to

capture user interface requirements.

TOWARDS A SYSTEM FOR MANAGING COLLABORATIVE CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE

303

Mixing those patterns allows an analyst to define

the interface of the application that will be generated

in an intuitive and simple way.

3.3 Customer Knowledge Competency

Building

The developed iCKM focuses primarily on

supporting the software development process in

order to build customer knowledge competency.

We will present some features of and lessons

learned in the use with the implemented iCKM with

respect to the framework of Campbell (Campbell,

2003) and the customer knowledge classification of

Staus (Stauss, 2002).

Regarding the components “(1) a customer in-

formation process” and “(2) marketing interface” the

screenshot (see figure 3) shows the part “Knowledge

for the customer” of the iCKM system.

Figure 3: Managing “Knowledge for the customer”.

As we can notice iCKM is a customer-company

interaction and communication system and a central

information point where information and knowledge

which is gained or created is documented and stored

along the relevant process. The whole interaction

process is supported through an organizational cul-

ture of a strict documentation concerning every

formal and informal feedback or knowledge from

the customer and from inside the organization.

The next figure shows the screenshot (see figure

4) of the part “Knowledge from the customer” of the

iCKM system.

The customer likes to see the position of the

software product in the relevant process so that he

can give feedback and recommendations anytime.

From the use of iCKM in practice we know that

customers like to have the opportunity to provide

feedback which directly should flow into the

customer solution. And customer’s await for a quick

Figure 4: Managing “Knowledge from the customer”.

answer. It is important that the other way around

knowledge is provided for the customer for

communication and targeted activities affecting

individual customer’s needs.

This allows the high-tech company to provide

personalized service and on the other hand the

customer feedback gives good recommendations for

action. This is the starting point for a single loop

learning process in the sense that based on a task

after completing this task successfully the task

definition is supplemented with the accordingly

customer feedback (positive and negative) and

supplemented with the gained experience through

task execution. The entire knowledge is stored as

lessons learned for next projects. These learning

processes contribute to customer competency buil-

ding. Regularly these learning processes are

expanded to an organizational level where the tasks

and learnings are analyzed and reflected collectively.

It is important to mention that we have

recognized that customers need to believe that the

system is trustworthy. Therefore on the lower left

side the degree of confidentiality of information can

be indicated.

Concerning the component “(3) senior

involvement” we experienced that the kind of

leadership and the role and behaviour of the senior

during every software development project ranges

from a strong guidance which should be provided by

the com-pany’s senior leader as part of the customer

knowledge creation process to a delegative

leadership or the simultaneously application of the

opposite leadership stategies in a balanced way

(Semmelrock-Picej, 2010) what depends on the

concrete project.

Finally, concerning the component “(4) emplo-

yee evaluation and reward system” we recognize a

shift from a notable intra-organizational viewpoint

of a traditional economy where incentives are used

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for motivation to the behavioural rules conditioned

to the knowledge based economy, as Richter stated

on the social network XING on 4

of March 2010

(see figure 5):

Figure 5: Use of Incentives in Knowledge Economy.

Knowledge sharing is more than ever a question

of personal motivation which is triggered by a high

degree of transparency about the ownership of

externalized knowledge.

4 CONCLUSIONS

This paper contributes to the research in the area of

customer knowledge competency building.

Our approach addresses the above mentioned

issues by proposing a customer knowledge manage-

ment model which takes care of human aspects and

organizational aspects and the customer knowledge

management goals in a company. This system

follows a process oriented approach which helps

managing a companies process and the entire know-

ledge in this process, with special attention to the

management of the customer’s knowledge.

We conclude that for reaching these goals a

customer relationship management approach is faced

with a number of limitations.

Therefore, in high technology companies, as

presented, the customers’s preferences are the focus

to be served especially with a technology based cus-

tomer knowledge management system.

The information technology based system is de-

signed and implemented using ONME® in order to

generate cost and time sensitive applications from

models. This system acts like an enabler, to support

this, some useful learnings from the organizational

viewpoint have to be mentioned too, like a structure

that is characterized by a low degree of

centralization, formalization and an open culture.

The future work will concentrate on information

technology based externalization techniques

(Semmelrock-Picej and Kandutsch, 2010) in order to

support the customer to better express his/her

knowledge, needs and wants.

The next research questions concern the value

contribution of the gained knowledge to corporate

success.

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