44 Abdel-Aziz and Wahba
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Training is important to the success of an OMIS. Training has never been managed
in the right way from an OMIS perspective. It was shown that new staff members have
always relied on themselves in developing the necessary skills and knowledge on how
to efficiently use the OMIS. On the other hand, all employees have never been trained
on how to share knowledge by making it available to colleagues.
Management of OMIS
Management of the OMIS is a crucial factor. There is a clear problem in the
management of the OMIS, as there is no single owner of that task. Due to its nature,
several applications do constitute the OMIS. Each of these applications has its owner.
Also, content is not centrally managed, which leads to inconsistency problems. Another
clear OMIS management problem is the lack of content in some specific areas such as
integration with other vendors’ products. Due to the current decentralized management
aspect of the OMIS, this subject has never been approached. In addition, “CITE” has not
determined strategy that defines what exactly should be made available in the knowledge
base, nor its location or how it is to be acquired.
Communication
Communication is one of the negative issues towards the success of “CITE’s”
OMIS. One aspect is determined, that is, the lack of communication between the owners
of the different Web sites from one side and the PS consultants delivering services to
customers in the field on the other side. The incompleteness and poor content in some
areas, such as integration services, has a negative effect on the overall performance of
the PS organization.
Technology
Technology has an important role in the success of an OMIS. Information search and
retrieval is an important aspect of any OMIS. However, “CITE’s” search and retrieval
system is good only in performing basic search, as it lacks a high level of search granularity.
Corporate Culture
“CITE’s” corporate culture is encouraging all staff to use the OMIS, but it is not
rewarding or acknowledging personal initiatives of knowledge sharing. In other words,
explicit knowledge is shared because it is published on the local intranet Web sites or
because it is made available through the company’s portal; but the company has no
defined strategy or any type of mechanism that encourages its employees to share their
personal tacit knowledge. Therefore, the key issue is to instill a corporate-wide culture
that encourages and rewards knowledge sharing.
RECOMMENDATIONS
As a solution to “CITE’s” problem of a lack of OMIS effectiveness, several actions
have been recommended: