A knowledge management framework for the telecommunication industry: the KMFTI model

Recent years have witnessed a continuing growth of developments in knowledge management systems to capture the information flows within organisations and tum them into exploitable management databases. Examples to this are such as the Total Quality Management and the Business Process Reengineedng models. There is no doubt, that during the last few years there has been a broad interest of exploiting knowledge. However, traditional Knowledge Management (KM) systems and frameworks do not necessarily take into account the specific nature of the telecommunication industry, particularly those related to capturing, sharing and exploiting unconventional data flows that occur between the personnel on the move such as technicians and engineers. Thus, a large amount of these data is lost and will never be able to benefit the organisation or its employees in any way. Therefore, this research addresses the development of a new KM framework to fill in this gap and provide the telecommunication organisations in general and the General Post and Telecommunication Company(GPITC) in Ubya in particular with a solid base where bulk and rough data will become exploitable and manageable in a concise and intelligent way. The main questions being posed by this research are as follow: Could the Existing Knowledge Management Systems help the GPTC in Libya in particular and the telecommunication industry in general to better manage their data flows and turn them into an exploitable knowledge base? and How a strategic Knowledge Management Framework (KMF) could contribute to establishing adequate guidelines and policies in such telecommunicatioenn vironment? In this regard, the investigations in this research will stress on the Identification of the broad range of issues that are preventing the adoption of KM systems within the GPTC or any given telecommunication organisation rather than trying to focus on a specific and unique question about the exploitation of KM. This approach is justified by the fact that no specific KMS appear to be developed for such Industry. Furthermore, the various parameters are described under this common framework which is expected to benefit the telecommunication sector as a whole.