An empirical knowledge management framework for professional virtual community in knowledge-intensive service industries

With continued growth of the service-oriented knowledge economy, knowledge-intensive service industries (KISI) have become a trend nowadays for industrial development. Enterprise activities in knowledge-intensive service industries are highly creative. When performing and achieving each activity, the domain professional knowledge and experiences, which involve various ideas, such as service innovation or service value-added, are employed. Therefore, effective knowledge management must be achieved to rapidly accumulate knowledge assets of enterprise and increase the efficiency of knowledge-intensive service industries. A professional virtual community is an interactive platform that allows enterprise experts to create and share empirical knowledge in knowledge-intensive service industries. A high volume of useless information and empirical knowledge is typically generated during expert discussions. Therefore, managing and sharing useful contents of knowledge discussion have become important issues for empirical knowledge management in a professional virtual community. This work presents a systematic approach to develop a framework for managing empirical knowledge to support a professional virtual community in knowledge-intensive service industries. The approach presented in this study comprises three phases: (i) proposing an empirical knowledge management model for a professional virtual community, (ii) designing an empirical knowledge management system framework for a professional virtual community, and (iii) implementing an empirical knowledge management system prototype for a professional virtual community. Study results facilitate efforts within the professional virtual community to extract, verify, store, and share empirical knowledge to assist knowledge-intensive service industries in enhancing service innovation abilities and creating the best services for customers.