Knowledge management based collaboration moderator services to support SMEs in virtual organisations

Recent decades have seen a move away from large-scale organisations and supply chains covering all stages of the value chain to smaller, more agile organisations focused on their core competencies and business areas. Whilst competitive advantage can be gained through efficient use of resources and optimisation of products and processes, challenges are also created as companies need to collaborate to provide customers with more complete solutions or greater product functionality. Specialist SMEs can offer vital skills and expertise in this context but may be vulnerable to the high costs of collaboration. Hence, knowledge management services to support collaborations are critical for the effective operation of such SMEs. This paper discusses the role of Collaboration Moderator Services (CMS) as a knowledge management service for SMEs operating in a virtual organisation. One of the key requirements for such SMEs at the pre-creation stage is to quickly identify potential business opportunities and corresponding collaborative partners to form a virtual organisation to capture business opportunities. CMS applies different data and text mining techniques to analyse calls for tender documents based on the competencies and areas of interest stored in the shared information of a collaboration pool. A case study of UK-based SMEs demonstrates the concept of the application of text mining as a knowledge discovery tool, supporting SMEs at the pre-creation stage of a virtual organisation. It has been shown that text mining for CMS can be used to (1) identify possible business opportunities for each SMEs in the collaborative network using text analysis (2) Indicate the possible collaboration between the two SMEs using link analysis and (3) Raise awareness in SMEs by indicating the possible business opportunities and possible collaborating SME partners for multi-enterprise collaborations using a dimensional matrix.