Abstract:
Personal knowledge networks have been primarily conceived by researchers with regard to the inter-firm
knowledge sources between organisations, where networks are informal and personal. Instead of looking
at the organisational context, some researchers investigate the intra-firm aspects at personal level of
organisational knowledge networks, where knowledge management processes start and end. In a recent
study on agent-mediated personal knowledge management (PKM) processes, an interview survey has
been conducted to investigate the needs of organisations in tapping the personal knowledge networks
among the employees by understanding the processes of managing knowledge at personal level. It also
attempts to justify the knowledge sources for agent-mediation that are not only characterised by the usual
knowledge repositories and databases, but also the knowledge experts within and outside of an
organisation. The survey covers two main industries in Mala ysia, which are Service and Education, in
which the sampling of experts for respondents is made on these two industries. This paper analyses and
discusses the results of this interview survey, to contribute to the domain of agent technology in
mediating the human knowledge worker’s PKM processes. It then recommends future works in modelling
the bottom-up approach of PKM-OKM, where personal knowledge networks manifest the organisational
knowledge management with the help of software agents.
