Knowledge Management For Chinese Medicines And Information Technology System Model

Knowledge Management has been viewed as an important subject since early 90's of the last century. Entering the 21st century, with the accelerated development of the knowledge economy, knowledge has become the most important asset. For any organization, good knowledge management means strengthening its assets and competitiveness. Organizations of Chinese medicines are no exception under this global climate. Besides, Chinese medicines, once being forsaken and viewed as unscientific, have resumed development again following the modernization, scientifization, internationalization and acceptance of traditional medicines by the world, including the World Health Organization (WHO). The knowledge of traditional Chinese medicines, inherited from the long history since a thousand year ago, as well as the rapid development of modern Chinese medicine knowledge in the past decades, forms an enormous treasure-house of knowledge. The future blossom of Chinese medicines, especially their further internationalization and scientifization, will highly count on the proper management of the knowledge of Chinese medicines, including its exchange, transfer, use and innovation.The study of knowledge management has long been focused in the fields of organization and management, psychology and sociology. Nonaka's theories of knowledge innovation, transfer and transformation between explicit and tacit knowledge and Wenger's communities of practice are among the most representative studies. On the other hand, knowledge management in information technology area has emphasized on the study of knowledge discovery and information engineering. Currently, the knowledge management system products in the information technology market are basically of this type. The study of knowledge management with full consideration of combining information technology with organization and management, humanity and social factors is still at an initial stage. The application of the aforesaid to Chinese medicines is even rare. This thesis, with the first of its kind, dissolves the SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) model and Ba theory of Nonaka, and Wenger's communities of practice into the traits of the knowledge of Chinese medicines. With further embedment into information technology, the theories of knowledge management are integrated for Chinese medicines and a system model of information technology has been created.This thesis analyses the needs for knowledge management of Chinese medicines and comes up with a knowledge map of Chinese medicines. It then analyses the explicit and tacit characteristics of the knowledge of Chinese medicines along the"Theory","Methodology","Prescription"and"Drug"areas, concluding the"Duality of Explicit and Tacit Knowledge for Chinese Medicines". Following this, the strong and weak ties between knowledge objects and the management strategies for the explicit and tacit knowledge of Chinese medicines are discussed. Base on the above, the author establishes the CMCoPBa– Chinese Medicines Communities of Practice & Ba, discussing the Chinese medicines domain, community, practice and Ba being the basic elements of CMCoPBa, the development phases of CMCoPBa, characteristics of inter-organization and distributed CMCOPBa, and the information technology support. Consolidating the above findings and making use of the modular system design method from information technology, the author finally constructs an information technology system model for the knowledge management of Chinese medicines, comprising the network and computer system layer, data layer, knowledge services layer and application layer. Through a case study of knowledge management in the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences of University of Macau, this paper also discusses the implementation considerations.The CMCoPBa and the information technology system model established in this thesis offer a guiding theory and methodology, implementation framework and practicing considerations when incorporating knowledge management in Chinese medicines organizations. This should facilitate the advancement of knowledge management for Chinese medicines and provide a significant contribution to the modernization of Chinese medicines.