Abstract
M.Sc. (Computer Science)
Corporations throughout the world are facing numerous challenges in today’s competitive marketplace and are continuously looking for new and innovative means and methods of gaining competitive advantage. One of the means used to gain this advantage is that of information technology, and all the associated technologies and principles. These are primarily used to facilitate business processes and procedures that are designed to provide this competitive advantage. Significant attention has been given to each of the individual technologies and principles of Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Information Security, and Intranets and how they can be leveraged in order to improve efficiency and functionality within a corporation. However, in order to truly reap the benefits of these technologies and principles, it is necessary to look at them as a collaborative system, rather as individual components. This dissertation therefore investigates each of these individual technologies and principles in isolation, as well as in combination with each other to outline potential advantages, associated risks, and disadvantages when combining them within the corporate world. Based on these, the Intelligently Generated Knowledge (IGK) framework is outlined to implement such a collaborative system. Thereafter, an investigation of a theoretical situation is conducted based on this framework to examine the impact of the implementation of this type of collaborative system. The potential increase in cost savings, efficiency and functionality of corporations that would employ the IGK framework is clearly outlined in the theoretical example, and should this approach be adopted, it would be able to provide significant competitive advantage for any corporation.