Knowledge culture

Citation

Chase, R.L. (2006), "Knowledge culture", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 10 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jkm.2006.23010daa.001

Knowledge culture

Knowledge culture

Asupportive organizational culture is essential for creating and sustaining a successful knowledge-driven enterprise strategy. All of the papers in this issue of the Journal of Knowledge Management touch in one way or another with knowledge culture.

Stan Oliver and Kondal Reddy Kandadi examine the factors influencing the development of organizational knowledge culture by investigating and assessing knowledge management (KM) practices in six large distributed organizations. The authors have identified ten major factors: leadership, organizational structure, evangelization, communities of practice, reward systems, time allocation, business processes, recruitment, infrastructure, and physical attributes. Current KM literature suggests that organizations create a knowledge culture by focusing on a particular approach, such as business processes, people or technology. Based on the results of their study, the authors urge KM practitioners to adopt a holistic approach encompassing all ten organizational factors when creating a strategy for the development of an enterprise knowledge culture.

Vittal Anantatmula and Shivraj Kanungo in their paper “Structuring the underlying relations among the knowledge management outcomes” have sought to identify a set of criteria to assess the effectiveness of KM, and to understand how these criteria inter-relate with one another. Based on a survey of KM professionals, they have determined that the critical criteria set to assess the effectiveness of KM includes enhanced collaboration, improved communication, improved employee skills, improved productivity and better decision making. The interrelation of the criteria set reveals that enhanced collaboration and best practice sharing, supported by improved communication, leads to improved employees skills, which in turn creates better decision making. By making better decisions, employees are more productive and the “quality” of products/services/solutions is improved.

Jacqueline L. Kenney and Siegfried P. Gudergan report on the results of an empirical study testing the effects of different combinations of organizational form and combinative capabilities on an enterprise’s knowledge integration capabilities. The authors have determined that the affects of organizational form on the efficiency, scope and flexibility of a firm’s knowledge integration is influenced by its combinative capability. As firms do not necessarily have singular integration requirements, the latter are employed to increase primary efficiency, scope and flexibility requirements, and secondary requirements are necessitated by the types and forms of knowledge.

“Understanding dynamic capabilities through knowledge management” by Anders Paarup Nielsen attempts to integrate research on knowledge management with the dynamic capabilities approach. The author investigates three dynamic capabilities: knowledge development, knowledge (re)combination, and knowledge use. Research findings suggest that our understanding of these dynamic capabilities can be better understood by “unbundling” them into the elemental KM activities of knowledge creation, acquisition, capture, assembly, sharing, integration, leverage and exploitation. The author concludes that KM practitioners should balance their emphasis on dynamic capabilities and KM management activities to optimize enterprise performance.

Karma Sherif examines how an adaptive strategy for managing knowledge helps organizations to become more innovative and also builds their dynamic capabilities. The author states that a better understanding and appreciation of the adaptive processes of complex adaptive systems is required, especially since these adaptive processes reflect episodes of massive organizational learning which must be managed and supported. KM practitioners with a clear understanding of complex adaptive systems should be in a better position to plan and deploy KM programs to radically improve organizational learning.

Roy Williams examines the concepts of tacit and explicit knowledge with a view towards developing a better framework for a theoretical and practical understanding of knowledge management. With the assistance of concepts borrowed from applied linguistics, such as articulation and discourse, the author explores the relationships between data, the components of information in their various forms, knowledge and narrative. He develops distinctions between formal and ante-formal information, and procedural information and contextual analysis. Finally, the author proposes a framework for analyzing how the component elements of KM articulate with each other.

“Strategic knowledge transfer and its implications for competitive advantage: an integrative framework” by Juan Carlos Bou-Llusar and Mercedes Segarra-Ciprés analyzes how the efficient transfer of strategic knowledge creates competitive advantage. Strategic assets are the set of resources and capabilities that are difficult to commercialize and imitate; they are scarce, appropriable and specialized. Four conditions have been identified in the resource-based view that provides these assets with a strategic character: imperfect mobility, difficulty of imitation, difficulty of substitution, and durability. The authors state that internal knowledge transfer may have different implications for competitiveness, depending upon the characteristics of transferred knowledge. Thus, strategic knowledge may generate competitive advantages from the nature of the knowledge itself. The effect of strategic knowledge transfer varies depending upon the competitiveness of a specific business sector. This effect is more pronounced in knowledge-intensive industries because these organizations employ technological knowledge intensively in R&D and new product development.

The paper by Junxia Wang, Hans Peter Peters and Jiancheng Guan studies implicit knowledge practices in research groups in order to identify those factors that contribute to high knowledge productivity. Within the context of German research groups, the authors report that human resource management is the major weakness. There seems to be an inherent contradiction between the long-term employment security valued by German researchers and the institutional requirements to create a flexible environment that encourages creativity and innovativeness. The authors conclude their investigations by offering a number of recommendations for improving research capabilities in developing countries.

“Knowledge flows in self-organizing processes” by Harri Laihonen examines the subject using Holland’s views on complex adaptive systems. Holland defines seven basic characteristics for examining self-organization. According to Holland, there are four properties that are in common – aggregation, non-linearity, flows and diversity. The mechanisms are tagging, internal models and building blocks. Laihonen states that these seven basic characteristics can be used as an effective tool in knowledge management. They offer a way to understand how self-organization emerges from lower-level or local interactions, i.e. knowledge flows. Self-organization can be seen, at least in some cases, as an effective way of organizing and creating enabling infrastructures for creative work. However, without adequate knowledge flows this innovativeness can be stifled from the outset.

Samo Pavlin studies the differences and similarities of communities of practice (CoP) in small and large organizations. The author looks at CoPs by asking whether CoPs in small organizations share the same theoretical characteristics as those in large organizations. Pavlin reports that there are differences, such as a higher degree of community engagement, overlapping of organizational roles such as sponsor and coordinator, scarce resources, and a more dispersed and heterogeneous membership, which differentiate a community based on the social network of small organizations from a CoP in a large organization.

One of the immediate challenges facing knowledge managers is finding the balance between open knowledge sharing and enterprise intellectual capital management. Ebrahim Randeree reviews security for data and information and explores the dimensions of secure knowledge management systems. The author concludes that the security of knowledge has to be incorporated into a company’s goals and strategic objectives. And, the culture of the firm needs to support knowledge sharing while at the same time including security protection.

Rory L. Chase