Knowledge Management Most Cited
Articles 10, 11 and 12
Presented by:
Lana Abu-Shaheen
Undergraduate Senior in MIS and OM
November 8, 2005
Contents
Organizational Memory: Review for Concepts and Recommendations for
Management
 E. Stein (1995)
 Research interests focus on the role of knowledge and expertise in business
organizations.
 It is important for “lower down” people to get connected and interrelate the
knowledge each one has.
 An improved organizational memory can benefit organization in several ways
Contents
Exploring Internal Stickiness: Impediments to the Transfer of Best Practice
Within the Firm
 Gabriel Szulanski (1996)
 Research interests focus on strategic management, with a
specific focus on the management of knowledge assets and the making
of strategy
 Barriers are knowledge related not motivation related
 Results contrast to conventional wisdom
Contents
The Firm as a Distributed Knowledge System: A constructionist Approach
 Haridimos Tsoukas (1996)
 Resources are created by human interface
 Knowledge is dispersed through individual communication
Cross-cutting Themes
Concepts
Paper 1
(Szulanski, 1996)
Paper 2
(Stein, 1995)
Paper 3 (Tsoukas,
1996)
Ways to deter transfer Internal stickiness
of knowledge
- Organization does not
know how to learn
- lack of absorptive
capacity
- lack of motivation
- arduous relationships
Non-functioning
Organizational
memory
1. Not fully utilizing
resources
2. Uneven distribution
of knowledge
3. Not enough
interaction because of
management
Resources
People, interaction,
past knowledge
repository
People and their
departmental
interactions
The people, their
interaction and the
communication channel
Cross-cutting Themes
Throw backs to Nonaka’s philosophies
 Knowledge creation occurs at any level in the organization
 Tacit and explicit knowledge
 Make knowledge available for testing and use in the whole organization
Throw backs to Garvin’s philosophies
 Importance of having a learning organization
 Communication across functional departmental boundaries important to
stimulate diffusion of knowledge among all aspects of organization
Additional Information
DECOR System (2004)
Delivery of Context-sensitive Organizational Knowledge
Documented knowledge on different sources of media
Links and relationships not represented
Ontology based system that makes looking up information easy for user
Approach:
Identify knowledge-intensive processes
Process analysis
Construct domain ontology
Analyze task specific knowledge needs
Deal with weak workflow structures
Basic Structure: DECOR philosophy
References
1. The DECOR Toolbox for Workflow embedded Organizational Memory Access
Abecker A., Bernardi A., Ntioudis Spyridon, Mentzas G.,Heretrich R., Houy C.,
Muller S., Legal M.
http://project.know-net.org/Papers/C45-ICEIS-01.pdf
2.
Dr. Szulanski
http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/gszulanski/
http://www.sagepub.com/book.aspx?pid=6731
3. Dr. Tsoukas
http://www.alba.edu.gr/faculty/faculty/resident/index.asp?prof_id=20
4. Dr. Stein
http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/e/w/ews3/