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Abstract The goal of every organization is to manage their knowledge successfully. A firm's knowledge management strategy should reflect its internal competitive strategy. The strategy chosen should create value for the firm's customers, turn a profit for the firm and focus on how the firm's employees deliver on the value, differentiation, and speed. The primary thrust of this paper is to inspect the knowledge management (KM) practices of three organizations and discuss the commonalties based on a grounded theory approach. The results of this research effort are intended to show some of the tools and methods that successful organizations have used to manage their knowledge.
Keywords Knowledge management, Research methods, Corporate strategy
Introduction
Concepts of strategic knowledge management systems
Knowledge management (KM) is a rapidly growing field that crosses diverse disciplines such as psychology and information systems. KM is often referred to as organizational learning, organizational memory, and expertise management (Thomas et al., 2001). In fact, KM can be viewed as a conceptually complex, evolving, broad umbrella of issues and viewpoints. Traditionally, organizational knowledge needs to become a stable resource if it can be translated into a profitable venue for information sharing. There is a growing rate of turnover among managers and/or knowledge workers who accumulate organization-specific knowledge that are ultimately lost to the firm and possibly gained by their competitors. Knowledge needs to be captured, interpreted, and eventually transferred in such a manner that the knowledge will continue to serve the organization, regardless of the individuals' original purpose for collecting the information. Given the strategic emphasis on creativity (Mintzberg, 2001 a,b; Pfeffer ef a/., 1995), the most valuable resources available to any organization are human skills, expertise, and relationships. Hence, upper management should capitalize on these assets in determining a KM strategy that is appropriate for the business enterprise (Allee, 1997; Duffy, 2001; Ahanotu, 1998).
Hansen et al. (1999) suggested that there are at least two types of strategies for managing knowledge. They are the codification strategy and the personalization strategy. The codification strategy necessitates storing knowledge into various databases where it can be easily retrieved by anyone in the organization. Codification strategy is where knowledge is carefully codified and stored in databases, where it can be accessed and used easily by anyone...