Defining Process-oriented Knowledge Management Strategies

Along which basic lines could an organization which plans to invest in knowledgemanagement proceed? What general initiatives can be suggested for knowledge management?First, an array of knowledge management goals and strategies is presented taken fromtheoretical and empirical studies which are then related to each other in the light of what wecall a strategic intervention into an organization’s way of handling knowledge. We then makethe case for the integration of process orientation into a comprehensive multi-dimensionalframework for knowledge management strategies. Process-oriented knowledge managementinitiatives are designed to provide employees with task-related knowledge in the organization’soperative business processes. We argue that with this......
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Defining Process-oriented Knowledge Management Strategies Knowledge and Process Management Volume 9 Number 2 pp 103–118 (2002) DOI: 10.1002 / kpm.136& Research ArticleDefining Process-oriented KnowledgeManagement StrategiesRonald Maier* and Ulrich RemusUniversity of Regensburg, Germany Along which basic lines could an organization which plans to invest in knowledge management proceed? What general initiatives can be suggested for knowledge management? First, an array of knowledge management goals and strategies is presented taken from theoretical and empirical studies which are then related to each other in the light of what we call a strategic intervention into an organization’s way of handling knowledge. We then make the case for the integration of process orientation into a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework for knowledge management strategies. Process-oriented knowledge management initiatives are designed to provide employees with task-related knowledge in the organiza- tion’s operative business processes. We argue that with this framework the resulting process- oriented knowledge management strategies address the integration of the resource-based view of an organization — which is the main focus of knowledge management — with the market-oriented view — which is implicitly brought about by process orientation. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.INTRODUCTION activities implemented in organizations which often lack a strategic perspective. KM seems toKnowledge Management (KM) and Organizational ‘absorb’ all kinds of theoretical approaches as wellMemory (OM) are concepts well known from as practical activities, measures and technologiesorganizational science and learning theory. Many without thorough consideration of their strategicapproaches have been developed which claim to or business value. We hypothesize that an organi-guide organizations to use their common or shared zation should follow a complex KM strategy asmemory in a more efficient way (for extensive part of a comprehensive business strategy. A KMsurveys of existing KM or OM approaches see strategy can be described using several dimensionsLehner, 2000; Maier and Lehner, 2000). With the derived from a theoretical and empirical survey ofadvent of advanced database technologies, net and KM activities, measures and technologies.communication technologies, especially the so- Process orientation is a perspective widelycalled ‘Intranet’ or ‘Web’ technologies, as well as accepted in organization science. Recently, therededicated knowledge management systems (KMS, have been a number of attempts to integrate KMfor a list of systems see Maier, 2002), sound infor- and process orientation (cf. Davenport et al., 1996;mation and communication technologies exist Allweyer, 1999; Eppler et al., 1999). However, untilto support organizational processes of creating, now there has been no link between the twoacquiring, organizing, distributing and applying concepts on the strategic level. Organizationsknowledge. which have already implemented a process- There are already a large number of KM oriented organizational design can use process- orientation as one of the strategic dimensions. The*Correspondence to: Ronald Maier, Department of Business goals of this paper are:Informatics III, University of Regensburg, D-93040 Regensburg,Germany. E-mail: ronald.maier@wiwi.uni-regensburg.de $ To lay out a framework that shows the strategicCopyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.RESEARCH ARTICLE Knowledge and Process Management options an organization has with respect to KM. material and publications can be downloaded The framework details the very general classes from the URL: http://www-wi.uni-regensburg. of KM strategies suggested in the literature (see de/yoms. e.g. Hansen et al., 1999). The list of KM goals which we used in the$ To address the integration of the resource-based empirical study was derived from case studies view of an organization incorporated into KM documented in the literature (see e.g. Davenport initiatives with the market-oriented view. I ...