Michael H. Zack

Developing a Knowledge Strategy

Today, knowledge is considered the most strategically important resource and learning the most strategically important capability for business organizations. However, many initiatives being undertaken to develop and exploit organizational knowledge are not explicitly linked to or framed by the organizations business strategy. In fact, most knowledge management initiatives are viewed primarily as information systems projects. While many managers intuitively believe that strategic advantage can come from knowing more than competitors, they are unable to explicitly articulate the link between knowledge and strategy. This article provides a framework for making that link and for assessing an organizations competitive position regarding its intellectual resources and capabilities. It recommends that organizations perform a knowledgebased SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, comparing their knowledge to that of their competitors and to the knowledge required to execute their own strategy.

Knowledge management and organizational performance: an exploratory analysis

– The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an exploratory investigation of the organizational impact of knowledge management (KM)., – A search of the literature revealed 12 KM practices whose performance impact was assessed via a survey of business organizations., – KM practices were found to be directly related to organizational performance which, in turn, was directly related to financial performance. There was no direct relationship found between KM practices and financial performance. A different set of KM practices was associated with each value discipline (i.e. customer intimacy, product development and operational excellence). A gap exists between the KM practices that firms believe to be important and those that were directly related to organizational performance., – The majority of the research constructs were formative, thus improving the measurement of KM practices will prove vital for validating and extending these findings. The findings were based solely on organizations from North America and Australia and may not reflect KM practices in other geographic, economic or cultural settings., – This study encourages practitioners to focus their KM initiatives on specific intermediate performance outcomes., – The paper examines the relationship between KM practices and performance outcomes. It was expected that a direct relationship between KM practices and organizational performance would be observed. It was also expected that organizational performance would mediate the relationship between KM practices and financial performance. These expectations were supported. KM practices showed a direct relationship with intermediate measures of organizational performance, and organizational performance showed a significant and direct relationship to financial performance. There was no significant relationship found between KM practices and financial performance.

Interactivity and Communication Mode Choice in Ongoing Management Groups

Management is communication intensive and, therefore, managers may derive benefits from computer-based alternatives to the traditional communication modes of face-to-face FTF, telephone, and written memo. This research examined the use of electronic messaging EM by ongoing management groups performing a cooperative task. By means of an in-depth multimethod case study of the editorial group of two daily newspapers, it examined the fit between the interactivity of the chosen communication mode FTF vs. EM and the mode of discourse it was used for alternation vs. interaction/discussion. Two propositions were derived from this exploratory study. The first proposes that FTF, being highly interactive, is appropriate for building a shared interpretive context among group members, while CMC, being less interactive, is more appropriate for communicating within an established context. Groups exhibiting effective communication will use FTF primarily for interactive discourse and EM for discourse consisting primarily of alternating adjacency pairs. The second proposes that to the extent that the appropriate communication modes are chosen, communication will be more effective.

Knowledge Management and Organizational Performance: An Exploratory Survey

Ninety organizations were surveyed in an exploratory investigation of the organizational impact of knowledge management (KM). A search of the literature revealed 12 KM practices. Results indicated that these KM practices were directly related to organizational performance which, in turn, was directly related to financial performance. In addition, a different set of KM practices were associated with specific value disciplines (i.e., customer intimacy, product development and operational excellence). Interestingly, a significant gap exists between the KM practices that firms believe to be important and those that turned out to be directly related to organizational performance. The implications of this study are significant for both practitioners and academics. Suggestions are offered for future work in this area.

The role of decision support systems in an indeterminate world

Decision making involves processing or applying information and knowledge, and the appropriate information/knowledge mix depends on the characteristics of the decision making context. Information (or its absence) is central to decision making situations involving uncertainty and complexity, while knowledge (or its absence) is associated with problems of ambiguity and equivocality. This paper proposes that computer-based decision support technologies are appropriate to supporting decision making under conditions of uncertainty and complexity, while human-centric approaches may be more appropriate under conditions of ambiguity or equivocality. Both approaches, however, must be tightly integrated for organizational learning to occur. The framework is illustrated with a case study of the implementation of a decision support system used for price quoting in a leasing company.

Researching organizational systems using social network analysis

A key impact of organizational systems and new information technologies is that they enable new organizational form-the structural features or patterns of relationships and information flows of an organization. Consequently, research on organization systems can benefit from methods that are explicitly directed toward describing and measuring organizational forms and structures. This article proposes social network analysis as a highly appropriate and useful method for framing and describing the effects of organizational systems on organizational forms and structures. It discusses the concept of representing organizations as social structures and how network analysis is an appropriate method given that representation. The article draws several implications of examining the impact of organizational systems from a network view, and reviews three examples of using network analysis to examine the impact of information technology.

The strategic advantage of knowledge and learning

While knowledge has been described as the most strategic resource, and learning as the most strategic capability, our models of strategy and industrial economics are still defined within the traditional context of physical product. Building on traditional notions of strategy, this paper provides a knowledge-based framework for defining strategy and competitive advantage.

Electronic publishing: a product architecture perspective

Abstract Information products, like physical ones, require well-designed platforms from which multiple versions of a product can be easily and efficiently derived. This study investigated the design implications of converting a large subscription-based industry-research firm to an electronic publishing and distribution process. The analysis applied concepts used in designing architectures for physical goods. Electronic publishing technology, in addition to providing a new automated production platform, enabled the firm to move from a traditional document-based publishing paradigm to one more akin to an information refinery based on the storage and integration of modular information-units. That move had a significant impact on how documents were written, edited, and marketed. It was found that digitizing documents alone is not sufficient to create a flexible enough electronic publishing platform from which multiple versions of a document-based information product may be derived. Rather, the entire structure of the document must be reconceived in terms of more primitive information-units that can be digitized, indexed, and linked for retrieval in a variety of ways.

An MIS course integrating information technology and organizational issues

Integrating technologies and applications to provide better access to, and sharing of, corporate data and to coordinate enterprise-wide tasks and processes is a critical means to adding business value through information technology. Consequently, potential employers seek information systems professionals whose skills focus on the integration of information technologies, information resources, and business strategy. However, these companies also perceive that universities are not providing graduates the necessary integration skills.This paper describes a course, Business Systems Integration, that addresses the gap between the information systems integration skills that employers desire and those that universities teach. The course approaches information systems integration from three perspectives: 1) integrating information technologies, 2) integrating the content of the MIS curriculum, and 3) integrating organizations via cross-functional business processes. Attaining a practical level of knowledge about systems integration requires a sufficiently complex, real-world environment; thus the course relies on an extensive organizational simulation as the primary pedagogical method. That simulation is described in this paper.

A knowledge-based view of outsourcing

Literature and practice have significantly underplayed the role of knowledge and learning in evaluating outsourcing decisions. We examine outsourcing from the Knowledge-Based View (KBV) and argue that activities that might seem appropriate for outsourcing from the perspectives of transaction cost economics or the resource-based view of the firm might not be from the KBV. We address the impact of outsourcing on knowledge and learning and consequently on a firms ability to compete.