Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

Knowledge management (KM) is a set of relatively-new organizational activities that are aimed at improving knowledge, knowledge-related practices, organizational behaviors and decisions and organizational performance. KM focuses on knowledge processes—knowledge creation, acquisition, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing and utilization. These processes support organizational processes involving innovation, individual learning, collective learning and collaborative decision-making. The “intermediate outcomes” of KM are improved organizational behaviors, decisions, products, services, processes and relationships that enable the organization to improve its overall performance.

Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning presents some 20 papers organized into five sections covering basic concepts of knowledge management; knowledge management issues; knowledge management applications; measurement and evaluation of knowledge management and organizational learning; and organizational learning.

Basic Concepts of Knowledge Management.- Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning.- Knowledge Management or the Management of Knowledge?.- From Tacit Knowledge to Organizational Knowledge for Successful KM.- Organizational Routines as Mechanisms for Knowledge Creation, Utilization, and Storage.- Toward a Maturity Model for Knowledge Management Systems Integration.- “Knowledge Management Issues”.- Knowledge Diffusion in Contemporary R&D Groups; Re-Examining The Role Of The Technological Gatekeeper.- Managing Asymmetries In Transferring Tacit Knowledge.- Information Technology as an Enabler Of Knowledge Management: An Empirical Analysis.- Knowledge Management in Business Intelligence.- Antecedents of Procedural Governance in Knowledge—Sharing Alliances.- Enterprise-Wide Management of Intellectual Property.- “Knowledge Management Applications”.- Virtual Worlds as Platforms for Communities of Practice.- Open Innovation Through Online Communities.- Knowledge Networking to overcome the Digital Divide.- “Measurement and Evaluation in KM and OL”.- Evaluating KMS Effectiveness for Decision Support: Preliminary Results.- Valuing Knowledge Within Virtual CoPs: The Quest for Meaningful Indicators.- Organizational Knowledge, Cognitively Plausible Actors and Multi-Actor Systems.- “Organizational Learning”.- On Using Organizational Knowledge Capabilities to Assist Organizational Learning.- Organizational Learning and Performance in Two National Cultures: A Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling Approach.- Sustainability, Learning, Adaptation and Knowledge Processing.

Volume editor William R. King is the University Professor of Business Administration at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration, University of Pittsburgh.  He was the founding president of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and a past president of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) (1989–90), an international professional society with 8,000 members, which he guided to merge with the Operations Research Society of America to form INFORMS. He has twice served as chair of ICIS—the annual International Conference on Information Systems (1988; 2005), has served as editor-in-chief of the Management Information Systems Quarterly, the primary journal in the field of information systems, and was the key figure in the founding of a new journal, Information Systems Research.