An Empirical and Modeling Approach to Knowledge Management Practices in South American Organizations

Abstract

The following chapter explores Knowledge Management (KM) practices in some South American organizations operating in Spanish speaking countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. More specifically, empirical results are confronted to a functional KM guideline based on balanced scorecard architecture and used as a diagnosis tool. Some fundamental KM issues are previously discussed. A dominant trend within researchers and practitioners is to relate Knowledge Management (KM) with innovative organizations, their sustainable economic growth, and the development of information management systems (e.g., Maier and Hadrich, 2006, Salojarvi et al., 2005, Tedmori et al., 2006). Technological innovation has for example been cited as a major reason for the current interest in knowledge management (Bouthillier and Shearer, 2002). According to this dominant perspective, in the “knowledge era” in which we are, the ways intangible assets are managed and converted into actionable knowledge contribute to organizational learning, competitive advantage, and organization’s overall success (e.g., Dorey and Gobat, 1996, Roos et al., 1997, Senge, 2006). Based on well established cognitive psychology findings on learning and memory Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) described the two fundamental categories of knowledge found in organizations: on the one hand tacit knowledge that is distributed among the personnel and which is hard to articulate. On the other hand, explicit knowledge which can be codified and that will eventually contribute to feed technological systems such as data bases, and expert systems. Converting tacit into explicit actionable knowledge is one important challenge faced by any KM program (see Toledano O’Farrill, 2011); this being particularly true in the South American context. However, there are still many gaps for a global theoretical scheme on KM dynamics. This is currently reflected in the existence of a variety of concepts and methods surrounding KM research. For instance Andriessen (2008) showed that metaphors are largely used to conceptualize knowledge in a KM context (Andriessen, 2008). For example Andriessen (2006 cited by Andriessen, 2008) found a list of 22 metaphors used by researchers and practitioners to describe what knowledge is (for example “knowledge as capital” or “Knowledge inventory”). As Andriessen explains, the use of metaphors to describe