Knowledge Management and Organisational Effectiveness: balancing the mild, the wild and the crazy

Abstract

In the Knowledge Age, effective Knowledge Management (KM) is seen as fundamental to the survival of many organisations. Information Systems (IS) increasingly underpin KM in such organisations. The value of the contribution of IS to the goals of these organisations depends on balancing various conflicting requirements. For example, stable, robust and reliable business processes are often fundamental to their efficient operation. However, less structured environments are conducive to the innovation and knowledge creation that are considered to be fundamental to their on-going effective operation. The paper presents a model developed to relate these conflicting requirements to organisational effectiveness and describes how it was used to examine the outcomes of a Knowledge Management study conducted in the Australian Defence Organisation.