INTRODUCTION transfer is defined as a process of transferring tacit and explicit knowledge to individuals and organizations through diverse means of practices, techniques and media to ensure the organizational learning (Argyris & Schon, 1996) and to leverage intellectual capital (Ulrich, 1998). Literature review depicts that knowledge transfer and management is gaining popularity as organizations are realizing the importance of intellectual capital and its relationship to their bottom line. Organizations are having hard time in finding knowledge, which resides in their companies. Regardless of present practices used by chief knowledge officers (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), organizations are unaware of importance of knowledge which resides in their structures and are unable to transfer it to the needed person on time to support their decision making systems. The process of transferring knowledge effectively within the organization is a challenging goal for many executives. The need isn't new. Executives have long been frustrated by their inability to identify or transfer outstanding practices from one location or function to another (O'Dell & Grayson, 1998). Kuhn and Abecker (1997) summarized the most serious impediments like information is not readily available to highly paid employees, experts have only excess to their own know-how; outsourcing leads to loss of intellectual know-how of manufacturing process; previous experiences are ignored and are resulting in costly errors; and insufficient information inflow effects the product quality and delays. The efforts of academia and practitioners to solve the problem of information flow and knowledge transfer are decades old and invite new ways to intervene the existing practices to resolve the loss of intellectual capital (1) . An intelligence system is necessary (Sena & Shani, 1999) to bridge a gap between the intellectual capital and the decision-maker. However, to compete astutely, intellectual capital reservoir alone is not sufficient to make a valuable contribution to the assets of the firm. Managing human intellect-and converting it into useful products and service-is fast becoming the critical executive skill of the age (Quinn, James, Philip, & Finkelstein, 1996). Davenport and Prusak (1998) state in their book Working Knowledge that organizations can transfer effectively by hiring intelligent people and letting them talk to each other. But the changes in the organization, economy and personal preferences force them to relocate or to take other challenging assignments and the after effects of losing employee can be devastating and can affect the organization's future success. For example, in the absence of the previous project expert, the challenge of finding decisions residence within the organization in time can disrupt the decision making process and jeopardize consultants' and clients' relationship. O'Dell and Grayson (1998) recognized this trend and wrote, that corporate support network was unable to keep up with knowledge management system and was shaken up due to the restructuring, downsizing and decentralization. Moreover, hiring intelligent people alone do not solve the problem of transferring information unless they recognize the information flow between each other and find ways to capture and transfer to their colleagues for organizational learning. They admit that it is hard for organization to implement the second part of this strategy. Organizations hire bright people and burden them with work that leaves them no time to interact with other employees. Important information is flowing between employees, and organizations are not realizing the importance of that knowledge (Davenport, De Long, & Beers, 1998). Sarvary (1999) wrote that a knowledge-based approach to business would be the connected economy. He added that such companies would use knowledge as their competitive asset and would create unexpected value by applying their knowledge more intelligently than their competitors. …
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Aug 23, 2024
Maayan Nakash 
Open Access
