Organizational knowledge resources

Decision-making episodes are knowledge intensive processes, operating on and adding to organizational knowledge resources. Decision support systems (DSS) perform some of the knowledge management (KM) that is integral to these episodes. Interest in the field of KM, among both practitioners and researchers has mushroomed in the late 1990s, Initiatives that aim to deliberately, explicitly manage organizations' knowledge resources have become commonplace. A basic prerequisite for fully understanding how an organization can, could, or should conduct KM is an appreciation of the kinds of knowledge resources it has. In this paper, a framework of knowledge resources is introduced, focusing on identifying and organizing basic classes of knowledge resources, and supplemented by the identification of attribute dimensions for characterizing knowledge across these classes. Developed via a Delphi methodology involving an international panel of practitioners and researchers, this framework is assessed as being relatively successful in terms of completeness, accuracy, clarity, and conciseness criteria. The result is a basis for investigating effects of alternative knowledge resource portfolios, and for studying how an organization does, could, or should conduct its KM - including its decision-making episodes. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.