Ranking the knowledge management strategy using the integrated approach of ANP and DEMATEL

Dissertation for Master's Degree in Industrial Management, Financial Orientation

Abstract

Knowledge management helps organizations to identify, select, organize and disseminate important information and skills that are considered as organizational memory and usually exist in an unorganized form.  This enables the organization to efficiently and effectively solve learning problems, strategic planning and dynamic decision-making. Since today, cities, especially megacities, are the main centers of population, employment, economy, social, cultural and political developments in the country, the all-round and favorable growth of cities and megacities in the future is conditional on planning, budgeting, organizing, directing and monitoring targeted affairs and increasing the productivity of organizational knowledge and municipal employees as the institution in charge of these affairs. By conducting this research, it can be expected that the managers of Tehran municipality will firstly be able to recognize the level of implementation of knowledge management in their organization and on the other hand, find an optimal way to choose a knowledge management strategy. The results of this research will not be specific to Tehran municipality, but all organizations that value their organizational knowledge will benefit from the final achievements.

To achieve the goal of the research, which is the prioritization of knowledge management strategies, based on the proposed hierarchical model, three questionnaires were distributed among managers and employees of Tehran municipality. After checking the reliability and validity of the research data collection tool, using the DEMATEL and ANP techniques, knowledge management strategies were prioritized in the Tehran Municipality. The results of the combined approach of ANP and DEMATEL in determining the weight of criteria and prioritizing knowledge management strategies indicate that management support is the most important criterion in the selection of knowledge management strategies in Tehran Municipality. Also, the results of the integrated approach indicate that the best knowledge management strategy for Tehran Municipality is the socialization strategy, so the organization under review should provide the necessary trainings and incentives, a background for knowledge socialization, teamwork, exchange of thoughts, ideas, knowledge and information, experiences, work methods, provide creativity and innovation.

Key words: knowledge management strategy, network analysis process technique, DIMATEL technique, Tehran Municipality

1-1 Introduction

In the economy of leading countries, the balance between knowledge and other resources has changed in favor of knowledge; So that knowledge has become a determining factor in life even more than land, work and capital. Organizational learning is one of the critical components of organizational intelligence, which means the ability to solve problems and problems of that organization. In this way, organizational learning is considered a strategic resource that appears at all organizational levels, and the most important way to improve the level of organizational learning is to manage employees' tacit knowledge and transform it into explicit knowledge. The strategy of achieving knowledge management can be considered as one of the necessities of current organizations because on the one hand it will make their human resources incomparable in front of competitors and on the other hand it can affect other aspects of the organization such as the agility of the organization or the quality of services and its performance (Samadian and Seyed Alavi, 2013), which is also designed to choose the most appropriate knowledge management strategy in the organization. This chapter of the research will define and express the generalities of the research, including the statement of the problem, hypotheses and scope of the research, so that it can provide general guidance for the other chapters of this research.

1-2- Statement of the problem

In the knowledge-based economy, products and organizations live and die based on knowledge, and the most successful organizations are those that use this intangible asset in a better and faster way. From a strategic point of view, nowadays, knowledge management and intellectual capital are used to create and increase organizational value, and the success of any organization depends on the management of these scarce resources (Lambe, 2011).

One of the characteristics of new organizations is the excessive accumulation of knowledge, so that the increase in the amount of information in organizations and the need to use it in organizational decisions during the last two decades has led to the emergence of a phenomenon called knowledge management (Wiig, 2007). This shows the necessity of planning, organizing, leading and monitoring organizational knowledge as well as managing the knowledge access process in a way that is efficient and effective (Marr and Neely, 2002).In the current era, organizations have realized that their life will not continue unless they have a strategy for managing and valuing their organizational knowledge (Wieneke & Phylpo-Price, 2010). Therefore, strategies and cycles for the implementation of knowledge management are presented. With the developments that have occurred in the global arena, now the attention of managers and management theorists has been directed more than ever to the intellectual assets of organizations (Hassanzadeh, 2015). Knowledge management is the intelligent design of processes, tools, structures, etc., with the intention of increasing, renewing, sharing, or improving the use of knowledge, which appears in each of the three elements of intellectual capital, i.e., structural, human, and social (Seemann et al, 1999, 81)). Knowledge management helps organizations to identify, select, organize and disseminate important information and skills that are considered as organizational memory and usually exist in an unorganized form.  This enables the organization to efficiently and effectively solve learning problems, strategic planning and dynamic decision making. Knowledge management emphasizes identifying knowledge and presenting it in a way that can be formally shared and thus reused (Gupta, 2000).  Although there is no general agreement about the definition of knowledge management and its areas, different texts agree on the point that there are different strategies for implementing knowledge management for different situations and organizations (Amirkhani, 2013, 102). Therefore, according to the competitive conditions, knowledge has replaced financial and physical capital as the most important capital. Therefore, every company should make double efforts to maintain survival in the market in order to acquire knowledge (Chen et al., 2004). On the other hand, knowledge-based business requires an approach that includes intangible organizational assets such as knowledge and competencies of human resources, innovation, customer relations, organizational culture, procedures and organizational structure. In this regard, the concept of intellectual capital [1] (IC) in the form of knowledge management has attracted the attention of academic researchers and organizational practitioners (Bontis, 2001).

Overview studies show that in the public sector of our country, the phenomenon of knowledge management focuses more on the aspect of extracting hidden knowledge and documenting the experiences of managers, while the implementation of knowledge management in the private sector emphasizes the application of knowledge in order to produce new products or provide new services. Although the achievement of each of the above goals has a separate path and has its own conditions, at the same time, it requires compliance with the principles that the implementation of knowledge management in projects will ultimately lead to the acquisition of competitive advantage and organizational development (Kharghani and Selesh, 1386 (

1-3- Necessity and importance of the subject

In fact, the influence of knowledge management in developed countries in order to reconcile the tension between theory and practice) However, in most developing countries, these circles exist in an isolated form and there is no strategy to link them. Knowledge producers do not find a reference for applying their achievements. knowledge and its crystallization in the form of a product or service. At the macro level, using the knowledge management approach, it is possible to integrate isolated and separate circles of production, organization, exchange and application of knowledge to crystallize knowledge in the form of products and services (explicit knowledge). All these steps require the creation of an organizational knowledge management unit strategy to connect these parts to each other. By conducting this research, it can be expected that the managers of the investigated organization will first be able to recognize the level of knowledge management implementation in their organization and on the other hand, find an optimal way to choose the knowledge management strategy. The results of this research will not be specific to Tehran municipality, but all organizations that value their organizational knowledge will benefit from the final achievements.