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Perceptions of Knowledge and Knowing - A Focus Group Research
Abstract
Knowledge has been recognized as one of the most important resources that contribute to organizational competitiveness. By managing their knowledge resources effectively, organizations can, at least theoretically, enhance their performance and ensure continuous growth. Despite their attempts to pursue the prescribed knowledge management (KM) guidelines rigorously, organizations encounter thwarted results in their KM initiatives. Previous researches and studies (e.g., KPMG 2000) have found that some unmet KM promises are due to the ambiguities or misconceptions of what KM is (e.g., a purely technological solution) and described how KM contributes to business growth and development. In short, KM still remains an elusive concept to many organizations though there is no lack of available KM concepts and frameworks. It is necessary to elucidate the confusions and to fill the gap between theoretical possibilities and practicalities such that organizations can grasp the value of knowledge to devise effective KM strategies. To shed some light on the above-mentioned issues, this study embraces a primarily objective with an examination of the fundamental notion what components there are in KM (e.g., what knowledge is). By accommodating diverse methodologies (e.g., survey, experiment) and an extensive range of views from related disciplines about KM issues (e.g., organizational learning, philosophy), the study aims to provide deeper insights and explore new facets of the extant KM theoretical ground. This study adopts a participant-driven process – focus group (FG) research - to solicit a wide range of empirical perceptions from practitioners with diverse exposure to KM, and discusses results along five KM themes to reflect considerations for possible research topics and practical implementation.
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