Organizational Knowledge Maturity and Complementarity: A Conceptual Framework

Knowledge has become a primary organizational resource and many organizations have focused attention on Knowledge Management (KM) as a means of enhancing their performance. KM encompasses a range of activities including the creation and capture of knowledge, the transfer or sharing of this knowledge and its application and reuse in organizations. KM has also been defined as providing the strategy, process and technology to shape and leverage expertise and knowledge across an organization so as to enhance the effectiveness of decision-making and thereby lead to improved performance. We have constructed a Knowledge Management Integrative framework to represent a range of activities associated with knowledge assets and their management. We seek to apply complementarity theory and a business value modeling approach to this framework to explore the benefits that can be accrued by an organization. Complementarities exist when the incremental benefit from leveraging two variables is greater than the sum of the incremental benefits from leveraging each in isolation. By combining this theory with a multi-stage business value model, we argue that organizational benefits from investments in KM initiatives can be maximized when knowledge assets are leveraged in a concerted manner.