Governance of Strategies to Manage Organizational Knowledge 93Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenwhen a strategy was implemented using an individual working and engaging with other
individuals, that is, a one-to-one model, the strategy usually failed. When a strategy is
implemented using an individual working with and engaging groups, that is, a one-to-
many model, the strategy usually failed. However, they found that when the initiative was
implemented within an organization by a group of people engaging other groups, that
is, it is implemented as a many-to-many model, then the initiative usually succeeded. As
a consequence “the strategy crew became convinced that if we had a single champion,
it would fail. We needed multiple [KM] stakeholders across the organization and we
decided that it wasn’t just the knowledge management that would fail ... any of these
change strategies would fail if they only had one particular champion” (Informant 2).
Thus a strategy was developed with multiple champions who were responsible for
presenting the strategies back to their peers.
Development of the Governance Process
The STDO strategic plan specifies the goal of corporate governance and informa-
tion management to make sure that information users can access relevant knowledge
resources; accordingly, the chief knowledge strategist has sought to enable these
activities. He saw the contributions of elements of KM coming from a number of different
sections within the organization.
- The understanding of and contribution to the management of tacit knowledge came
from neural networks research which sought to establish an effective model for tacit
knowledge transfer.
Figure 2. Position of KM (2000) at the STDO prior to the development of governance
mechanisms
CustomerConsultan^ s, ts
Regulatory EnvironmentOrganizational Environment – aims and
objectives, governance processLibrary
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