254 Al-Shammari
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Corporate Culture
The ability, willingness, and readiness of people to create, share, and transfer
knowledge heavily depend on the corporate culture and business integration. Although
many attempts have been made at GTCOM to encourage knowledge sharing, it seems that
there is still a lack of cultural preparedness for intradepartmental knowledge sharing that
was aggravated by lack of business integration across different silos, which had its
profound adverse effect on interdepartmental knowledge sharing.
The knowledge-sharing culture at GTCOM has been hindered by additional factors;
among these are position/power differences, lack of self-confidence, fear of loss of power
or position, and/or misuse or “no use” of knowledge-sharing collaborative technologies.
An example of the misuse of knowledge-sharing technologies is when an employee finds
hundreds of e-mails waiting for him/her in his/her “in-box” simply because other
employees kept on forwarding received e-mails to him/her whether these e-mails concern
him/her or not. A customary practice of the no use of knowledge-sharing collaborative
systems may be evidenced by an employee who asks his/her boss or another colleague
on how to invoke a particular computer procedure instead of searching the intranet for
retrieving such a command.
SETTING THE STAGE
Description of KM Context
GTCOM has traditionally been product focused and overwhelmed with supply-side
issues rather than customer-side needs. Until GTCOM made a serious effort to under-
stand its customers better, its initiatives designed to improve efficiency and effective-
ness in the customer interface had little chance of success.
The description of KM context provides an exploration of what customer knowl-
edge is, assesses who hold and should hold that knowledge, outlines KM problems,
identifies KM directions needed, sketches the overall KM plan, and assesses the way
in which that plan relates to KM problems.
What is CK?
Customer knowledge (CK) refers to understanding customers’ needs, wants, and
aims when a business is aligning its processes, products, and services to create real
customer relationship management (CRM) initiative. Sometimes CK can be confused with
CRM. Although there could be some overlap, CK works at both micro and macro levels
and includes a wider variety of less structured information that will help build insight into
customer relationships. CK should include information about individuals (micro) that
helps explain who those individuals are, what they do, and what they are looking for, and
should also enable broader analysis of customer base as a whole (macro). Similarly, CK
may include both quantitative insights (i.e., numbers of orders placed and value of
business), as well as qualitative insights (tacit or unstructured knowledge that resides
in people’s heads).
The aim of building up a strong body of CK is to enable GTCOM to build and manage
customer relationships. CRM is an interactive process that achieves optimal balance