Knowledge Sharing in a Customer Oriented Organization

• Main Authors: Gnezdova, Irina, Khorasani, Leyla
• Format: Bachelor Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Högskolan i Jönköping, Internationella Handelshögskolan 2005
• Subjects: Knowledge Sharing; Computer and Information Sciences; Data- och informationsvetenskap; Arctic
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-121

In order to stay competitive, companies need to take into account many different aspects such as Knowledge Management (KM). Knowledge sharing (KS) is an important aspect in the field of KM. Organizations today increasingly recognize the need to support, in one way or another, knowledge sharing amongst employees. Employees and specifically managers are searching, testing and using various proactive interventions to facilitate knowledge sharing. By effectively enhancing knowledge sharing a company can develop a higher degree of competitive advantage. The purpose of our thesis is to make recommendations for how knowledge sharing may be improved amongst the sales representatives in the sales department at a customeroriented company, Arctic Paper. In order to fulfil this purpose and to present a reliable and valid report a qualitative analysis method was used. We wanted to get a deeper understanding of the chosen subject matter in this company and therefore conducted the interviews in a semi-structured manner in order to have the flexibility to follow up the interviewed participants perceptions and thoughts. Conducting the interviews on the two levels, strategic and operational, turned out to be rather informative. We found that the view on the chosen subject, knowledge sharing, differed in the two levels. There seemed to exist a notion of problem-free view on the higher level of the company, while the employees on the operational level could more easily target the main problems that they face. The most evident problems regarding the sharing of knowledge in the Sales Department concerns the tacit knowledge, since this is prevalent here and do not have structured means of transfer among the sales representatives and therefore easily can get lost. The informal direct sharing of knowledge causes loss of information and errors in production and delivery. Drawing from this we have gathered some recommendations for the company to consider, which will be presented in the study. Some of the most important recommendations that we could conclude deriving from the probelms concerns the transferring of a certain amount of tacit knowledge into explicit, which means paying more attention to the process of externalization from Nonaka’s model which we present in the our Frame of Reference.