A systematic consulting approach to knowledge management

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Pedro Paulo Maciel
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/41135
• topic: Knowledge management; Knowledge sharing; Consulting; Gestão do conhecimento; Passagem de conhecimento; Consultoria; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Knowledge management is believed to be a fundamental practice to modern corporations, being a source of innovation, operational efficiency, and the foundation for creating and sustaining competitive advantages. Nevertheless, the right approach to managing knowledge is not obvious and it demands the correct definition of “knowledge” to be aligned with a company’s culture, practices, goals, and strategy. This research was conducted inside Unicre, a traditional Portuguese company in the financial industry. Having a consulting bias, the main goal was to solve the client’s pain, caused by knowledge vacuums or gaps, created when a key employee leaves the company taking with him years of experience that were not yet crystallized into the firm’s know-how. Qualitative data was collected from a series of interviews, field visits, and internal documents and analyzed with the use of coding methods to test the two hypotheses elaborated to explain the causes of the problem. The study argued that the knowledge gaps were created fundamentally because knowledge was ill-defined in the company, leading to systems that are not designed to effectively retain it. The data showed that the hypotheses partially explained the problem, as it was possible to identify other points of improvements key for Unicre’s success in managing knowledge. The author concludes with a series of recommendations aiming at impacting the company’s culture, initiatives, and infrastructure for knowledge management.