An investigation on knowledge management and business strategies alignment in the Gulf Cooperation Council Banks

Today's business and technical managers have to actively incorporate knowledge strategy (KS) into an organisation's Business Strategy (BS) in order to improve the organisation's performance. A study has been conducted to explore the alignment between KS and BS. The different types of BS were considered in terms of Miles and Snow's (1978) typology of Defenders, Analyzers and Prospectors. In terms of KS, two types of KS strategy - Aggressive Knowledge Strategy (AKS) and Conservative Knowledge Strategy (CKS) were selected. This model was empirically validated through a survey of 106 banks selected from six Gulf countries - Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Oman. This was followed by interviews with key officers from representative organizations. In this paper, mainly the outcomes from the interviews were reported. Detailed results from the survey are published elsewhere and only the summary is described here. Finding from the research demonstrated that in the case of GCC banks, there is a strong association between KS and BS and that the alignment between KS and BS clearly influenced the organizational performance. However, the concept of dedicated knowledge officer is not practiced.