Alignment of Business and Knowledge Management Strategy

The role of knowledge as a crucial asset for an enterprise’s survival and advancement has been recognized by several researchers (e.g., von Krogh, Ichijo & Nonaka, 2000). Moreover, by having knowledge (intellectual resources), an organization can understand how to exploit and develop its traditional resources better than its competitors can, even if some or all of those traditional resources are not unique (Zack, 1999). However, realizing the importance of organizational knowledge and its management in creating value and in gaining competitive advantage is only the first and the easiest step in any knowledge management (KM) initiative. The second and almost as important step is to answer how and where to begin questioning (Earl, 2001). In fact, “many executives are struggling to articulate the relationship between their organization’s competitive strategy and its intellectual resources and capabilities (knowledge)” (Zack, 1999). As Zack (1999) argued, they need pragmatic yet theoretically sound model. It has been highly accepted that a pragmatic and theoretically sound model should meet at least two criteria. First, it should explicitly include the external domains (opportunities/threat) and internal domains (capabilities/arrangements) of both business (B-) and knowledge (K-) strategies and the relationships between them. Second, it should provide alternative strategic choices. In order address this issue a KM strategic alignment model (KMSAM) is presented. It stems from the premise that the realization of business value gained from KM investment requires alignment between the business (B-) and knowledge (K-) strategies of the firm and is based on the Henderson-Venkatraman SAM for IT (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993).