Knowledge management impacts on decision making process

This article investigates the deep relation between knowledge management and decision‐making process. Strategy process is concerned with decisions that influence firm’s strategic position. This research tries to link how knowledge management influences these decisions that influence the position. If we can understand what are the knowledge’s modes of integration used over the different phases of the strategy‐making process, we can act on these modes more efficiently. Based on a qualitative research developed with 92 firms over the last four years, we study and classify how firms implement knowledge management (what we named knowledge management strategies (KMS)) and their impacts on the different phases of the decision‐making process in complex situations. For this second stage we analyze 14 decision‐making processes. The model is based on the Simon’s works and is built around the three phases: intelligence, conception, and selection. We describe knowledge’s transformations over this model and the role of each KMS in each phase. This paper demonstrates that knowledge types as well as knowledge management strategies have different roles regarding the phase of the process.

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