Knowledge and information communication in organizations: an analysis of core, support and improvement processes

This paper analyzes how knowledge and information are communicated in different types of business processes. Twenty-two business process instances obtained from three organizations were studied and these were split into three types: core, support and improvement processes. The study led to three main research findings. The first was that when core, support and improvement processes were considered separately, the proportion of knowledge exchanges was considerably higher in improvement processes than in core and support processes. The second was that when all processes were considered together, most of the knowledge exchanges happened in improvement processes. The third was that the number of information exchanges in the processes was strongly correlated to the number of process functions and to the number of knowledge exchanges. Implications are drawn regarding organizational cognition and competitiveness. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Cornwallis Emmanuel Ltd.