Toward Designing A Flexibility-Based Knowledge Management Model

Abstract

The terms ‘Flexibility’ and ‘Knowledge Management (KM)’ might exhibit similarity in the characteristics, however, the difference lies in their application to the organizational assets.  While knowledge is extracted from intellectual assets; flexibility is meant to be applied to control the behaviour of these assets. This way KM can be perceived as the application of extraction while flexibility is the application of control. Their integration can be visualized as a process and a system wherein KM as process, is related to the managing, creating and sharing of organization knowledge and; flexibility as system, keeps a check on the tendencies that may cause organization to drift from its KM process. This postulate holds the basis of this research. The orientation of this paper is therefore towards understanding how to design a flexibility based KM model.