Knowledge management: the missing link in DMO crisis management?

Abstract

Despite some recognition of the role of DMOs in crisis management, limited attention has focused on the role of Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) in crisis events, and in particular their role in managing knowledge across diverse stakeholder groups and domains. This theoretical paper attempts to address this deficiency by synthesising knowledge management and tourism crisis management literature, to outline the potential role of DMOs in managing knowledge across boundaries during crises. Carlile's (2004) work on boundary spanning is used to consider potential organisational and management issues for DMOs dealing with crisis events and how they should be managed. The paper argues that because of the role and nature of DMOs they should play an important role as knowledge spanners/brokers to transfer, translate and transform knowledge to stakeholders. The paper concludes with future research avenues related to knowledge management, DMOs and crises.

The influences of knowledge exchange on organizational c-commerce success and crisis readiness: The case of the crisis of an automobile manufacturing and merchandising group

“…Additionally, hypotheses H2a, H2b, H2c, and H2d are supported, indicating that knowledge exchanges among an organization and its c-commerce partners have significant direct positive effects on the managers' perceived level of the four primary dimensions of crisis readiness, as indicated in prior studies [3,14,33,59,66,78,79]. These findings provide us with empirical evidence, absent from the findings of prior CM studies, of the positive influence of continuous multi-directional knowledge exchange practices among an organization and its business partners on their level of crisis readiness.…”

“…[75,78]. Second, organizations must devote themselves to identifying and eliminating both the psychological and physical barriers to intra-and inter-organizational communications to ensure that collaborative knowledge exchange can occur among key partners and stakeholders during crises [3,59,66]. Finally, there is a need for more strategic planning research related to sharing different types of knowledge for CM purposes [33,76].…”

“…For example, Wang and Belardo [78] indicate that knowledge exchanges between a company and its c-commerce partners can enable the former to resolve key problems more quickly by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the crises. Blackman et al [3] also argue that knowledge can be identified as a series of flows among different entities, and how these flows are managed is critical in determining an organization's ability to quickly respond to crises.…”

“…In this study, we define c-commerce as a set of electronically enabled and facilitated collaborative relationships that support multi-directional knowledge exchange among supply chain participants to increase value to all such participants [1,21]. Based on this definition, the core of c-commerce is to use IT to facilitate effective knowledge exchange practices among organizations that engage in joint A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 4 organizations' CM capabilities, based on case studies from many different industries [3,26,33,36,57,59,66,74,75,76,78]. In a similar vein, a group of information systems (IS) researchers argue that any crisis response systems or mechanisms should be capable of supporting a knowledge-based environment that facilitates effective information and knowledge exchange activities to achieve successful crisis resolution [15,54,73,84].…”

Along came a mega-event: prospects of competitiveness for a 2010 FIFA World Cup™ host city

“…From an events perspective, they play the key coordinating role within a destination. From a destination competitiveness perspective on the other hand, the key coordinating roleplayer can be regarded as the DMO (Blackman, Kennedy & Ritchie, 2011;Marzano, 2007;Presenza, Sheehan & Ritchie, 2005;Singh & Hu, 2008;Yoon, 2002). It has to be kept in mind that most DMOs will be representative of government to an extent, as they are often government departments/divisions, parastatal/quasi-governmental institutions or public-private agencies (Bornhorst et al, 2009;Presenza et al, 2005).…”