Responding to crisis through strategic knowledge management

Abstract

Many managers would like to take a strategic approach to preparing the organisation to avoid impending crisis but instead find themselves fire-fighting to avoid its impact. In this paper we examine an organisation which made major strategic changes to respond to the full effect of a crisis which would be realised over a 2 to 3 year period. At the root of these changes was a strategic approach to managing knowledge. We reflect on the managers' views of the impact this strategy had on preparing for the crisis and we explore what happened in the organisation during and after the crisis. Methodology/ approach: The paper examines a case-study of a financial services organisation which faced the crisis of its impending dissolution. The paper draws upon observations of change management workshops, as well as interviews with organisational members of a change management task force. Findings: The response to the crisis was to recognise the importance of the people and their knowledge to the organisation, and to build a strategy which improved business processes and communication flow across the divisions, as well as managing the departure of knowledge workers from a dissolving organisation. Practical implications: The paper demonstrates the importance of building a knowledge management strategy during times of crisis, and draws out important lessons for organisations facing organisational change. Originality/ value of the paper: The paper represents a unique opportunity to learn from an organisation adopting a strategic approach to managing its knowledge during a time of crisis.

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

“…[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].…”

“…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].…”

Developing Business School Strategies: A Practitioner-Oriented Conceptualization

“…Stalk, Evans and Shulman (1992) found that, by stringently ensuring strategic capabilities Þ t the environment and incorporating them into a consistent strategy, Þ rms can outperform their less coherent competitors. Strategic capabilities may result from the business school's resources and competences (Johnson, Scholes, & Whittington, 2011), cost setup (Porter, 1985;Parnell, 2011), organizational knowledge creation and utilization (Campos & Sanchez, 2003;Shaw et al, 2007;Cruceru, 2015), or its corporate culture (Dixit & Nanda, 2011;Akbar Ahmadi et al, 2012). Each of these points needs to be analyzed in order to identify strategic resources and competencies (to be incorporated into a winning strategy), cost efÞ ciency boost potentials, helpful and harmful know-how transfer mechanisms, and central aspects of the corporate culture that may support or undermine certain strategies.…”

Review of the Recovery Strategies of Pakistan: Dealing Tourism Wreaked with Terrorism

“…Interestingly, constant terrorism attacks have a more severe impact on the tourism destination that have a more lasting effect, eventually leading to a complete disintegration of a tourism destination (Pizam and Fleischer 2002).Therefore, rebranding destination by different exhibitions, tourism attractions and sport competitions become a crucial factor in improving the overall image of any destination (Avraham 2013;Shaw et al 2007). However, the impact of terrorist activity is directly proportional to the media coverage of those events and hence can lead to a long term crisis for the tourism destination(Sönmez and Graefe 1998) due to immediate public attention through considerable media coverage.…”