Knowledge Management Practices: A Framework Proposal

Knowledge management practices have, as well as mechanisms and technological tools, an important role on the development of knowledge management (KM) in organizations. However, the distinction between these concepts is far from being well understood in the KM community, particularly what distinguishes KM practices and KM mechanisms. Furthermore, the fact that many KM literature authors use these terms indiscriminately contributes to this lack of clarity. Nevertheless it seems that some authors consider the existence of KM practices, such as knowledge mapping and competence management, with an implicit set of KM mechanisms and technological tools. One of the consequences of the lack of clarity is the inexistence of theoretical frameworks that could ease the understanding of the several existing KM practices and the importance of KM mechanisms and technological tools in their development. A KM practices framework constitutes an opportunity for organizations to develop KM, by enabling them to understand which KM practices they should implement and which KM mechanisms and technological tools they could use. This paper introduces a KM practices framework proposal presenting KM practices together with the mechanisms and technological tools that respectively contribute and support their development. In this sense, this paper contributes to a clearer distinction between all the concepts involved, particularly between the concepts of KM practice and KM mechanism, and their relationships. A qualitative case study was developed to evaluate the framework proposal. The case study occurred in a Portuguese organization from the waste management area and allowed us to make a first validation of the framework. The paper is organized in five sections, as follows: section one starts with a brief introduction. Section two describes the theoretical background, presenting systematizations of KM practices, mechanisms and technological tools, developed through a literature review. In section three, the KM practices framework proposal is presented, and the case study is described in section four. Finally conclusions and future work are presented in section five.