Coupling of Processes - a Case Study of KM Initiatives in a Seed Company

This article discusses coupling effects between organizational processes, as observed in a seed company that took great interest in the subject of knowledge management and launched initiatives that aimed to improve the coupling. The company was chosen because of its extensive internal documentation of both its organizational and information processes and the empirical study was part of the company's knowledge management initiatives. Despite success in coupling processes, senior management decided to discontinue all such initiatives. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the reasons for such behaviour. The findings are important, both to senior management and also to researchers and other team members, because the effect of tight coupling among the working processes is usually ignored, and an analysis that treated these processes individually would lack an important attribute.