Technological, Organizational and Managerial Tools for Knowledge Management Supporting Dispersed Workers

Knowledge Management (KM) of intellectual capital has become a central theme in today’s business environment and a commonly cited source of competitive advantage. This paper argues that one of the main drivers of knowledge-related organizational problems is the dispersed nature of organizational knowledge. In today’s global economy, much of economic activity in and between firms is based on dispersed knowledge workers (DW). Therefore, developing tools to support KM in distributed environments is becoming a major challenge. Mobile technology opens a new perspective to work and organisation by increasing possibilities to select more freely the place of working than “wired” technologies. Research in this field deals with how to create a sustainable work organization – i.e. configuration of organizational mechanisms, ICT and management tools (KM Levers) which enables at the same time efficiency, innovation and good quality of working life. The National research program (funded by MIUR) “Technological, Managerial and Organizational Tools for Knowledge Management (TOM)”, started in 2002, involving the Universities of Pisa and Genoa, and the Polytechnics of Turin and Milan. Starting from a deep analysis of management literature state of the art, the project objectives consists in the analysis of the emerging KM models in dispersed knowledge workers networks, and developing management tools supporting the choice of the Levers for KM within these networks. This paper presents the research framework and the first field results of TOM project, based on three case studies, aiming at identifying the KM Configurations in support of dispersed knowledge workers. The paper has an explorative nature.