A knowledge-oriented analysis of organizations: Knowledge Nodes the building blocks of Distributed Knowledge Management Approach

In the last few years a lot of effort has been made in developing KM systems. A typical outcome is the creation of a unique conceptualization of corporate knowledge which enables communication and knowledge sharing across the entire organization. This unique conceptualization of knowledge cannot represent all the different workers’ perspectives, therefore traditional KM systems are often deserted by users. In order to solve this problem, a new approach, called the Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM), was proposed in (Bonifacio et al., 2000). This approach allows us to see complex knowledge-based organizations as constellations of local organizational units which manage knowledge in an autonomous way, exchanging it with other units, without sharing a common and unique knowledge conceptualization. In this work I introduce the concept of Knowledge Node (KN), a notion that reifies semantically autonomous organizational units, and their fundamental characteristics. Through a case study – a complex Italian national firm – techniques and methodologies are analyzed and then used to unveil KNs. Such analysis will demonstrate that the resulting DKM system might be implemented within the firm with a high probability of success, because KNs and the DKM system reflect the way in which organizational units manage their knowledge.