Personalization and codification at NASA : a case of an evolving knowledge management strategy

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY : Ikujiro Nonaka proposed the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge in his classicpaper 'The knowledge-creating company. Nonaka's archetypes proved foundational for the field of knowledge management, dominating subsequent theoretical discourse and strongly influencing knowledge management strategy in the years that followed. The influence ofNonaka's tacit-versus-explicit distinction on knowledge management strategy can be seen most clearly in a paper published by Hansen, Nohria and Tierney entitled 'What is your strategy for Managing Knowledge? in the Harvard Business Review. Building on Nonaka's tacit-versus-explicit distinction, Hansen et al. contend that an organization's knowledgemanagement strategy must either focus on codification or on personalization, highlighting how each of these strategies exhibits distinct organizational characteristics and warning thatattempting to straddle both strategies risks organizational failure.While Nonaka's tacit-explicit paradigm remains influential as a foundational concept in knowledge management, Hansen et al.'s extension of this concept has subsequently been criticized and disproved by several authors. This thesis takes a fresh look at Hansen et al.'stheory in the context of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to determine whether NASA conforms to Hansen et al.'s theory and whether this conformity/non-conformity has any effect on NASA's effectiveness as a knowledge organization as predicted by Hansen et al. However, while authors to-date have focused on whether an organization conforms to one of Hansen et al.'s extreme archetypes, none havelooked at the evolution of an organization's knowledge management practices over time through the lens of Hansen et al. NASA is a knowledge-intensive organization with a long andpublicly-available record that not only documents its of knowledge management practices but also its successes and failures as well as the considerations that shaped its knowledge management strategy.This analysis uses the organizational characteristics identified by Hansen et al. to evaluate NASA's current competitive strategy, knowledge-economics model, knowledge management strategy, I.T. strategy and human resources strategy. The analysis also shows how NASA'sprevious knowledge management strategies focused alternately on personalization and then on codification, and how NASA experienced and responded to the respective limitations ofeach strategy. The results of the analysis show that NASA cannot be classified as either pursuing an archetypical codification or personalization strategy, and that despite straddling both strategies the organization is showing a strong positive performance.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University