Authors: Leila Halawi, DBA, and Rich McCarthy, PhD

Knowledge is widely regarded as one of the most valuable and efficient capital in organizations and is often referred to as a source for competitive advantage. Organizations that are able to achieve and apply valid and current knowledge effectively are often more successful. As an intangible asset, knowledge is a vital indicator for organizational success. In an information rich society, the knowledge assets within an enterprise must be managed skillfully. Therefore, scholars and researchers have given increasing consideration to organization’s capacity for recognizing, acquiring, creating, sharing and collecting knowledge.

Knowledge Management (KM) integrates practices from quality management, organizational learning, and performance management, to name a few. However, KM extends beyond these concepts to bring new ideas, tools and techniques for efficient use of knowledge resources. The field of KM is so ample, incorporating both organizational properties and technical factors.

KM encompasses practices that enable the usage and advancement of organizational knowledge to create value and thus enhance and/ or maintain competitive advantage for any organization in all these three dimensions: strategic, managerial and operational. KM also supports and organizes the generation, codification, transfer and application of knowledge in value creation processes. The knowledge processes of acquisition, transformation, storage and dissemination work much more effectively when there is a supporting architecture in place.

An enterprise architecture (EA) is one way to present the ‘big picture” view of an organization where incongruent information may be imparted in a systematic way to tackle organization’s issues and concerns. A knowledge architecture is grounded in knowledge constructs that provides structure to the information in a more rational, consistent and significant way so that managers come to agree on the information that is pertinent to the business situation at hand. Thus, this emphasis on information and knowledge resources suggest that enterprise architecture (EA) is very much a KM discipline however this isn’t mostly acclaimed by many experts or stakeholders.

Further Reading

1. North, W., North, J., Benade, S., Information Management and Enterprise Architecture Planning, Problems and Perspectives in Management, 2004.
2. Oracle, Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework: Information Architecture Domain, White paper in Enterprise Architecture, 2012.