Organizational knowledge resources

Decision-making episodes are knowledge intensive processes, operating on an d adding to organizational knowledge resources. Decision support systems (D SS) perform some of the knowledge management (KM) that is integral to these episodes. Interest in the field of KM, among both practitioners and resear chers has mushroomed in the late 1990s, Initiatives that aim to deliberatel y, explicitly manage organizations' knowledge resources have become commonp lace. A basic prerequisite for fully understanding how an organization can, could, or should conduct KM is an appreciation of the kinds of knowledge r esources it has. In this paper, a framework of knowledge resources is intro duced, focusing on identifying and organizing basic classes of knowledge re sources, and supplemented by the identification of attribute dimensions for characterizing knowledge across these classes. Developed via a Delphi meth odology involving an international panel of practitioners and researchers, this framework is assessed as being relatively successful in terms of compl eteness, accuracy, clarity, and conciseness criteria. The result is a basis for investigating effects of alternative knowledge resource portfolios, an d for studying how an organization does, could, or should conduct its KM - including its decision-making episodes. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.