Introducing an Evidential Reasoning Approach for Selecting Knowledge Management Strategies

In a knowledge economy, a key source of sustainable competitive advantage relies on the way to create, share, and utilize knowledge. In order to react to an increasingly competitive business environment, many companies emphasize the importance of Knowledge Management (KM), and base their KM strategy on their unique resources and capabilities. Although numerous works discuss the issues of how to perform a KM strategy and implement it successfully, few have provided methods that can systematically evaluate and model the KM strategy involving several complex factors. In this paper, the evidential reasoning (ER) approach is applied as a method for KM strategy selection. The process of building a multiple criteria decision model of a hierarchical structure is presented, in which both quantitative and qualitative information is represented in a unified manner. The KM strategy selection is then fully investigated using the ER approach in a real case study in Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR). Both the advantages of applying this model in practice and the analysis process itself are discussed.