Facilitating a business transformation in knowledge-intensive organizations - The development of the Business Transformation Method for Knowledge Intensive Organizations (BTMKIO)

Abstract

Nowadays, we live in a turbulent environment: increasing globalization, economic recessions, and changing customers’ demands require organizations to change their way of conducting business. The success of an organization depends on its ability to change the way it conducts business. Fortunately for organizations, numerous business transformation methods exists which support organizations to change. However, there is almost no support for the business transformation of knowledge-intensive organizations. The majority of currently existing methods focuses on high-level goals of the new organization and not on the identification of knowledge that is required to reach those goals. This is odd given the fact that the success of a knowledge-intensive organization heavily relies on the knowledge possessed by its employees.

This research focuses on the development of a method that can complement current existing business transformation methods in order to facilitate a business transformation in knowledge-intensive organizations. Knowledge is their most important asset required to reach organizational goals. Therefore, it is important that this knowledge is successfully transferred to the newly developed organization. This method, called the Business Transformation Method for Knowledge-Intensive Organizations (BTMKIO), uses an approach consisting of three steps which ensures that the right knowledge transferred:

1. Step 1: The business goals are translated in order to identify the knowledge areas required in the new organization. 2. Step 2: The possession and sharing of the required knowledge areas within the organization are mapped. 3. Step 3: The required knowledge areas are transferred to the new organization, whereby the old organization remains operational during the transformation.

The BTMKIO is composed of existing techniques available in scientific literature: the Knowledge Strategy Process and the Knowledge Network Analysis are used as foundation of the method.

The developed method is evaluated by means of a case study. The method is conducted at a department of a Dutch insurance company. The correctness, completeness, ease of use and practical value of the method are graded. Additionally, the method is also reviewed based on the same criteria by 2 experts in the field of business transformations and 1 expert in the field of network analysis. Main advantage of the method is that it provides useful and meaningful insights in knowledge possession and knowledge sharing within the organization. These insights can actually be used to make decisions on the reassignment of personnel. Main disadvantage is that the method cannot be conducted without the help of an expert, while this was a requirement for the method. Reason for this is that underlying knowledge is required on network analysis to convert the gathered data into meaningful results.