Measuring knowledge retention among engineering consulatncies in UAE
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Date
2008-06
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
With ongoing globalisation, organisations are increasingly confronted with worldwide competition. In order to build and sustain their competitive advantage, the knowledge and expertise of an organisation's staff needs to be seen as a critical strategic resource (Bender & Fish, 2000). The problem is that whilst expertise cannot be transferred, people "walk out the door'' and their knowledge and expertise goes with them. Hence, it is extremely important to ensure, that knowledge is retained within the organisation (Bender & Fish, 2000). This paper aims to conduct a research about how to retain the knowledge in organizations. The main objective of the research is developing a tool for assessing and applying knowledge retention system in organizations. In order to satisfy the aims and objectives, a thorough review for the relevant literature was conducted, and a new framework was developed to enable organisations to measure the status and to successfully implement a knowledge retention system. The new model was developed based on existing models and has several strength over them such as, dealing with knowledge retention as a whole process and gathering the concepts of knowledge sharing, codification, retrieval and renewal. The data was collected analyzed for three organisations by conducting a chi square test for the survey data results, which was supported by the data gathered from the interviews and the real observation. It was concluded that knowledge retention is not a simple IT system that can be applied and that most of the organisations are at a level where knowledge is shared and partially stored, but not yet completely retained. Therefore, it was recommended that the organisations build a suitable environment for knowledge sharing at individual level, to codify knowledge and to search for a suitable system where this knowledge can be documented, stored and easily retrieved. Using the developed model was recommended as well since it enables the organisations defining and hence filling the gaps, which may exist in their knowledge retention system.
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DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTION
Keywords
knowledge retention, engineering consultancy, United Arab Emirates (UAE), globalisation, competitive advantage