Building a framework for actions and roles in organizational knowledge transfer

In order to analyze and improve knowledge management (KM) initiatives, organizations must be enabled to systematically look into the processes of organizational knowledge transfer. They need to know what roles are involved in these processes and what actions are performed. We propose that only if the building blocks of organizational knowledge transfer are known, reasonable in-detail analyses of KM initiatives can be conducted. In this paper we present a framework that structures roles and actions relevant in organizational knowledge transfer scenarios and that is useful for identifying and classifying factors which leverage or prevent knowledge transfer. The identification of roles and actions is inevitable since they build the core structure of knowledge transfer in an organization and therefore represent appropriate starting points for analyses. Without a proper framework that shows these starting points it might be difficult to set up a thought-out research that grasps the characteristics of organizational knowledge transfer. Furthermore, by contrasting IT supported knowledge transfer with non-electronic knowledge transfer our framework helps in answering the question how KM systems can support knowledge transfer.