A stage model of organizational knowledge management: a latent content analysis

This study develops an integrated management framework for building organizational capabilities of knowledge management. The framework consists of four major components of management: organizational knowledge, knowledge workers, knowledge management processes, and information technology. Based on the framework, this study proposes a stage model of organizational knowledge management encompassing the initiation, propagation, integration, and networking stages. Each of the four stages is differentiated in terms of its management goals, activities, and characteristics of the management components. To validate the proposed stage model, we conducted a latent content analysis of 21 knowledge management case reports. While the results do not validate the time sequence of each stage, they do reveal meaningful clustering of distinct case organizations in different knowledge management implementation stages. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.