Organizational memory is said to be one of the essential factors of organizational learning, particularly in a part that is concerned with knowledge flowing from an organization to its employees. Often viewed as a system of knowledge repositories, organizational memory is argued to be important in various contexts. The purpose of this study is to explore an impact of the organizational memory in two such contexts, namely in a situation of presence of new employees and organization involved in innovation activity. The importance of organizational memory for the new employees can be explained by the fact that it is through facing it they socialize in the organization. Organizational memory also influences innovative behaviour of employees. This researched is performed in a form of a case study; where the object of study finds itself in a combined context – new employees of R&D department learn from different organizational memory systems. The data for this case study were collected through qualitative interviewing of both the newcomers and their supervisor. The results show that new employees face a range of memory systems, and this range does not depend on the innovativeness of the work they are involved in. It was found possible to look separately into the systems and methods the newcomers accessed them. The most important access methods in this case turned out to be personal communication and IT-enabled means, however a number of other methods were also found relevant for the case. Focusing on how this knowledge can support innovative behaviour of the new employees, this study has found several ways in which both incremental and radical innovations can be enhanced. The memory systems have been found to affect innovative behaviour of the newcomers by demonstrating expectance of this behaviour, by providing “old” knowledge, as well as hints where one can possibly find “old” and “new” knowledge. In general, the findings suggest that looking into memory systems separately from the ways to access them might give valuable insights for rethinking how properties of the memory systems have been defined so far.

Knowledge has long been recognized as one of the most valuable assets in an organization. Managing and organizing knowledge has become an important corporate strategy for organizations to gain and maintain competitive advantages in the information age. Electronic knowledge repositories (EKRs) have become increasingly popular knowledge sharing tools implemented by organizations to promote knowledge reuse. The goal of this study is to develop and test a research model that explains users' continued usage behavior of EKRs in public accounting firms. Theoretically grounded in the expectation-confirmation model (ECM) and commitment-based model, the research model presented in this study integrates both of these theoretical perspectives to study users' EKR continuance intentions. This study surveyed 230 EKR users from four large public accounting firms. Partial least squares regression was used to test the hypotheses and the explanatory power of the model. Results indicate that perceived usefulness and commitment exhibit a sustained positive influence on continuance intention. Additionally, subjective norms are positively related to calculative commitment and moral commitment. Organizational identification is positively related to affective commitment and moral commitment. Perceived usefulness is positively related to affective commitment and calculative commitment. The model comparisons with the technology acceptance model (TAM) and ECM demonstrated that the integrated model presented in this research explained 1.6% and 0.8% additional variance in continuance intention than both ECM and TAM respectively. Additional multi-group analyses were also conducted to examine the differences between knowledge seekers and contributors and the differences between knowledge novices and experts. This study raises theoretical implications in the area of knowledge management in general and EKRs in particular. It represents one of the first attempts to empirically examine users' continuance intention of knowledge management applications. This study has presented a different perspective on technology acceptance/continued usage by introducing commitment to explain continued IS usage. By integrating commitment and ECM, this study offers a useful framework for future studies on technology use. It demonstrates that both user commitment and perceived usefulness are strong predictors of EKR continuance intention. The results also raise interesting implications for practitioners interested in knowledge management and particularly for public accounting firms how to leverage EKRs to gain a competitive advantage. / Ph. D.

Visando explorar como as empresas de consultoria especializadas em avaliação de impacto ambiental promovem a gestão do conhecimento, foram levantadas práticas adotadas por oito empresas atuantes neste ramo. O estudo procurou verificar se há relação entre a classificação das empresas no contínuo de Maister (1997) com as práticas e ferramentas propostas por Silva (2004), fundamentadas, por sua vez, no ciclo de aprendizado de Nonaka e Takeuchi (1995), com os repositórios de conhecimento utilizados pelas empresas e com suas experiências relacionadas à criação, troca e retenção de conhecimento. Utiliza-se como método de pesquisa a aplicação de entrevistas qualitativas com integrantes chaves destas organizações. Conclui-se que o nível de diversificação de atuação das consultorias, em relação a mercados e territórios, pode indicar quais ferramentas de GC são mais apropriadas para essas organizações. / In order to explore how environmental consulting companies specialized in environmental impact assessments promote knowledge management, practices adopted by companies operating in this field were raised. The study attempts to verify whether there is relationship between the classification of companies in the Maisters continuous (1997) and the practices and tools proposed by Silva (2004), based in turn in the cycle of learning proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), with the knowledge repositories used by companies and their experiences related to knowledge creation, exchange and retention. It is used as the research method the application of qualitative interviews with key members of these organizations. The conclusion of this study is that the level of consultants diversification, regarding markets and territories, may indicate the most appropriate KM tools for these organizations.

Visando explorar como as empresas de consultoria especializadas em avaliação de impacto ambiental promovem a gestão do conhecimento, foram levantadas práticas adotadas por oito empresas atuantes neste ramo. O estudo procurou verificar se há relação entre a classificação das empresas no contínuo de Maister (1997) com as práticas e ferramentas propostas por Silva (2004), fundamentadas, por sua vez, no ciclo de aprendizado de Nonaka e Takeuchi (1995), com os repositórios de conhecimento utilizados pelas empresas e com suas experiências relacionadas à criação, troca e retenção de conhecimento. Utiliza-se como método de pesquisa a aplicação de entrevistas qualitativas com integrantes chaves destas organizações. Conclui-se que o nível de diversificação de atuação das consultorias, em relação a mercados e territórios, pode indicar quais ferramentas de GC são mais apropriadas para essas organizações. / In order to explore how environmental consulting companies specialized in environmental impact assessments promote knowledge management, practices adopted by companies operating in this field were raised. The study attempts to verify whether there is relationship between the classification of companies in the Maisters continuous (1997) and the practices and tools proposed by Silva (2004), based in turn in the cycle of learning proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), with the knowledge repositories used by companies and their experiences related to knowledge creation, exchange and retention. It is used as the research method the application of qualitative interviews with key members of these organizations. The conclusion of this study is that the level of consultants diversification, regarding markets and territories, may indicate the most appropriate KM tools for these organizations.

This thesis explores applying DevOps practices to mitigate knowledge loss in project-based environments. In the context of high developer turnover, the study aims to implement a standardised DevOps workflow using automation and knowledge management. The research questions of the thesis are answered by following a method consisting of interviews, requirements gathering, implementation of a DevOps workflow focusing on knowledge management practices and evaluation using a DevOps maturity model. The study finds that explicit knowledge practices, including issue tracking, code reviews, and knowledge repositories, are complemented by developers’ tacit knowledge. Additional practices including testing standards, coding standards, and containerisation also contribute to knowledge retention. Integrating these practices into a DevOps workflow involves automation, tool integration, and continuous workflow through a CI/CD pipeline. The research evaluates the organisation’s initial maturity level at level 1 ("Initial") in technology and process areas. However, implementing the proposed DevOps workflow increases the maturity level to level 3 ("Defined"). This, in turn, indicates that knowledge management practices can be integrated into a DevOps workflow to mitigate knowledge loss further.

Knowledge management is seen as a hot topic in order for organizations to become effective and utilize the knowledge residing within the organization. The most important factor in knowledge management is believed to be the knowledge transfer, which is the process of transferring knowledge between two parties. A context in which knowledge and knowledge transfer are especially important is within the best practice framework ‘ITIL’ and IT-service organizations. Therefore, the purpose with this study is to analyze how knowledge is transferred through information systems in an ITIL organization, and how the transfer process can be further understood by incorporating individual perspectives on knowledge. Besides that, our purpose is to identify factors influencing the knowledge transfer from both the organizations and the ITIL framework. The reason for this is that knowledge transfer through information systems in an ITIL context is rather underexplored, previous research regarding this is mainly focusing on putting knowledge in repositories and make it available, which is believed to create certain implications regarding the individual perspective in the creation and transfer of knowledge through information systems. These implications are something that has not been explored, which is a knowledge gap we intend to fill with this thesis. That is why we have constructed three research questions regarding how the organizations understand what valuable knowledge is, what factors that is influencing their knowledge transfer, and how these previously individual aspects can be further understood by applying the boundary object theory on knowledge transfer through information systems. From a multi case study with semi structured interviews we could collect a valuable collection of empirical data, that was collected from six respondents representing three organizations. By applying the interpretive and social constructivist research philosophy with an abductive methodological approach, previous research and the boundary object theory in combination with the theory of knowledge creation we could analyze our empirical data. Our study shows that the perspective on valuable knowledge is something with direct relation to ITIL, and highly connected to what its contribution is to the core business that the IT-service organization is helping. Valuable knowledge is also seen as stored knowledge. We can from our study also see that there are four predominant forces influencing the knowledge transfer process. We identified that the overall perspective on what knowledge is in the organization, how and what the organization values as knowledge, the ITIL framework and their knowledge management strategy directly influenced knowledge transfer. Our main finding in this study is that when organizations are transferring knowledge through information systems the individual perspective on both knowledge, knowledge creation and the knowledge transfer is one of the most important to keep in mind. The knowledge in the information systems is a way to communicate among individuals, and a way to translate one individual’s knowledge to another, hence is the individual creating the knowledge an important factor to acknowledge. We can see that aspects such as experiences, skills, insights, purposes, perspectives and contextual understandings highly influence the knowledge being created, hence the possibility to create rich knowledge at the receiver of knowledge. These aspects also influence whether the stored knowledge has any tacit elements, which seems to facilitate learning more for the receiving individual.

This qualitative study is of the interpretivist nature and it aims to examine how knowledge workers perceive their interaction with a knowledge management system when used for knowledge sharing purposes. The purpose is to offer answers to two research questions: How do knowledge workers perceive their interaction with knowledge management technology in relation to knowledge sharing? What are the benefits and challenges that knowledge workers experience in relation to knowledge managing and sharing when using a KMS system? The data was collected by applying qualitative research methods and by conducting five interviews with participants of an IT organization that has its head office in Sweden, but additional offices in other geographical locations. To be able to study the participants´ perception and the benefits of the use on both local and international levels, the interviewees were chosen from different sites in which their organization was operating. To provide the answers to these questions and to establish the foundation of this research, an extensive literature review on the problem area was carried out, and a theoretical framework has been employed to study the different aspects of this model in the context of knowledge management systems in relation to knowledge sharing among knowledge workers. As a result, additional derived attributes came from the findings and it is shown that users tend to relate knowledge quality with the completeness, frequency of update, and validity of the knowledge content that they are exposed to in the KMS. Similarly, they relate KMS quality to administrability and maintenance easiness, whereas organizational service providing quality in relation to knowledge sharing is more related to the aspects of organizational commitment and reliability. Moreover, the findings show that participants relate their intention to use the KMS to the attributes of convenience and practicality, and the levels of user satisfaction were in this case mainly related to the user´s perception of usefulness. Lastly, the perception of the benefits and reciprocal value-creating for both the organization and the individual was examined and the findings show that the users tend to relate these to the aspect of relevance, or in other words that the benefits are only perceived as useful by the user if they are identifiable, respectively the user being aware of the benefits and perceiving them as relevant.