Knowledge management practices from a culture free and culture specific perspektive

The Cultural Wall
“Recently a large global company set up a sophisticated website for employees in international subsidiaries to share knowledge. It had areas for chat, document storage, and messages from the company’s leadership. Everything was clearly segmented so information could be looked up in many different ways. The designers expected people to load many documents onto the site. But even it was interesting, easy to use, and had many features, hardly anyone visited the website. Potential users said that they liked it, but just did not have time for it. The designers felt that they hit the ‘cultural wall’.”

1.1 The Influence of National Culture on Knowledge Management

Today, most organisations are aware that managing their knowledge effectively is the only way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (Drucker, 2001). Companies not securing systematically knowledge for later usage, risk to reinvent solutions and to incur unnecessary expense to relearn the same lessons (Tiwana, 1999). But in an increasingly global business context, companies not only need to understand the importance of knowledge management but also the importance of (national) cultural differences which influence knowledge management processes. Recognising cultural differences is an important step to anticipating potential threats as well as opportunities. [...]