Organizational Knowledge, Routines and Core Competency

In the last blog we looked at concept of "context" in organizational knowledge creation. In today's blog we continue understanding these terms and also learn a few new terms in the process.

It is always good to understand and look at an organization as a cognitive enterprise that learns and develops knowledge. In this direction there are some interesting terms that have been coined by management theorists. Understanding these is quite intuitive:

Organizational Knowledge: This term refers to the shared cognitive schemes and distributed common understanding within the firm that facilitate knowledge sharing and transfer

Organization Routines: A kind of collective knowledge rooted in shared norms and belief that aids joint problem solving and capable of supporting complex pattern of action in the absence of written rules

Core Competency: Implies that learning and knowledge creation activities of a firm tend to be cumulative and path dependent.

While all these talk about how organizations are learning environment, it is also true that in some cases, the same earning could be difficult to unlearn past practices and explore alternative ways of doing things - this many a times leads to what some management experts call as "competency trap".

At this point again it would be interesting to reiterate the importance of decision making in management. There is an inherent difficulty when organizations try to learn - to draw the boundary between external and internal knowledge flows is extremely crucial. We shall continue to discuss this in the next blog and it is pretty interesting to understand this.