Measuring knowledge management performance using a competitive perspective: An empirical study

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach of measuring a technology university's knowledge management (KM) performance from competitive perspective. The approach integrates analytical network process (ANP), which is a theory of multiple criteria decision-making and is good at dealing with tangible and intangible information, with balanced scorecard (BSC) that contains four perspectives, including customer perspective, internal business perspective, innovation and learning perspective, and financial perspective, being adopted as the indicators of KM performance measurement (KMPM). This paper makes three important contributions: (1) it propose a methodology of comparing an organization's knowledge management performance with its major rivals to offer effective information for improving KM, increasing decision-making quality, and obtaining clear effort direction of attaining competitive advantage; (2) it explores the case involving a lot of findings that present the positions of the case organization against it major rivals and imply that the technology university has to reinforce knowledge creation and accumulation to catch up with its competitive rivals; and (3) it is generic in nature and applicable to benefit an organization. The results prove the proposed method can act as a measurement tool for the entire KM of an organization. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.