Knowledge as a capability to make decisions: Experiences with a virtual support context

Abstract

Human decision making is an act or process that is based on explicit or tacit knowledge, and can be supported in a limitless number of ways. Knowledge is a broad and delicate concept, rich in nuance, a concept that has been interpreted, understood, and categorized in different ways. Even if it may be true that “all knowing is personal knowing,” all knowledge is not inevitably personal knowledge. Organizations have a common capability to act (i.e., knowledge capacity or intellectual capital), the lack of which would inevitably prevent organizational action and would lead to unpredictability, disorder and chaos. Hence, the conversion of personal knowledge to organizational usage has become an important and justified stream of research. However, there are serious conceptual barriers to deriving organizational knowledge directly from personal knowledge. Although the term “conversion” is partly misleading, it is used here in the absence of a better alternative to describe a type of knowledge generation process in which one kind of knowledge is used to create another kind of knowledge. In this paper, we define knowledge as the individual or organizational capability to make decisions. We show that the ability to make decisions is determined not only by the personal dimension but also by the social and material dimensions; knowledge is a triangular model that combines these three worlds. In order to explore and manage the resource of knowledge more effectively in organizational contexts, the key question involves how to support and stimulate the deployment of personal knowledge for common usage in organizational decision making. The contributions of this paper are firstly the provision of a theoretical basis for a virtual support context, and secondly a description of an experience with a concrete virtual context that supports and stimulates the conversion of personal knowledge into strategic, organizational decisions. The support system developed here provides a set of virtual conditions that can be used to exercise organizational skills and capabilities for effective decision making.