A Design Language for Knowledge Management Systems (KMS)

Abstract

As with all species, humans spend their life in competition. Unlike other organisms, we carry this competitive drive past mere survival and reproduction into the structures of our social and business life. The structures of our business environment revolve around the ability of an organization to obtain long-term competitiveness through the control of rare and valuable resources that have limited substitutability, mobility, and imitability (Barney, 1991, Peteraf, 1993). Knowledge is precisely such a rare and valuable resource and does add greatly to an organization’s ability to sustain competitiveness (Alavi and Leidner, 2001, Kogut and Zander, 1992, Argote and Ingram, 2000).