CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER WORK
Strategic problems cross the boundaries of a single
function and can only be solved by exploiting the
collective knowledge and experience through an
apparent process of constructive discussion and
collaboration among the parties involved. As
knowledge and experience reside in a diverse set
of organizational assets including employees,
structure, culture and processes, a consistent
approach for synthetic, problem-specific use of tacit
and codified knowledge for decision making is
necessary.
Having this in mind, in this paper we have considered
the strategy process from both the social
dynamics and the knowledge management perspectives.
We argued that a process of collaborative
development and evaluation of a set of issue models,
which follows the dynamics of a strategy team,
facilitates knowledge elicitation, recombination
and diffusion in a more consistent and productiveway. Towards this end, we have described a novel
methodology for accomplishing the above process.
The G-MoBSA methodology views issue resolution
as a co-evolution of the issue models with the
shared understanding and knowledge of the
team. The core of the methodology consists of a
problem–solution modelling formalism for providing
consistent views of the issue and a formal argumentation
schema for conducting the dialogue
among team members.
In addition, we presented Knowledge Breeder, a
software tool that implements this methodology
over the web. Knowledge Breeder provides the
mechanisms for the participants’ interaction and
argumentation, and gives suggestions over the collectively
perceived defensibility/validity of the
models. The tool has been evaluated in the strategy
development process of a software company in
Greece. During its evaluation phase, modifications
regarding the exact structure of the modelling
formalism and its interface to the managers/users
were accomplished. There was a consensus among
users that Knowledge Breeder enhances team
learning and provides an efficient environment
for strategic dialoguing. Current efforts of the
development team are directed towards integrating
system dynamics simulation features, as well as
developing a more focused version that fully supports
the innovation and product development
process.