What impact have these advances in IT capability had on firms’ abilities to manage knowledge, and what implications might a continuing advance of IT-enabled knowledge capabilities hold for strategic management theory? Specifically, what are the theoretical implications of a firm’s ability to now more effectively acquire, process, store and transfer knowledge on the sustainability of competitive advantages and firm performance based upon such knowledge?
The management field’s current theoretical treatment of knowledge may perhaps be best viewed through common competency-based theoretical perspectives, such as the RBV and KBV of the firm. In these views, RBV deals with the potential for a firm’s resources to generate sustained competitive advantage if the resource is: (1) valuable; (2) rare; (3) imperfectly
imitable; and (4) non-substitutable. Whereas KBV, as an outgrowth of resource-base
view (RBV), treats individual or organizational knowledge as a distinctively unique resource that is the true source of sustained competitive advantage in organizations. Extensions of KBV have argued that the ability to transfer knowledge within the firm is a critical component of an organization’s ability to build competitive advantage and appropriate rents from internal knowledge resources. While such competencies and/or knowledge are ideally imperfectly imitable by a firm’s competitors, they are also then by nature difficult to imitate internally, and may therefore represent a limiting factor on a firm’s competitive advantage if methods of effective intra-firm knowledge transfer are not institutionalized or technically enhanced. Therefore, increased adoption of modern IT-enabled KM systems could facilitate an increase in organizational knowledge flow. Further, organizations adopting these IT-enabled knowledge systems could, therefore, potentially experience increased performance. However, where, when and how should IT systems align with an organization’s knowledge processes to potentially result in such IT-enabled capabilities?