Abstract
ABSTRACT Knowledge Management (KM) is primarily created for acquisition, capturing, using, and sharing of knowledge within the organization. It is important to be applied for different kinds of business organizations to lead forward and to gain the benefits. One of the main causes or factors to implement KM successfully is the type of Organizational Culture (OC) and its readiness to implement KM successfully. This thesis is to assess and compare organizational culture readiness for Knowledge Management implementation. It is a case-study of two Saudi business organizations, first one is an International Industrial Organization (I.I.O.) producing products and second one is a Power and Electricity Organization (P.E.O.) producing service. The main goal of this study is to assess and to compare the readiness of OC of the two organizations to implement KM successfully. The methodology which was used to achieve the main goal of this study is based on three objectives which lead to the main goal. To achieve the three objective, one survey called Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) has been used only for first objective to identify the kind of dominant culture of the two case-study organizations and one questionnaire form was used to achieve the other two objectives, to determine the most important aspects of the organizational culture like (Clan Culture, Adhocracy Culture, Market Culture, and Hierarchy Culture), to support the KM strategy, among workers in the two organizations and to assess the cultural readiness of the two organizations, in general, to implement KM successfully. The collected number of (OCAI) survey which distributed on executives persons in both case-study organizations was 20 forms. But, the collected number of questionnaire form which distributed generally for all employees and workers with different levels in both case-study organizations was 80 forms. The author utilized Microsoft Office program (Excel) to analyze the collected data. The results gave an indication that, the dominant culture type on (I.I.O.) is Hierarchy-Market oriented culture and has Good readiness to implement KM successfully and for (P.E.O.) is Hierarchy culture and has Good readiness to implement KM successfully. The lack of concern of knowledge increase the complexity and ignorance. Therefore it is necessary to explain the importance of knowledge as an organizational resource, Appropriate OC is concerned with the organization development. And determine the type of OC will help the organization to see how the capacity of their resources and their ability to implement and support KM successfully. It is recommended for both case-study organizations to make sure that there is no clash between the current culture and the concept of KM. However, since culture is one of the factors to implement KM successfully, one of the recommendations for future study to be applied on another factor and its role to implement KM successfully.
