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The barriers of knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application that impede learning in gas and petroleum companies

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to find and rank the barriers of the four knowledge management (KM) processes including generation, storage, distribution and application in the gas and petroleum sector. Design/methodology/approach – Revie…

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The barriers of knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application that impede learning in gas and petroleum companies

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to find and rank the barriers of the four knowledge management (KM) processes including generation, storage, distribution and application in the gas and petroleum sector. Design/methodology/approach – Reviewing the literature of KM and organizational learning, this paper extracted all of the barriers which impede KM processes. Then it designed a questionnaire for validating, ranking and categorizing barriers. Totally, 190 completed questionnaires were gathered from 26 gas and petroleum companies in Iran. Some statistical tests such as T, Friedman, Kruskal– Wallis and Mann–Whitney were used for analyzing data. Findings – FindingsreviewedthecurrentliteratureofKMbarriers,validatedandrankedthebarriersof knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application separately. The importance of knowledge generation and knowledge application barriers were significantly different between gas and petroleum companies. Hence they were disjointedly ranked for gas and petroleum. Finally, KM barriers were rankedaccordingtotheircontributiontoKMprocessesandtheaveragemeanoftheirimportanceinKM processes. Practical implications – From the practical point of view, this paper suggests managers of gas and petroleum companies to emphasize solving high-priority barriers according to the KM process which theyarefocusedon.Furthermore,thestudyprovidesachecklistthatcanbeusedasanassessmenttool for evaluating KM processes considering barriers

Evaluation, Knowledge Management, Best Practices, and High Quality Lessons Learned

In the endlessly hyped knowledge age of the new millennium, evaluators are being asked to generate lessons learned and best practices. Pressure to do so seems only likely to increase. At the end of this article I’ll suggest a way of bringing some increased rigor to evaluators’ use of these terms, but first I’ll examine and opine on popular usage and the current context. The demand for knowledge acquisition, which demonstrates membership in the elite ranks of learning organizations, has crescendoed into an organizational development and program evaluation mania. But just what is popularly meant by a best practice? What does it mean to learn a lesson? And what’s evaluation’s role in all this? Maybe we can find out by looking at a meta-example. The great lesson learned in the last decade of the last millennium was that information is not the same as knowledge. (Wow! Who knew?) The information age has given way to the knowledge-hungry age. Chief Information Officers, all the rage in the 1990s, have been replaced in multinational corporations by Chief Knowledge Officers. And what do Chief Knowledge Officers do? They capture lessons learned and identify best practices.