Lowering the barriers to knowledge transfer and dissemination: The Italian cooperative banks cooperative experience

Knowledge has become increasingly relevant for organizations since the shift from an industrial economy based on assembly lines and hierarchical control to a global, decentralized, information-driven economy (Barua, 1996; Levine, 1995). Although knowledge is a wider concept than information because it is based also on expertise, we can consider the Information Management as the enabler for the Knowledge Management (KM). In particular, KM is viewed as an emergent process in which bits and pieces of information are integrated, within and across organizational boundaries, to produce and share new knowledge. Thus, the basic aim of KM is to capture and increase the knowledge of individuals. We are going to consider the perspective according to which the organization is a knowledge transfer system (Hertog and Huizenga, 2000), since virtual corporations are based on technological and communication means that help it. After defining why the knowledge dissemination is a win strategy for people within an organization, we are going to describe how managers can promote it. In this respect, we consider the cooperative banks experience in Italy very interesting. In order to exploit the power coming from their institutional network, they decide to create a unique knowledge management system in which competences and process are shared by all banks participating to the virtual network. 1. KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER Generally when we use the word "transfer" we are talking about conveying or moving something from one person or place to another, or to hand over something. Knowledge transfer would then indicate conveying or moving knowledge from one person or place to another. In the world of business, knowledge transfer relates to how we move knowledge from one point of the organization to another (Rutkowski, 1999). Organizations are taking a serious look at how they can transfer the knowledge of their employees throughout their organizational structure. The pressure to more efficiently transfer knowledge to obtain highly qualified people that stay at the edge of the state of the art throughout life, and that can acquire new knowledge (=learn) whenever the need arises, has much increased over the Franca Cantoni, Mauro Bello, Chiara Frigerio 666 years, mainly due to the acceleration of growth of information and partly due to high cost of education, training and re-training. Even more serious, the fact that persons within an organization do not know what others are doing or what they know has lead to so much waste and duplication of efforts that it became imperative to look for at least partial solutions. There is yet another development that is constantly accelerating: in traditional organizations their main assets were property, buildings, machinery, inventory, etc.; in high-tech (read “high-brain”) organizations the main asset has become more and more the knowledge in the brains of their employees. Putting this together, techniques for archiving, transferring and increasing knowledge will be crucial factors for high performance organizations (Maurer, 1999). 2. THE KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER MECHANISM. AN APPLICATION OF THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA. Two players A, B (in our case: business units, enterprises, divisions, function or individuals) have to decide whether to transfer mutually their knowledge or not (cooperate or not). Each was offered by the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) a bargain (as shown in Fig. 1): if A and B decide not to transfer their own knowledge everyone will possess its own and the transferring cycle doesn’t start at all (strategy 4); if A refuses to cooperate and B decides to transfer knowledge, B would lose its own knowledge which is absorbed by A (or the opposite) (strategies 2 and 3); if they both decide to cooperate, each would spend/lose some time in absorbing knowledge, but a learning circle is created (strategy 1).