The Continuous Recombination of Codification and Personalisation KM strategies: A Retrospective Study

It is increasingly considered important to understand howcompanies plan their Knowledge Management (KM) strategy. Theliterature provides evidence that there may be different possibleapproaches to KM strategy. A significant distinction has been madebetween “codification” and “personalization”. Sometimes, these twoapproaches have been seen to be alternative to one another. In othercases scholars argued that a company can follow a strategy thatmixes the two approaches depending on diverse intertwined factors.Still, on this topic, the literature provides various and sometimescontrasting results that need clarification and confirmation.Especially, there is the need to understand if changes in internaland external conditions may induce modifications in a firm’s KMstrategy.The goal of the study is to analyse how the mix ofcodification and personalisation can vary over time in the samecompany, due to changing organizational and environmentalconditions. With this purpose, the evolution of KM initiatives of amultinational company was investigated. The findings of the studyconfirm that the strategic mix can change over the years due tomodifications in the factors of the company’s internal and externalcontext. Furthermore, the case shows that the different factors havedifferent weight and play a different role in influencing suchchanges. Specifically, in the investigated case, the factors relatedto the competitive context affected the evolution of the KM strategymore significantly than internal factors (which were just enablersor constraints of the evolutionary path). In addition, the studyshows that this classic distinction between codification andpersonalization may not be easy to use in practical terms, due tothe complexity of KM activities and needs in a company: this pointcan represent a fresh start of a future research agenda.