Applying quality function deployment to build a knowledge management conceptual framework

Knowledge Management (KM) is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach for identifying, capturing, retrieving and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. It is important because it stimulates innovation and growth and leads to effective decision making. Culture is a significant factor in this process and the role of people is critical. Successful Knowledge Management in any enterprise depends on the employees willing to share and invest their individual knowledge in the organization. Other factors are the business strategic priorities, top management support and technology, which may act as an enabler. We present a method for building a Knowledge Management framework utilizing Quality Function Deployment (QFD). The essence of the original QFD method was to extract the customer needs or desires expressed in his own words and to translate them into measurable product characteristics and further processing. The method has been enhanced and instead of being solely a technique for product design it became a technique for a variety of topics such as improvement of manufacturing systems, deployment of flexibility in supply chains and others. Our conceptual model has a top-down structure with QFD sequential matrices. It represents a research framework of an eventual empiric research for identifying important KM actions leading to improvement of the competitive and human advantages of an enterprise. We assume that the Knowledge Management improvement needs in an organization stem from its strategic improvement needs. To propagate the improvement needs from the strategic level to the action level, we develop two QFD matrices. The first matrix translates the strategic improvement needs into the knowledge improvement needs of an enterprise while the second one translates the knowledge improvement needs into prioritized KM improvement actions.