Improving the Quality of Leaders' Decision Making in IT Companies to Achieve Better Predictions aboutFuture Developments for Competitive Advantage

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Over the last few years, professional dealing with information ż named Knowledge Management, in the following abbreviated as KM, ż has developed into an important issue in modern economy: Due to causes like worldwide networks, accelerated product life cycles and faster changing markets, knowledge and its management gains growing attention. These impacts lead to managersż inability dealing with knowledge in the right way at the right point of time to achieve a high quality of decisions with positive and sustainable influence. The approach is based on the author's hypothesis to optimize the decisionsż quality by capturing senior practitionersż knowledge at management level working for a German IT Company. The approach's core is to capture and utilise this certain type of knowledge captured in professional biographical case studies. The thesisż goal is to design a method by demonstrating the example in capturing this so called tacit knowledge of three IT practitioners as a needful complementation to software solutions. This might help to reflect and prepare for upcoming changes. This thesis aims to clarify the status quo of knowledge capture currently used in IT companies. In industrialised societies, tacit knowledge becomes a continuously more important asset to sustain or expand competitiveness. Existing management systems, mainly software solutions, basically capture explicit knowledge and are of limited use for company and staff: As these systems do not completely capture the aspects of tacit knowledge, especially possessed by senior employees, the thesis' approach is sorting out problems, possibilities and requirements for finding benefits and solutions in capturing and using this type of knowledge. For addressing these problems, three senior decision makers have been chosen to bundle some of their above mentioned knowledge within a case study. In arrangement with the authorżs principal supervisor, Dr Mark C. Williams, the methodology of reflective practitioner research as a heuristic enquiry is used to allow the discovery of insights.1 Not only by the affective domain of human experience, but also by the arts-based enquiry, e.g. poetry, as Germany is a nation of poets and philosophers. It will be significant considering action research, reflective practitioner methodology and the transformation of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. In this case, heuristic data is collected by email-questionnaires. Data is then analysed within the context of an ongoing literature review and the reflective experiences of the researcher. From this analysis, conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made, oriented to decision making processes. The aim is to demonstrate how the selected, worldwide-acting IT Company can convert senior worker tacit knowledge into a usable explicit form to optimize its decisions in a sustainable way. The results of the case study add to the theory and what is known by now about knowledge capture and the reflective practitioner methodology. Using this methodology, it is intended to be constructed the reflective way so that findings can be suited to practice. The subject company can benefit from the results of the study, as well as other companies faced with similar problems. Zusammenfassung: Innerhalb der letzten Jahre hat sich der professionelle Umgang mit Information, bezeichnet als Wissensmanagement, zu einem wichtigen Thema in der modernen Wirtschaft entwickelt. Aufgrund von weltweiten Netzwerken, schnelleren Produktlebenszyklen und sich stärker wandelnden Märkten wird dem Wissen und dessen Management mehr und mehr Beachtung geschenkt. Diese Einflussfaktoren führen dazu, dass Manager nicht mehr in der Lage sind, ihr Wissen in richtiger Weise und zum richtigen Zeitpunkt in nachhaltige Entscheidungen umzuwandeln. Der Ansatz fußt auf der Hypothese des Autors, die Entscheidungen auf Führung...