Describing collective creation of knowledge about competitive environment. The case of a business intelligence service

Collective processes of organizational knowledge creation remain poorly explored. Yet efficient knowledge management has to focus on those processes as far as it aims at dealing with sustaining knowledge development and sharing rather than solely sustaining its memorization. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of two processes of knowledge creation within a business intelligence service. We studied this business intelligence service during 16 months. Data collection was done through a participant observation methodology based on a half time participation in the business intelligence service. Emergent coding of interpersonal interactions within and outside the group is the basis for data analysis. Knowledge creation was evaluated by the difference between received and diffused knowledge. We studied the trajectories of the emerging codes and graphically represented them. Two graphical representations of the processes were used to bracket different phases we then characterized. The analysis led to a five stages model that can be described with six variables: interactions within the group, interactions outside the group, requests of information to or from the group, received documents, diffused documents and organizational / environmental context. We highlighted five different phases intervening in the processes: attentism, fragmentation, integration, rationalization and exploitation. They represent the basic “bricks” of the model. Real processes can be described by the arrangement of those different bricks