Research Question

1
How Do Policy-Makers Manage Knowledge? The
Effects of Codified and Personalized Strategies
on Health Board Decision-Making.
Elizabeth Quinlan and
Harley Dickinson

• Research Question
• Hansen et al. (1999) recommend a 80/20 split of
  codified and personalized strategies for
  effective knowledge management.
• We ask
• 1) What are the knowledge management practices of
  regional health board members?
• 2) Are their knowledge management practices
  effective?

• Knowledge Management is..
• The capturing and application of tacit and
  explicit knowledge to achieve organizational
  goals.
• In health care policy, organizational goals
  policy decisions endorsed by clinicians and
  citizens.
• There are two knowledge management (KM)
  strategies
• Codified (person to document)
• Personalized (person to person).

Model Results
Hypothesized Model
Codified KM Strategy (people to documents)
Outcomes support for policy decisions
Board-level Support for Innovation
Codified KM Strategy
h1
h2
Outcomes support for policy decisions
0.54
Board-level Support for Innovation
0.34
0.61
0.33
h3
Personalized KM Strategy
(1)
(2)
h4
0.26
Job Satisfaction
0.06
Personalized KM Strategy (people to people)
0.27
Job Satisfaction
h4
(3)
h) A personalized KM strategy is seen as
socializing and un-related, or even opposed to,
organizational innovation
h1)
Organizational innovation encourages the use of a
codified KM strategy h2) A codified KM
strategy improves policy decisions and health
outcomes h3) A personalized KM strategy
directly improves outcomes h4) A personalized
KM strategy indirectly improves outcomes mediated
by job satisfaction.
Hypothesized Findings Hypothesis h No support. Hypothesis h1 Full support. Hypothesis h2 Full support. Hypothesis h3 Full support. Hypothesis h4 Partial support. Un-hypothesized Findings (1) Organizational innovation encourages a personalized KM strategy. (2) Endorsement of Boards decisions produces job satisfaction for Board members. (3) Organizational innovation produces job satisfaction for Board members both directly and indirectly.

• Conclusions
• Both personalized (people lt-gt people) and
  codified (people lt-gt documents) KM strategies
  characterize knowledge transfer and utilization
  processes.
• Contrary to the recommendations in the
  literature, effective knowledge management can be
  achieved through a 50/50 split of personalized
  and codified knowledge management strategies.
• Future research needs to be done to determine
  if these KM practices are effective in other
  domains and if they are the optimal KM practices
  for regional health boards.

• Data and Methods
• Saskatchewan District Health Board Survey
  (HealNet, 1997)
• Survey data collected from members of
  Saskatchewans 30 regional health boards.
• N 275. Response rate 77.
• Structural equation modelling
• A multi-variate statistical technique which
  explores the underlying structures between
  variables.
• We are guided by Hu and Bentlers (1998) fit
  index thresholds
• SRMR lt .08 and (CFI gt 0.95 or RMSEA lt 0.06).