Conceptualising Organisational Knowledge Base in the Shipping Industry

The concept of organisational knowledge has been widely used in knowledge management literature. Similar concepts such as knowledge repository, knowledge stocks, and knowledge inventory have also been loosely referred to as organisational knowledge. Little has been done, however, to identify what organisational knowledge is and what components it contains. By adopting an epistemological and ontological classification of knowledge, the paper argues that knowledge in an organisation consists of two parts, organisational knowledge and personal knowledge. The concept of organisational knowledge base (OKB) is then developed to capture the characteristics of knowledge in an organisation. Next components of the OKB are identified through examination of organisational memory and measurement models on intellectual capital. The main contribution of such conceptualisation is to provide practical assistance for organisations to identify key knowledge components that need to be carefully managed and to initiate effective mechanisms to retain knowledge through integration of personal knowledge to organisational level. The conceptualised OKB is then applied to the shipping industry as the first step, from the knowledge management perspective, to address the severe loss of industrial knowledge as a consequence of high personnel mobility in the shipping industry.