A FUZZY ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS FOR EVALUATION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT EFFECTIVENESS IN RESEARCH CENTERS

Abstract

Measuring knowledge management (KM) effectiveness is a very important issue in organizations today. This study aims to develop a method to evaluate the effectiveness of KM under uncertainty in research centers (RCs) in Iran. To develop an evaluation, the relevant literature was reviewed to identify KM effectiveness criteria. Next, the judgments of the experts, specialists, scholars, and professionals in IT and KM systems and senior managers of Iran’s RCs were determined using a pairwise comparison questionnaire. Because linguistic terms are an integral part of human judgments that will influence the results of the research, a fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) called the Extent Analysis (EA) method was used for data analysis and weight determination. Accordingly, 34 subcriteria extracted from the literature that are important in the evaluation of KM effectiveness were categorized into six main criteria as follows: human resources, leadership and center structure, knowledge creation and acquisition, knowledge storage and security, knowledge sharing, and knowledge utilization and updating. The findings indicate that human resources is the most important criterion based on both the AHP and fuzzy AHP methods. The other five criteria in descending order of importance are knowledge sharing, leadership and center structure, knowledge utilization and updating, knowledge creation and acquisition and knowledge storage and security. Finally, to test the validity and reliability of the proposed framework, we evaluated the effectiveness of KM system in nine of Iran’s RCs.