The key challenges associated with managing sustainability-related knowledge: an empirical study

Although featuring strongly in the professional and practitioner press, the very concept of sustainability is elusive for businesses. For businesses, the creation of economic value by integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues now increasingly pose real profound strategic challenges. These complex challenges involve numerous processes carried out and influenced by many stakeholders to set the tone and guide corporate level decisions. As organisations try to meet these complex challenges, they need to be innovative. Decision makers often find it difficult to access core knowledge required in addressing highly complex and relatively new sustainability issues. This situation calls for mapping sustainability-related knowledge to increase the visibility of knowledge sources and hence facilitate and accelerate the process of locating relevant expertise or experience of stakeholders to improve decision processes. This paper primarily reports on the empirical findings of an on-going research study, which is focused on managing change and knowledge associated with sustainability initiatives for organisational competitiveness. This paper focuses on what the key challenges organisations face in mapping sustainability related knowledge en-route to organisational competitiveness. The findings are in the main, based on semi-structured interviews with fiftynine professionals from forty UK organisations in four sectors – energy and utility, transportation, construction and not-for-profit organisations. It reviews the concept of sustainability and knowledge mapping. In addition, it presents the key challenges for mapping sustainability-related knowledge. The paper concludes that mapping sustainabilityrelated knowledge is an integrated and complex process. The key challenges organisations facing in mapping sustainability-related knowledge are: mapping of dynamic knowledge, cross boundary knowledge mapping, knowledge representation, organisational culture and mapping tacit knowledge. KEY WORDS Decision making, knowledge management, knowledge mapping, sustainability, tacit knowledge