Knowledge-driven Dynamic Capability and Organizational Alignment: A Revelatory Historical Case

The current business environment has been characterized as less munificent, highly uncertain and constantly evolving. In this environment, the company with dynamic capability is reported to be more successful than others in building competitive advantage. Dynamic capability focuses on the link between a dynamically changing environment, strategic agility, architectural reconfiguration, and value creation. Being characterized to be flexible and adaptive to market circumstance changes, an organization with dynamic capability is described to have high resource fluidity, which represents business process, resource allocation, human resource management and incentives that make business transformation faster and easier. Successful redeployment of the resources for dynamic adaptation requires organizational forms and reward systems to be well aligned with firm's technological infrastructures and business process. The alignment is considered to be an executive level commitment. Building dynamic capability is knowledge driven; relying on new knowledge to reconfigure firm's resources. Past studies established the link between the effective execution of a knowledge-focused strategy and relevant setting of architectural elements such as human resources, structure, process and information systems. They do not, however, describe in detail the underlying processes by which architectural elements are adjusted in coordinated manners to build knowledge-driven dynamic capability. In fact, understandings of these processes are one of the top issues in IT management. This study analyzed how a Korean corporation with a knowledge-focused strategy aligned its architectural elements to develop the dynamic capability and thus create value in the dynamically changing markets. When the Korean economy was in crisis, the company implemented a knowledge-focused strategy, restructured the organization's architecture by which human and knowledge resources are identified, structured, integrated and coordinated to identify and seize market opportunity. Specifically, the following architectural elements were reconfigured: human resource, decision rights, reward and evaluation systems, process, and IT infrastructure. As indicated by sales growth, the reconfiguration helped the company create value under an extremely turbulent environment. According to Ancona et al. (2001), depending on the types of lenses the organization uses, different types of architecture will emerge. For example, if an organization uses political lenses focusing on power, influence, and conflict. the architecture that leverage power and negotiate across multiple interest groups would emerge. Similarly, if an organization uses economic lenses focusing on the rational behavior of organizational actors making choices based on the costs and benefits of action, organizational architecture should be designed to motivate and provide incentives for the actors (Smith, 2001). Compared to this view, information processing perspectives consider architecture to be designed to maximize the capacity of information processing by the actors. Using knowledge lenses, the company studied in this research established architectural elements in a manner that allows the firm to effectively structure knowledge resources to form dynamic capability. This study is revelatory single case with a historic perspective. As a result of this study, a set of propositions and a framework are derived, which can be used for architectural alignment.