Abstract:

Many current research concerns revolve around the knowledge organization and how to decide if certain companies can be called so or not. Although there are various models that place the organization on a certain stage or level, it would be more useful to have at most two synthetic indicators that incorporate as many relevant features of a knowledge-based organization as possible, because relevant graphical representation becomes possible in two dimensions, necesary in order to maintain comparability and to measure the evolution of the organization towards this status. The purpose of this paper is just to give a concrete and effective response to the question: "Which organization is closest to the stage of a knowledge organization?". Based on ten certain characteristics that are recognized in the literature as being found in a knowledge organization, we used the Principal Component Analysis and summarized these features so as to obtain a concrete graphical representation of the analysed organizations on two axes. The characteristics measured at each organization refer to economic performance, flexibility, innovation, rate of informatization in the company, dedication to continuous learning, as well as intellectual capital. Thus, the study allows to make an efficient hierarchy of twenty organizations considered, depending on the initial features and based on information synthesis, in order to create added value for the decision makers in relation to a number of companies and their framing as knowledge companies or not.