RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Knowledge management challenges: The case of SMEs in a competitive business environment 97
ture; human resources and evaluation systems. It is essential to focus on this factors to implement
KM in SMEs and also, this factors could represent key elements to gain and enhance
competitive advantage. The management, the leadership and the support plays a key role in
the success of KM (Horak, 2001, p. 9) because these elements focus on the strategy, activities
and processes of SMEs. Investment decisions in KM “should be based on a sound consideration
of resources … financial support is inevitably required if an investment in a
technological system is to be made. Human resources are needed to coordinate and manage
the implementation process as well as to take up knowledge-related roles. Time is also a consideration”
(Wong, 2005, p. 272). Organizational culture “defines the core beliefs, values,
norms and social customs that govern the way individuals act and behave in an organization
… In general, a culture supportive of KM is one that highly values knowledge and encourages
its creation, sharing and application” (Wong, 2005, p. 267). IT and technologies that
supports KM refer to “business intelligence, knowledge base, collaboration, content and document
management, portals, customer relationship management, data mining, workflow, search
and e-learning” (Luan & Serban, 2002, pp. 87-88; Wong, 2005, p. 269). All the activities and
processes need an evaluation system to identify their performance.
The implementation of KM in a turbulent business environment is governed by different
factors. This research provides a perspective of the barriers and the success factors for implementing
KM in the SME sector. The findings and results of this survey offer a framework of
the actual situation of KM and KM strategies in the SMEs from Romania.
The quantitative research offers relevant results but it has some limit: high costs, long
research duration, insufficient data and erroneous data (Funaru, 2013, p. 33). Further research
should focus on different tools and instruments to identify the attitude and the perception of
managers according to KM.
Step II. Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP)
AHP is a method used in strategic decisions, allowing the synthesis of complex hierarchies
by decomposing the problem (Saaty & Vargas, 2013, p. 5). Subjective evaluations are
converted into numerical values and processed for ranking each alternative on a numerical
scale and the implementation is easy and intuitive. AHP is a “benefit measurement (scoring)
model that relies on subjective managerial inputs on multiple criteria. These inputs are converted
into scores that are used to evaluate each of the possible alternatives” (Handfield, Walton,
Sroufe, & Melnyk, 2002, p. 75). The three concepts underlying the AHP are: the analytic
feature (which provides a logical structure and assists in an intuitive decision-maker); hierarchical
decomposition of the natural process of reducing complexity and the fact that defines
a decision-making process (Bhushan & Rai, 2004, pp. 11-20). The AHP is a “powerful management
science tool that has proven useful in structuring complex multi-person, multi-criteria
decisions in business and economics” (Handfield et al., 2002, p. 75). The AHP makes
“complex decision processes more rational by synthesizing all available information about
the decision in a system-wide and systematic manner” (Handfield et al., 2002, p. 76).
In this analysis, the authors use the critical success factors obtained in the quantitative
research to identify strategic decisions that managers implement in SMEs. The factors are: