Benchmarking knowledge management practices in small and medium enterprises : A fuzzy multicriteria group decision-making approach

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to formulate the process of measuring and benchmarking the performance of knowledge management (KM) practices as a multicriteria group decision-making problem and present a new multicriteria group decision-making approach for effectively evaluating the performance of KM practices to meet the interests of various stakeholders in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach A new multicriteria group decision-making approach is developed for evaluating the performance of KM practices of individual SMEs. Intuitionistic fuzzy numbers are used for representing the subjective assessments of decision makers in evaluating the relative importance of the evaluation criteria and the performance of individual KM practices with respect to specific evaluation criteria. A fuzzy multicriteria group decision-making algorithm is developed for measuring and benchmarking the performance of alternative KM practices. Findings The proposed multicriteria group decision-making approach is capable of effectively evaluating the performance of KM practices through adequately considering the presence of multiple decision makers, the multi-dimensional nature of the evaluation problem, and appropriately modeling the subjectiveness and imprecision of the evaluation process. The presentation of an example shows that the proposed fuzzy multicriteria group decision-making algorithm is simple to use and efficient in computation. Research limitations/implications The outcome of the multicriteria group decision-making approach is highly dependent on the inputs provided by the decision maker. Practical implications The novelty from this research lies in the utilization of a multicriteria group decision-making approach for evaluating the performance of KM practices in an organization. The outcome from the performance evaluation process allows the enterprise to adopt appropriate KM practices for achieving competitive advantages. Social implications The proposed multicriteria group decision-making approach has a significant social implication as it can be used as a decision-making tool for providing various decision makers in SMEs with useful and strategic information concerning the performance of KM practices in a given situation. Originality/value The originality of this paper lies in the development of the multicriteria group decision-making approach for effectively measuring and benchmarking the performance of KM practices of individual SMEs.