Leadership and Management: Amazon's Knowledge Management System

This report delves into Amazon's knowledge management system (KMS), starting with a background of the company and its organizational structure. It then presents a SWOT analysis, evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with Amazon's KMS. The report further offers a critical evaluation of Amazon's KMS, assessing its effectiveness and areas for improvement. Finally, it concludes with recommendations for enhancing the KMS, aiming to optimize knowledge sharing, decision-making, and overall organizational performance. The report highlights the importance of KM in fostering innovation and adapting to challenges, particularly in the context of remote work and digital transformation. The analysis emphasizes the need for a robust KMS to support Amazon's continued growth and competitive advantage.

Leadership and
Management

Table of Contents
MAIN BODY.............................................................................................................................................2
TASK 1.......................................................................................................................................................2
Background of the company....................................................................................................................2
TASK 2.......................................................................................................................................................3
SWOT Analysis of the Knowledge Management System........................................................................3
TASK 3.......................................................................................................................................................6
Critical evaluation of Amazon’s Knowledge Management System.........................................................6
TASK 4.......................................................................................................................................................8
Compiling a conclusion and outlining the main areas for development in a knowledge management
system at Amazon, while providing suitable recommendations to it.......................................................8
CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................................9
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................10
Books and journals:...............................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Knowledge management refers to a management in which process of producing, using,
sharing and managing the information and knowledge of business. It can be understood as a
multidisciplinary approach in order to accomplish the objectives of an organization by making
the optimum use of knowledge. Knowledge management is imperative to any organization as it
helps to boost the competencies of decision making ability in a business organization. It also
helps in ensuring the employees have access to the overall proficiency apprehended within the
organization and it makes them to work smartly and quickly, and informed decisions which will
increase the productivity of an organization. Data and information is different from each other
where data stands for individual facts that have some specific understanding whereas information
can be understood as a group of collected data that carries logical understanding. It is totally
depend on the data (Calvo, N., Fernández-López, S. and Rodeiro-Pazos, D., 2019). KM was
introduced by Peter Drucker in the 1990. Organizations how to managed KM because it deals
with tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge and comprises with dynamic attribute, maturity
attribute as well as self attributes. It is important for an organization as it includes employees and
cultural standards which stimuluses the behavior for successful knowledge creation, application
and dissemination, along with this if they are very determined, action oriented and concrete it
may provide various kinds of benefits to the employees as well as organization.
MAIN BODY
TASK 1
Background of the company
Amazon is an American technological company which is multinational in nature, in
which this business centers on digital streaming, e-commerce, artificial intelligence as well as
cloud computing. It is reputed as one of the known company which gives strong competition to
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple in the information technology industry. The company
was introduced by Jeff Bezos in the year 1994. The company has its headquarters in in Seattle
Washington US. Amazon is the world's largest internet based company which retails everything
from books to groceries to the shipping containers. This company is very ambitious about its
future and already has become one stop shop. Amazon is recognized as it delivers online retail
shopping services to their customers which includes primarily enterprises, sellers, customers and
content creators. This company also involves services like marketing as well as promotional
services which includes co-branded credit card agreements or online advertising. Earlier it
started its business from selling books but later it expands to sell video games, electronics,
furniture, jewelry, software, food, apparels and many more. The company focuses on their
services to the customers through its websites which focuses on price, selection and convenience
(Chen, X. and Wei, S., 2020). It design its companies websites which make sure that it can be
sold to the various companies as well as by third party involving dozens of product varieties. It
has become the biggest brand valuation throughout the world. This is also proposing on the
distribution of streaming music, video and audiobooks and downloads through its audible
subsidiaries, Amazon music, Amazon prime video, Twitch. It also facility to deliver consumer

electronics which includes fire TV, Kindle e-reader, echo devices, fire tablets. The two principle
segments are operated by the company which is North America and International. The North
America segment comprises with retail sales of subscriptions and customer product through
North America focused websites such as www.amazon.ca and www.amazon.com (Clegg, B.,
Balthu, K. and Morris, G., 2020). International segment involves retail sales of subscription and
customer products through internationally based locations which is basically includes trade of
export from such locations from sites to customers. The founder of the company wants to
introduce his company name which starts with A. Amazon logotype has characterized with a
curved arrow which leads from “a to z” which shows that this company bring the product from a
to z category with the shape of arrow which looks like a smile. The presence of the company is
multinational with various offices and facilities throughout the world. The main office of the
company is based in Seattle which has over 8,00,000 employees in the US. It has been studied
that the company has more than 110 active centers of fulfillment in the country of US and more
than 185 centers around the world. Amazon has a simple approach which involves the following
geographic sectors in its operations and major focuses; North America, Europe and Far East.
Although the company is running its operations in more than 180 countries around the globe,
these three geographic sectors includes them all. Amazon believes in diverse workforce who
have different backgrounds which helps to build an inclusive as well as supportive organization.
They hired employees who have sense of value, belonging and opportunity. The company also
believe that when workforce is diverse they are more likely to retain and attract the diverse
talent. They are involving number of women in the tech roles which helps to leave the company
including their delivery experience. It has been studied that employees working in Amazon are
the most satisfied because they are more concerned about them. The organizational structure of
the company also integrates geographical divisions and which is relatable to its business
objectives. Such as amazon.com, the company uses such divisions in order to make relaxed to
succeed the business of e-Commerce based on the workings of the challenges including logistics
as well as their regulatory framework. The organizational culture of the Amazon is based on the
hierarchical approach with geographical divisions and global function based group. It includes
top to down control throughout the operations in world which make them to enhance its market
share and maintain its competitive status.
TASK 2
SWOT Analysis of the Knowledge Management System.
Knowledge management system can be defined as a system in which focuses on storing
and retrieving the knowledge in order to improve the meaning, collaboration and alignment of
process. Knowledge management system can be exists in teams, groups or company but it can be
used as a base of the knowledge of the company's customer or user. Knowledge management
system also helps in building a knowledge base in order to enhance the experience of customer
and assist them by providing varieties of goods and services. Overall it is used to assist the
customers with utilizing the knowledge in order to achieve the objectives of company. In context
to Amazon, when knowledge management system is used by an organization it makes them to
access, update and share the business knowledge which results in profitability and productivity.
When an organization has a competencies to access the accurate knowledge at a specific time

through robust knowledge management system it helps to encourage innovation, collaboration
and it informs accurate decision making as well. KMS permits and helps to enhance the customer
service for the company throughout the world (da Conceicao, C. S. and Et.al., 2019). It is
important to various areas which includes internet web service, contact center service desks and
shared service center. It supports to boost the productivity, reduction in operational cost,
authorizes company to leverage the business knowledge.
SWOT analysis of Amazon’s Knowledge Management System:
It has been analyzed that SWOT analysis can be an effective solution to outline the assets
and skills that organizations KM team brings in front of others and recommend how they can be
applied to the problems of organizations. In context to Amazon, the SWOT analysis of the
company’s knowledge management system are mentioned below:-
Strengths:
 Relevancy: The main purpose of the knowledge management system is to provide
information and knowledge to the workers through which they can be able to make a
good decision. These are the strength which helps a company to fast-move when other
members are facing difficulties in order to react then new changes.
 Adaptive: The KM team also had progressed from back office operators peddling a
standard set of services to inside counsellors and looking for the projects based on the
changing needs of organization. This type of mindset helps to move faster and keep
growing with knowledge and even with the move to remote work and the process of
change which is not planned.
 Open and helpful: The knowledge management team of the Amazon company helps to
solve the problems, communicate and many more. This type of interpersonal skills helps
to provide a sense of developing requirements, providing innovative and creative
solutions and advertise the solutions in a way that supports broadly.
 Vulnerable: The situation of covid-19 disturbs the internal as well as external operations
of the company which fed of the perfect and polished traits and facilitate to face the real
world, own up the limitations and difficulties that can be personally as well as
professionally (Fantazy, K. and Tipu, S. A. A., 2019). The desire to be vulnerable has
trying to build trust between other sections of the organization.
Weakness:
 Invisibility: In the Amazon Company, knowledge management system works very well
for the organization but it is suffering from lack of awareness. Most of the employees
don't have the knowledge about knowledge management. Hence, their identity is very
limited to the people.
 Misunderstood: It has been also observed that even if employees know about knowledge
management system, they are not giving the required importance which this system
deserves. Also, sometimes they are unable to communicate and fails to highlights
compelling case of organization.

Opportunities:
 Growing need: The situation of crisis has clearly providing the importance of KM in new
reality to the people. They are aware about the risk of not updating the information
system, cultural barriers to knowledge sharing, benefits of good knowledge management
and undocumented the tacit knowledge. Opportunities for KM is growing day by day
because remote working needs virtual solutions, rapid decision making, innovation and
organized stuffs.
 Integrated Solutions: The responses and prices in in several cases boosting up the
partnership between knowledge management and other functions such as HR, IT or
learning (Gaol, F. L. and Et.al., 2019, April). This can be a great opportunity to deliver
more interconnected cross-functional services and assist to the customers.
 Cozying up to the digital: Before pandemic digital was very sizzling and most of the
companies are fast-tracking the digital projects or activities to reduce the cost, make job
more touchless and automate the processes. This will be helpful for the digital team to
understand the requirements of customers and to organize changes as well as to link
digital transformation can also building the support of leadership.
Threats:
 Scope creep: In the Amazon, the activity of knowledge management system enables to
respond as a “first responder” in the covid-19 situation. But it can be a threat when
knowledge management group turn into virtual conferences, provide training to
employees on Microsoft teams, or convert in person courses to e-learning may face
difficulty to disconnect from the extramural activities.
 Budget cuts: Money or finance for the company increasingly going down through this
pandemic. Program or the system of the organization will not survive without a business
which is focused on metrics of success and transparent business cases.
 Short-term thinking: In the changing environment, it can get easily to takeover. If the
managers and leaders of the company are not increasingly focused on the survival, each
member of the company put their eyes off the long term sustainability.
The core competencies of the organization are based on the capabilities and business
resources of any organization which provide the satisfaction all the VRIO criteria that is value,
rarity, inimitability and organization (Kipkosgei, F., Kang, S. W. and Choi, S. B., 2020). The
below mentioned table highlights the core and non-core competencies of the Amazon company:-
Resources and
capabilities
Valuable Rarity Inimitability Organization
Competitive
disadvantage
no
Competitive
Parity
yes no
Sustainable
competitive
advantage
yes yes yes yes

Unused
competitive
advantage
yes yes yes No
TASK 3
Critical evaluation of Amazon’s Knowledge Management System.
Knowledge Management is basically about availing the right knowledge to the right
people (Lei, H., Nguyen, T. T. and Le, P. B., 2019). It is practiced or provided to the employees
and leaders so as to improve the customer experience and let customer achieve satisfaction using
the services. While discussing about Amazon, being the most customer obsessed company, they
do have and practice multiple techniques to improve the knowledge management and the system.
The advantages of using knowledge management system could be counted as many but some of
them if listed down, i.e., to improve the productivity, more growth and motivation for employees
to grow within the company, being more customer centric and knowledge sharing and many
more.
There is also a knowledge management value chain (KMVC) which includes four
attributes within to justify the advantages. It also explains the chain of business processes
through Knowledge management system to create, store, transfer, and apply knowledge. The
four components of KMVC are:-
1. Knowledge Acquisition: The particular attribute focuses on acquiring knowledge
from different ways such as emails, documents, reports, presentations and best
practices. Amazon does follow the same pattern and has created multiple platforms
within the organization where the employee can acquire knowledge about multiple
skills which will be fruitful for both the company and individual (Liebowitz, J. ed.,
2019). Amazon has its own tool where the employee can enroll himself and seek for
more opportunities and learnings for him. There is also an open culture followed in
offices of the organization where an employee is always free to share his best
practices and providing equal opportunity to others also.
2. Knowledge Storage: The aforesaid platform do have advantage of storing the
database. Once the data or information or any knowledge management chain practices
is known then it is stored so that an employee can easily retrieve the same later in
need.
3. Knowledge Dissemination: Finding out the important out of the ocean. It is obvious
that the database would be filled with ample data and knowledge related information
but to know what to retrieve when is also a different skill that a manager and
employee at Amazon is practiced to excel at.
4. Knowledge Application: The attribute basically provides information about the
application that has to be included while practicing the above. Amazon has known to
use Knet modules for knowledge which is amazon’s application for knowledge
sharing, Quip sheets for data related inputs that is spreadsheets, documents and many
more. Inside Amazon for internal usage of employees which provides latest updates
about the company on a daily basis.

SECI MODEL
The model basically focuses on knowledge generation, transfer and recreation in a
company. It describes how explicit and tacit knowledge is generated, transferred in an
organization aligning with the knowledge management system practiced in the company (Lungu,
V., 2019). The SECI model consists of four ways of knowledge conversion: socialization (tacit
to tacit), externalization (tacit to explicit), combination (explicit to explicit), and internalization
(explicit to tacit).
 Socialization: There are multiple ways in which tacit knowledge can be transferred
which are like observation, practicing the shared best practices, imitation etc. In context
to Amazon, the company has its own communication application where the employees
can communicate within one on one, with the team, group discussion and at maximum
office strength level to share the knowledge.
 Externalization: It is the process of making tacit knowledge to explicit. A
communication or information, knowledge sharing through a way which is detailed and
could be shared with others at the end for the sole purpose of sharing knowledge.

 Combination (Explicit to Explicit): Combination involves integrated knowledge and
organizing where several range of explicit knowledge are combined. In order to support
this mode of knowledge transformation it can take a support from large scale database
and creative and innovative utilization of communication networks which can be
computerized. This type of knowledge can be taken from internal as well as external
sources of the organization and in order to form a new knowledge they are merged, edited
and processed.
 Internalization (explicit to tacit): Internalization means involving application and
receiving the knowledge by a person and bounded by learning by doing. It has become
the part of a person's knowledge and will be utilized as a asset for the company.
It has been evaluated that knowledge management is very advantageous because it enables
the people in the organization to search and access the required information without the assisting
human resource. It provides all the information or to access the information which is not required
for and they become overwhelmed (Rashid, M., Clarke, P. M. and O’Connor, R. V., 2019). It is
very important from a practical viewpoint that every employee should not able to identify the
available at HR documents, agreements or policies in the organization. It has been evaluated that
Amazon Company is based on their employees. According to LinkedIn, it is the most satisfying
company with a view from their employees. This company is based on hiring the appropriate
talent and enthusiastically move them throughout the company. Leaders and manager in the
company take their role very seriously in order to giving the proper training development and
approaching their employees. Also, the knowledge management system cannot operate in
isolation because it can be worked when it is merged with other department such HR or IT in the
organization.
TASK 4
Compiling a conclusion and outlining the main areas for development in a knowledge
management system at Amazon, while providing suitable recommendations to it.
In context to Amazon Company, they determine the experience of customer or user that
is the ability of their customers to identify what are their wants and when they wanted fast and
easily was a key to somewhat victory (Sampaio, C. A., Hernández-Mogollón, J. M. and
Rodrigues, R. G., 2019). It is been observed that whether the system could be able to achieving
the goals of the customers in personalized and instinctual manner, it would enlarge the
importance to their experience that is the main area where knowledge management helps to
develop, the company focuses on knowledge management principles to add the importance of
their value to customers. The areas which are developed in the knowledge management system
are as follows:-
 Consistent presentation: The Company’s focus on the product specification to their
feedbacks and reviews, de provide every information to every product in the same order
and the same way where ever it requires possibility.
 Distributed upstream content creation: No matters the company looks like to control
everything for almost every part, the product expertise where the proficiency is actually
create the content. In context to Amazon, the standards of designs, practices, policies

writing stills the content appears like it avail from the same destination in order to make it
more utilizable.
The area which need to be developed more in the area of knowledge management system:-
 The company need some development in order to reduce the call center because it needs
to strive the site customer friendly and as broad as possible. If information is good about
the products on Amazon Company the people would reference it to others if they like to
buy somewhere else.
 Amazon is one of the most progressive and successful sites while getting customers to
provide meaningful reviews and feedback (Tian, Y., Yu, J. and Jiang, J., 2019,
November). But it is also an area which needs development in the front page of product
where feedbacks should be on right place and provides user in many methods to sort the
information to the products they are liking. This will also makes the customers to rate the
reviews. Hence this will benefit to both future customers but also to better providing the
services and product from the company.
Recommendations:
It has been recommended that in order to get a reasonable feedback from customers the
organization should be focused on to give proper tutorial and training to the employees as well as
online chat and group discussion in order to answer the questions immediately and can marked
reason which is not understandable (Tirana, R. A. and Tjakraatmadja, J. H., 2019). While in
order to reduce the call center services the environment where employees are considered as an
asset and educate them continuously. In order to take the benefits from the knowledge
management system the employees must be incentivizing which will result in skilled staff
members who are ready to take the competition in the industry. Also the training enables the
organization to looking for the projects which help to grow.
CONCLUSION
It has been concluded from the above report is that knowledge management is very
significant part in the organization in order to increase the efficiency of decision making ability.
While ensuring the people in the organization who held with their expertise, employees can be
recognized as a smart one when they are more able to take fast and informed decisions in order
to provide the advantage to the company. It is also helpful to gather the strength from the whole
company and utilize in order to increase the efficiency of routine operations. It enables the
companies to be learnt more and make them to create and innovate better through knowledge
sharing structure, process and tools. Overall it has been summarized that knowledge management
methods and tools are the systems which help to design with the sharing of information within
the company whether it is internally or externally. They are the indicators that helps and ensuring
the information drifts are managed and captured in order to increase the value an application in
the organization.

REFERENCES
Books and journals:
Calvo, N., Fernández-López, S. and Rodeiro-Pazos, D., 2019. Is university-industry
collaboration biased by sex criteria? Knowledge Management Research & Practice.
Chen, X. and Wei, S., 2020. The impact of social media use for communication and social
exchange relationship on employee performance. Journal of Knowledge Management.
Clegg, B., Balthu, K. and Morris, G., 2020. Changing professional service archetypes in a law
firm using Process Orientated Holonic (PrOH) Modelling. Knowledge Management Research &
Practice, 18(1), pp.38-52.
da Conceicao, C. S. and Et.al., 2019. A four-step model for diagnosing knowledge transfer
challenges from operations into engineering design. International Journal of Industrial
Ergonomics, 69, pp.163-172.
Fantazy, K. and Tipu, S. A. A., 2019. Exploring the relationships of the culture of
competitiveness and knowledge development to sustainable supply chain management and
organizational performance. Journal of Enterprise Information Management.
Gaol, F. L. and Et.al., 2019, April. A Survey of Tacit Knowledge in Community Learning Based
on Measurement Dimensions. In Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database
Systems (pp. 179-190). Springer, Cham.
Kipkosgei, F., Kang, S. W. and Choi, S. B., 2020. A team-level study of the relationship between
knowledge sharing and trust in Kenya: Moderating role of collaborative
technology. Sustainability, 12(4), p.1615.
Lei, H., Nguyen, T. T. and Le, P. B., 2019. How knowledge sharing connects interpersonal trust
and innovation capability. Chinese Management Studies.
Liebowitz, J. ed., 2019. The handbook of applied expert systems. cRc Press.
Lungu, V., 2019. Knowledge-based society-a condition to ensure sustainable
development. Eastern European Journal for Regional Studies (EEJRS), 5(1), pp.96-111.
Rashid, M., Clarke, P. M. and O’Connor, R. V., 2019. A systematic examination of knowledge
loss in open source software projects. International Journal of Information Management, 46,
pp.104-123.
Sampaio, C. A., Hernández-Mogollón, J. M. and Rodrigues, R. G., 2019. Assessing the
relationship between market orientation and business performance in the hotel industry–the
mediating role of service quality. Journal of Knowledge Management.
Tian, Y., Yu, J. and Jiang, J., 2019, November. Aspect and opinion aware abstractive review
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International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (pp. 2061-2064).

Tirana, R. A. and Tjakraatmadja, J. H., 2019. Factors Affecting Knowledge Sharing Intention of
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Technology Management, 12(1), pp.70-85.