Communications of the ACM

An important aspect of the global, knowledge-based, technology-enabled economy is that organizations must invest in continuous training [4]. Managers, now exposed to concepts such as knowledge economy, organizational intelligence, learning organization, knowledge era, and organizational learning, [2, 3, 12], need to establish the optimum mix of continuous training activities to leverage organizational knowledge to its fullest potential. Several methods and models aimed at managing organizational knowledge at a macro level are now available [2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11]. But these methods don't address the micro level problem of planning and selecting continuous training activities while taking into account manager and employee preferences, and constraints such as budget or deliverables. The analysis of empirical data presented in this article incorporated factors, criteria, and weights into a model named Econof. Our findings provide managers with valuable tools to implement a continuous training management process aligned to organizational strategy---a step toward the development of knowledge management strategies.