Implementing KM in Organizations

In recent rsearch, knowledge-based theory of firms suggests that knowledge is the organizational asset that enables sustainable competitive advantage in hypercompetive environments. Many organizations are developing information systems desigined specifically to facilitate the sharing and integration of knowledge, these systems are referred to as Knowledge Management Systems (KMS).

Wiig (1997) coined KM as the systematic, explicit, and deliberate building, renewal, and application of knowledge to maximize an enterprise's knowledge-related effectiveness and returns from its knowledge assets. It can be seen as a way to improve performance, value, productivity, and competitiveness, a way to capture best practices, a way to increase speed and meet customer needs, and a way to become a more innovative organization.
Barney (1995) opines that before KM is formally implemented, an organization needs to solve four questions:

• Where is the value of knowledge?

• How does the organization develop and exploit the special characteristics of knowledge and again greater competitiveness?
• How does the organization avoid being imitated by other organizations of its special characteristics of KM
• How does the organization organize the exploitation of resources in order to implement KM?

In the implementation of KM in organizations five factors are been considered according to Barney (2005) and Nesbitt (2002) which are business strategy, organizational structure, K team, K audit and K map.

Business strategy

This Strategy expresses in what direction the company will be heading towards in the future, which is the organization business goal . The efforts to link KM programs to business strategy have become a vital source of competitiveness for all organizations. ( Cook,1999) states that “knowledge drives strategy and strategy drives KM.” A study done by the America Productivity and Quality Center (1999) concludes that organizations pursuing different KM strategies tend to be more successful when the strategy employed is aligned to their business goal or strategy. It is important for the organizations that wish to implement KM to ensure that their knowledge strategy and knowledge program are consistent with their corporate ambitions or goals.

Organizational structure

Ebert and Griffin (2005) states that organizational structure can be defined as the specification of jobs to be done within an organization and the ways in which those jobs relate to one another. The hierarchical structure of an organization affects the people with whom individuals frequently interact, and to or from whom they are consequently likely to transfer knowledge. Knowledge sharing is likely to occur within a larger group of individuals in more decentralized organizations. The matrix structures and an emphasis on leadership instead of management also facilitate greater knowledge sharing primarily by cutting across traditional departmental boundaries . Organizational structure based on traditional command and control, also but this kind of structure will be quite inflexible in distributing and sharing knowledge laterally and across the teams with the organization. Therefore, to facilitate effective knowledge transfer in organizations, it is suggested that a decentralized and matrix structure is vital to ensure the organizations ability to adapt with the rapidly changing environment.

K team

Teams are groups of two or more people who interact and influence each other, are mutually accountable for achieving common objectives, and perceive themselves as a social entity within an organization (Cohen and Bailey, 1997). It allows organizations to apply diverse skills and experiences toward their processes and problem solving within and outside the organization. Soliman and Spooner (2000) found that K teams are required not only to improve the performance of the enterprise but also to ensure the effectiveness of the KM program. The major responsibility of a K team is to build, implement, focus, and deploy the knowledge management system (KMS). As KMS is built on expertise, knowledge, understanding, skills, and insights by a variety of stakeholders who might have little in common from a functional standpoint. The quality of collaborative relationship among these stakeholders determines the ultimate success of the system. Since KM is essential in organizations, it is important that a strong and capable K team that is formed by different functional departments is important to ensure a smooth and effective implementation of KM in organizations.

K audit

Knowledge of knowledge assets is critical to the proper planning of a KMS and is a rich source of information about the strengths of an organization. Therefore, organizations should begin their KM practices by taking responsibility for and appraising what knowledge is already available by benchmarking successful acquisition or best practices or by maintaining a curriculum vitae file of the personnel or by organizing experience swapping sessions Beijersr (2000). Knowledge assets must be exploited internally in order for its full value to be realized by the owner.Therefore, every organization needs to identify where knowledge resides in the organization. This is very important when designing strategies to ensure that knowledge is being created, transferred, and protected in the right way and with the right individuals. Therefore, it is vital for organizations to carry out K audit so as to examine what knowledge assets they have in their organizations prior to KM implementation. If this is not done,organizations would have no focus and may waste their time and effort in investing in something from the beginning again which had already been owned by them. With the adequate consideration of these factor in an organizations, knowledge management will be implemented through understanding the organization problems and relating it to organizational goals and culture.

References

• American Productivity & Quality Centre (1999), Knowledge Management: Consortium Benchmarking Study (Best-practice Report), American Productivity & Quality Centre (APQC), Houston, TX, .
• Barney, J. (1995), "Looking inside for competitive advantage", Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 9 No.4, pp.49-61.
• Beijerse, U.R.P. (1999)," Questions in Knowledge management: defining and conceptualizing a phenomenon", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 3 No.2, pp.94-109.
• Cook, P. (1999), "I heard it through the grapevine: making knowledge management work by learning to share knowledge, skills and experience", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol.193 No.3, pp.101-5
• Ebert, R.J., Griffin, R.W. (2005), Business Essential, 5th ed., Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, .
• Nesbitt, K. (2002), "Designing a knowledge management system", available at: http://academic.edu:2081/products/faulknerlibrary/00018382.htm (accessed April 1st 2009).
• Soliman, fr., Spooner, K. (2000), " Strategies for implementing knowledge management: role of human resource management",Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol.4 No.4, pp.337-45.
• Wiig, K. M (1997)," Knowledge management:where did it come from and where will it go" Expert Systems with Application. Vol. 13 No.1, pp.1-14

The Use of IT in Supporting Knowledge Management Systems in Business.

Technology is just an enabler. knowledge Management and coordination of diverse technology architecture, data architectures, and systems architecture poses obvious knowledge management challenges (Malhotra, 1996).Such challenges result from the need for integrating diverse technologies, computer programs, and data sources across internal business processes. These challenges are compounded by the concurrent need for simultaneously adapting enterprise architectures to keep up with changes in the external business environment. This adaptation requires upgrades and changes in existing technologies or their replacement with newer technologies.

The gap between the IT and business performance has grown with the shifting focus of business technology strategists and executives. This emphasis has shifted from IT(Porter and Miller, 1985; Hammer 1990) to information (Evans and Wurster, 2002; Rayport and Sviokla, 1995) to knowledge (Holsapple and Singh, 2001; Holsapple, 2002) as the lever of competitive advantage.

The application of real time enterprise as IT technology can seen as it supports organizations. The purpose why organizations embed IT on their day to day activities is to gain a competitive advantage, improvement on customer satisfaction and to meet the organization goals. The real time enterprises are organizations that enable automation of processes spanning different systems, media, and enterprise boundaries. Real time enterprises provides real time information to employees. customers, supplies, and partners and implement processes to ensure that all information is current and consistent across all systems, minimizing batch and manual processes related to information. To achieve this , systems for the real time enterprise must be adaptable to change and accept change as the process. The example of increase in business processes that is attributed to information technology are

• trading analytics: from 30minutes to five seconds
• call center inquires: from eight hours to ten seconds
• supply chain update: from one day to 15minutes
• airline operations: from 20minutes to 30seconds

An example: Wal-Mart success to its investment in real time enterprise technologies. A McKinsey Global Institute reports:
The technology that went into what Wal-mark did was not brand new and not especially at the technological frontiers, but when it was combined with the firms managerial and organizational innovations, the impact was huge. Wal- mart systematically deployed its technologies with focus on its core value proposition of lowest prices for mass consumers. The setting up its supply chain and inventory management systems to accelerate business performance.The business model created the strong linkage with suppliers, which not only subsidized the cost of technology investments but also per-committed the partners to the success of the shared systems.

The use of information technologies is very useful in knowledge management of organizations because it helps the organization to improve in productivity, services and also gain competitive advantage in the market by satisfying their client or customer needs as in case of Wal-Mart above.


Reference

• Evans, P. and Wurster, T.S (2002), Blown to Bits, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.
• Holsapple, C.W (2002), " Knowledge and its attributes", in Holsapple, C.W (Ed.), Handbook on Knowledge Management 1:Knowledge Matters, Springer- Verlag, Heidelberg.
• Holsapple, C.W. and Singh, M. (2001), " The Knowledge chain model: activities for competitiveness", Expert Systems with applications, vol.20 No. 1, pp. 77-98
• Malhotra,Y. (1996), " Enterprise architecture: an overview", BRINT Institue, LLC, New York, NY.
• Rayport, J.F and Sviokia, J.J (1995), " Exploiting the virtual chain", Harvard Business Review, vol. 73 No. 6, pp.75-99

Web 2.0 Technologies

In recent years, the offspring of new, organizational based concepts and services was introduced on the Internet. In 2005, Tim O'Reilly coined the term "Web 2.0" which includes web for participation, technology for significant change in web usage and design guidelines for loosely coupled services. The aim of this article is to give a review on how some of the concept of the Web 2.0 has influenced organization in there daily practice. O' Reilly (2005) notes six core competencies of the web 2.0 environment:

• service, not packaged software
• an architecture of participation,
• cost-effective scalability
• re-mixable data source and data transformations
• software above the level of a single device and
• harnessing collective intelligence.

The real impact of web 2.0 technologies is in the transformation of the organizational business model. This technology encourages user participation and derivers its greatest value when large communities contribute to the content. The the user generated metadata, information and designs enable a much richer environment where the value is generated by the volume of users. Web 2.0 emphasizes interaction, community and openness(Millard & Ross, 2006). O'Reilly (2005) defines Web 2.0 as a platform, spanning all connected devices as stated in the six core competencies above. The Web 2.0 has include the following concept of weblogs, wikis, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) , social tagging, mashups and user define content.

Weblog
Blogs are a form of web pages that contain articles similar to newsgroup postings in a reverse chronological order. Blogs are usually produced by single author or a small group of teams and can not be edited by the public. The biggest advancement made with weblogs is the permanence of the content to be posted and along with the comment to define a permanent record of information. In having a collaborative record that can be indexed by search engines will increase the utility and spread the information to other members in the organization.With the services of companies like blogger.com, the weblog is fast becoming a communication medium of the new web.

Wikis
A wiki is a web site that promotes the collaborative, web-based authoring environment, where anyone on the internet can edit existing content and add new pages any tme they wish. Wikis are currently in high demand in a large varity of fields due to simplicity and flexibility nature. Therefore, documentation,reporting, project management, online glossaries and dictionaries, discussion groups, or a general information applications are just a few examples of where the end user can provide value (Renihold, 2006). The major difference between the wiki and the blog is that the wiki user can alter the original content while the blog user can only add infornation in the form of comment. Wiki create an environment open to sharing information and knowledge to a large group users in organizations.

RSS
this was developed by Netscape, RSS was intended to publish news type information based upon a subscription framework (Lerner, 2004). RSS shares the metadata about the content without actually delivering the entire information source. With the aid of RSS an aggregator application, end users are not required to visit each site in order to obtain information and also RSS technologies changes the communication method from a search and discover to notification model. This help user to locate content that is pertinent to their job and organization which crate much faster stream.

Podcasting
Podcasting means blogging audio content. Listeners subscribing to a podcast have access to the full list of audio files made available by the producer and are notified about newly published content. Podcasting can be seen as a type of "audio on demand" (Biever, 2005). Podcasting are available on a wide range of topics, also have been identified as a technology for enhancing e-leaning. Conference presentations are disseminated as podcast on Internet which can re-used by organization for knowledge sharing.


Tagging

Tagging describes the collaboration activit of making shared online contecnt with keywords or tags as a way to organize content for future navigation, filtering or search (Gibson, Teasley, and Yew, 2006).TThe information architecture are placed in order to place inforamtion into specific pre-defined bucket or category.Tagging offers a number of benefits to the end user community and enble individual to bookmark the informationin a way that is easier fro them to recall at a later date.An example of social tagging is Flickr which allows user to upload images and tag themwith appropriate metadata keywords.

In conclusion, this concepts of of Web 2.0 technologies has helped organization in gaining compitive advantage in the market, a typical example is the research on wine industry in the United States when the big eight wine industries consolidated. This was creating a problem for the small wineries to break into the market, but the small wineries resolved application of internent as alternative in selling directly to the consumer.This downward price pressure, increased competition and the bargaining power of the distribution channel has created a challenging business enviroment for everyone(Kim & Mauborgne, 2005).


Reference

• Biever, C. (2005) Podcasters' deliver radio-on-demand, New Scientist,185,2486
• Kim, W.C., Mauborgne, R. (2005) "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant", Harvard Business School Press, March 2005.
• O'Reill, T.( 2005) What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Model for the Next Generation of Software
• Yew, J., Gibson, F., & Teasley, S. (2006) " Learning by tagging: group knowledge formation in a self-organizing learning community" In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences,( Bloomington: International Society of the Learning sciences). pp. 1010-1