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

KM Framework and models

The literatures of knowledge Management have defined many ways in which KM in organization could be managed and implemented. Nonaka (1991) came up with a SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) framework of “Knowledge creation”.

Socialization: the sharing of tacit knowledge between individuals through the joint activities are been concentrated on.

Externalization: the expression of tacit knowledge in the publicly comprehensible forms.

Combination: the conversion of explicit knowledge into more complex sets of explicit knowledge: communication, dissemination, systematization of explicit knowledge.

Internalization: this is the integration of externalized knowledge into tacit knowledge on individuals or organization scale.

According to Nonaka (1991), the spiral resulting from the exchange of tacit and explicit knowledge across different organizational levels lead the key to knowledge creation and re-creation.

(Earl, 2001). Came up with 7 school’s of knowledge management model. According to Earl( 2001). organization existence depends on these features TECHNOCRATIC, ECONOMIC and BEHAVIORAL. The Technocratic was divided into 3 schools as “systems”, “cartographic” and “engineering”, this has to do more with the Information Technology. In engineering school, it captures how re engineering is used in the processes of the transfer of knowledge flows in an organization activity. An example according to A. Gonnan (1998) is the consultancy practice on learning and improvement from knowledge reuse, recognizing that assignments and their component tasks or processes are often repeatable.

(Earl, 2001).The systems school still have to do with IT, it studies the expert knowledge and used in the knowledge bases so that organization can use the information. Internalization is the based on IT infrastructures. This justifies Nonaka (1991) model “Internalization”. Example according to M. J. Earl (1994) is the data-base built by Shorko Films to capture all second-by-second transactional data from a distributed process control system.

In the economic, which has the commercial school did not fit into the Nonaka (1991). SECI model. The commercial school deals with maximization of profit. It focus on “exploitation” of knowledge than “exploration” of knowledge according to M. J. Earl (2001). For example. A consultant can sell its intellectual knowledge to an organization to make income, i.e knowledge exploitation.

Earl (2001). in the behavioral, the organizational school have to do with how an organization shared, stored, interacted and exchange of information with in it environment “knowledge communities”. This agrees Nonaka (1991) SECI model. According to Hansen et al. 1999 combines both “codified knowledge “ and “personalized knowledge” strategies. Here their exist form of “socialization”, this school has the full integration of the Nonaka (1991) SECI framework.

Earl(2001). In strategic school sees how knowledge management can be used as competitive strategy by an organization i.e knowledge capability. An example is the Buckman Laboratories where knowledge is seen as a source of differentiation as well as a necessity in the specialty chemicals business.

In conclusion, Nonka (1991) in his SECI framework was give an outline and they are bounded. He didn't go further to simplify its framework. But Earl (2001) was more specific with his views about the 7 schools model. Some of the schools in Earl (2001) where able to fit into the SECI framework showing some forms of agreement with the SECI although not all.

References

• Earl, M. J. (2001).Knowledge management strategies: Towards taxonomy. Journal of Management Information Systems/ Summer 2001, vol.18, No. 1, pp.215-233.
• Earl, M. J. (1994)The new and old business process redesign. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 3, 1 (1994), 5-22.
• Gannon, A.(1998) Knowledge management at Hewlett Packard. Knowledge Management, 3, 1, (December/January 1998), 14-17.
• Nonaka, I., and Takeuchi, H. The knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Data, Information and Knowledge

There have been these misunderstanding, misuse and trying to distinguish between data, information and Knowledge. However, different writers and authors came up with the ideas that the use of data, information and knowledge depends on the end user.

Data
Different scholars came up with definitions of data. According to Harris (1996) and Avison and Fitzgerald (1995) they have similar views about data as "the lowest level of known fact and unstructed fact".

Davenport and Prusak (1998) defines data as essential raw material for the creation of information.

Data can be defined as raw and unprocessed fact.
Example: In Nokia organization the defective records of manufactured phones in the production process is data. The records from the process are raw .

The above example justifies Davenport and Prusak definition of data.


Information.
Information according to Harris(1996) are sorted, grouped, analyzed, and interpreted data. Marshall(1997) and Davenport and Prusak(1998) have similar views on information, i.e information to some persons can be knowledge and vice-vase.

For example, if Nokia phone organization takes record of all there monthly sales(data) and put it down in a processed form as (information) charts or graphs. These charts or graphs will help Nokia organization to have the knowledge on when to invest more on their products to certify
there customers demand against the coming season and for a common man it could be an information or data.Therefore, Information are processed data.

Knowledge
Many authors has the word knowledge as not been static, it is interchanged for information.
Davenport et al. (1998) sees knowledge as information combine with context, experience, interpretation, and reflection. Marshall (1997) views knowledge as understanding, interpreting and applying information to a specific work function.

In Practice

Using the above example to illustrate, when Nokia organization have knowledge of their customers demand, meaning they have been able to use the experience and understanding of the past to interpret, reflect and predict for the future business plan. Here, knowledge will come to play because it will help the organization or company to have a competitive advantage over others in the next season.



References

• Avison, D.E and Fitzgerald, G. (1995) Information Systems Development: methodlogies,techonologies, tool, 2nd edn,McGraw-Hill, London.
• Davenprt, T.H, Delong, D.w and Beer, M.C. (1998) 'Successful Knowledge Management projects', Sloan Management Review, 39(2): 43-57
• Davenport, T.H and Prusak, L. (1998) Working knowledge, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, MA.
• Harris, D.B (1996) 'Creating a Knowledge Centric Information Technology Enviroment', Technology in Education Institute, http://www.dbharris.com/ckc.htm , 15 September.
• Marshall, L. (1997) 'Facilitating Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing. New Opportunities for Information professionals, Online, Vol 21 No5, Pp 92-98.

COMMUNITY OF PRATICE "CoP"

Community of Practice exist in our day to day life activities, in our homes, schools, place of work e.t.c. .These are people that come together to share ideas or knowledge about an event or a set goal.
Therefor, Community of Practice can be defined as a group of people or organizations bounded by what they share or do together i.e tiring to archive there set goal.An example of a community of practice is Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).
Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) is a community of practice because the entire labour workers both the skilled and unskilled, the government and private workers all come together to form the NLC. In this Community of practice, there objective can be found on http://www.onlinenigeria.com/finance/?blurb=619
, these set objectives or goals is the bounding force holding the labour workers together as one community, even though the workers are from different Establishments and organizations.
In my view, for a Community of practice to exist each member in the community of practice must be attracted or have a passion for the set goal or objectives.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge Management

In last few years, KM have been a major concern in organizations and industries. This have given rise to WHAT "Identification of KM", WHY "Insight about KM", HOW "Implementation of KM" this can be noted as 3I's . Knowledge management guru’s and scholars came with different definitions of Knowledge management.This definitions have sprigged up debates and arguments which till date have not agreed on a particular definition for Knowledge management.However, recent research have examined KM into :

1.Conceptual- Definitions, Principles and KM framework.
2.Process - How the KM model work.
3.Technology - Integrating of Information Technology (IT) into KM.
4.Organization - Organizational characteristics, Skills assessment, Organizational forms.
5.Management - Management practices, Measuring and Valuing intellectual capital.
6.Implementation - Success factors, Challenges and prerequisites, IT infrastructure, KM strategies.

According to Bassi, L.J (1997) KM is the process of creating, capturing and using knowledge to enhance organizational performance.

Von Krogh (1998) refers to KM as identifying and leveraging the collective knowledge in an organization to help the organization compete.

Wiig, K (1997) refers to KM the systematic, explicit and deliberate building, renewal and application of knowledge to maximize an enterprise's knowledge-related effectiveness and returns from its knowledge asset.

Despite the views of the authors about KM, it could be fitted in into the 3I's according to it features. However, Knowledge management could defined as how organizations identifies, have an insight and implementation of knowledge for there self goal.

In Practice

Illustration of how KM is applied in an organization, for example: Consider Nokia as an organization. When GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) came into Nigeria 2000, there where different mobile phone organizations like Nokia, Samsung, Ericson e.t.c there various phone was in the Nigeria market. But Nokia mobile was fast enough to use the Knowledge management to identify(behavior), implement(good product quality) and have an insight (knowledge about demand) about the mobile phone market and used it to have an competitive advantage over others mobile phone makers. When an organization is trying have a completive advantage over another, it develops to knowledge management strategy.

Knowledge Management Strategy

Knowledge management strategy arises when an organization tries to gain or have an edge in its environment. These KM consultants or experts where able to identify KM strategies into codification and personalization strategies .

• Codification Strategy can be identify as Knowledge in a database ,where it can be accessed by anyone in the companies. This KM strategy can also reuse,stored and edited.

An example of Organization that uses codify strategy is Ernst & Young, they codify strategy using "People to documents" approach such as interview guides, work schedules, benchmark e.t.c by storing them in the electronic repository for people to use. This was extracted from person who develop it, made independent of that person and reused for various purposes.

• Personalization Strategy can be identify as knowledge form the person that develops it, and is shared through one-to-one conversation.

An example of organization that uses personalization is Boston Consulting and Bain thy focus on dialogs between individual, not knowledge object in a database.here the organization is much important in the person-to-person knowledge sharing approach.

Differences between codification and personalization strategy are as follows:

1.Knowledge in codification strategy is retained through storage, editing and reuse while in personalization strategy can be lost because it is from one sources.
2.Knowledge in codification strategy is multi-dimensional in ideas of knowledge because it is stored in the organization while personalization strategy is one-dimensional.
3.Knowledge in codification strategy is share through computer networks while the use of computer in personalization strategy is use for information.

Finally, the two strategies can not be applied by an organizations because they have to stick to one. Those that have tried failed. Example is Bain in 1980' s when they developed a large paper-base document center at there headquarter. It was a waste of time and money, so they have to revert to there person-to-person strategy .

References

• Morten, T.H et al (1999) WHAT'S YOUR STRATEGY FOR MANAGING KNOWLEDGE? Source:Harvard Business Review 77(2), 1999:106-16

• Wiig, K. (1997), "Knowledge management: where did it come from and where will it go?" Journalof Expert Systems with Applications. Fall 1997

• Von Krogh,G. (1998), Care in knowledge creation. "California Management Review". 40(3) 133-153.