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