Organisational Knowledge Management Systems and IT Support

Transactional Processing Systems(TPS). Management Information Systems(MIS). Decision Support Systems(DSS). Executive Information Systems(EIS). Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Supplier Chain Management (SCM). Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Expert Systems (ES). What a hell of 'systems'. They are too much. Knowledge Management Systems(KMS). Another 'system'?

Not so in the really sense. A KMS takes a different paradigm to traditional IS systems mentioned above. Traditional IS systems are decomposing in nature i.e. a problem to be addressed by the IS is broken down into sub-problems. The sub-problems can be broken further into smaller units where it is easy to build procedural code to address them. Viewed from this perspective, then they can be seen as being "code-centric" where individual procedures and modules are pierced together, compiled and executed in computing platforms such as operating systems.

KMS are complex in nature. In an organizational context, they identify entities in the organization that constitute knowledge, communicate those entities' knowledge horizontally and vertically and use IT resources to support the communication (Moteleb and Woodman 2009). From this perspective, one can safely say that they are not "code-centric".

Organizations are constantly having demanding environmental challenges that have to be addressed to remain competitive (Zack 1998). The question that has always been around is: What newer ways should we be constantly looking for to help us remain competitive? Newer approaches aim to identify KM issues within organizational challenges and build an appropriate KMS to be supported by IT.

Developing an IT supported KMS in an organization

One recent model for such a KMS has been proposed by Moteleb and Woodman(2009). In their model, the KMS development approach has been characterised into three mutually dependent aspects as follows:

Whereas this model is particularly useful to SMEs, it has some few issues that need to be addressed. For example, how can their findings be extrapolated to benefit large scale multinational organizations, who, contrary to their contention that their services are integrated, might not always be the case? Are there not significant KM problems in large organizations that the organizations will be happy to be addressed by researchers? Which future direction should research take in regard to this issue?

To supplement this model, the impact of the cultural component of a KMS should be seriously considered, irrespective of how much support IT resources give, in the meaningful development of a KMS like the complicated communications of the USS Wasp Navy vessel (Call 2005). The research carried by King, Kruger and Pretorius (2007) in a large multicultural organisation in South Africa demonstrate how the cultural aspects play a central role in a KMS.

Development of an IT supported KMS is not for the faint-hearted. Extra care, patience and precautions, especially in regard to the usage of KM terms, should be taken when using the participatory approach to the design (Wagner and Piccoli 2007). Otherwise we run into the risk of exasperated users frustrated, in their view, by abstract KM terminologies and difficulties, as exemplified by the following user comments posted at Denham Grey's blog (Grey 2005):

This is really a crazy world. How can anybody understand all this crazy stuff all around? It's so meaningless, but in one way it's fantastic!

Since IT support is one of the thrusts of this paper, it (paper) argues that IT by itself is not an end, but a means to an end i.e. the support of IT doesn't guarantee the success of a KMS. How IT is deployed, especially to focus on business processes, is critical in supporting the alignment of a KMS to organisational performance and competitive advantage strategies. As Malhotra(2005) demonstrates in his work, not sealing the technology gaps between technology inputs, knowledge processes and organisational performance can lead to failures of KMS implementations. If that happens as it does often, should we then raise our hands and utter the often-quoted cliche: "technology is just an enabler of business processes" (Call 2005) in justifying such KMS failures?

References:

Grey, D. 2005. KM models - mix & match. Betty Bo's comments at http://denham.typepad.com/km/2003/11/km_models.html?cid=5138954#comment-5138954 (accessed March 21, 2009).

Call, D. 2005. Knowledge management - not rocket science. Jounal of Knowledge Management 9(2):19-30.

King, N., N. Kruger, J. Pretorius. 2007. Knowledge management in a multicultural environment: a South African perspective. Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 59(3):285-99.

Malhotra, Y. eds. 2001. Knowledge Management and Business Model Innovation. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.

Malhotra, Y. 2005. Integrating knowledge management technologies in organizational business processes: getting real time enterprises to deliver real business performance. Journal of Knowledge Management 9(1):7-28.

Moteleb, A., and M. Woodman. 2009. Uncovering a KMSD Approach from Practice. Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management (eJKM)

Wagner, E.L. and G. Piccoli. 2007. Moving beyond user participation to achieve successful IS design. Communications of ACM 50(12):51-5.

Zack, M. H. 1998. If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, Then What’s the Problem? Quoted in Malhotra, 2001. http://web.cba.neu.edu/~mzack/articles/fourprob/fourprob.htm (accessed March 24, 2009).