Reflections on Knowledge Management Research and Practice

This is the third volume in the Advances in Knowledge Management and I thought it appropriate to start this volume with some reflection on where KM is at and where it is going. This chapter reflects on two key issues—the need to ensure KM is relevant and the risk of KM becoming a fad. The chapter concludes with reflection on the future of KM.

Social Capital and Knowledge Sharing in Knowledge-Based Organizations

The study aims to understand the social and organizational factors that influence knowledge sharing. A model of knowledge management and knowledge sharing was developed inspired by the work of Nahapiet and Ghoshal. Data on KM processes and various social capital measures were collected from a sample of 262 members of a tertiary educational institution in Singapore. Rewards and incentives, openmindedness, and cost-benefit concerns of knowledge hoarding turned out to be the strongest predictors of knowledge sharing rather than prosocial motives or organizational care. Individuals who are highly competent in their work abilities are less likely to share what they know when they perceive that there are few rewards or when sharing is not recognized by the organization. The findings provide evidence for the importance of social capital as a lubricant of knowledge sharing and engaging performance management systems in knowledge-intensive organizations.

Developing a Knowledge-Based Organizational Performance Model for Improving Knowledge Flows in Discontinuous Organizations

Tacit knowledge attenuates particularly quickly in organizations that experience discontinuous membership: the coming and going of organizational roles or positions during a workflow process. Since knowledge flows enable workflows, and workflows drive performance, theory suggests that dynamic knowledge—particularly tacit knowledge—is critical for competitive advantage. This research seeks to extend established organization theory, through integration of emerging knowledge-flow theory, to inform the design of discontinuous organizations. Toward this end, we build a computational model based upon ethnographic study of an affordable housing project that experienced severe discontinuous membership. Analysis of this model reveals problematic theoretical gaps, and provides insight into how scholarly understanding of knowledge flows can extend organization theory to address discontinuous organizations. This research contributes new knowledge for designing knowledge-based organizations in discontinuous contexts.

Knowledge Patterns and Knowledge Refactorings for Increasing the Quality of Knowledge

Knowledge management is a relatively young discipline. It has accumulated a valuable body-of-knowledge on how to structure and represent knowledge, or how to design socio-technical knowledge management systems. A wide variety of approaches and systems exist that are often not interoperable, and hence, prevent an easy exchange of the gathered knowledge. Industry standards, which have been accepted and are in widespread use are missing, as well as general concepts to describe common, recurring patterns of how to describe, structure, interrelate, group, or manage knowledge elements. In this chapter, we introduce the concepts “knowledge pattern” and “knowledge anti-pattern” to describe best and worst practices in knowledge management, “knowledge refactoring” to improve or change knowledge antipatterns, and “quality of knowledge” to describe desirable characteristics of knowledge in knowledge management systems. The concepts are transferred from software engineering to the field of knowledge management based on our experience from several knowledge management projects.

IS Support for Knowledge Management and Firm Performance

While a great deal has been written about how information systems (IS) can be deployed to facilitate knowledge management for performance improvements, there is little empirical evidence suggesting such IS deployment can actually improve a firm’s bottom-line performance. This study attempted to assess the impacts of IS support for two key knowledge management activities (knowledge generation and knowledge transfer) on labor productivity and profitability with both survey and archival data. The potential moderating effects of firm-specific, complementary organizational resources on the performance impacts of the IS support were also examined and tested. The results showed that IS support for knowledge generation and IS support for knowledge transfer both had direct positive effects on labor productivity. Coupled with firm-specific, complementary organizational resources, both types of IS support exerted positive effects on profitability.

A Structured Method for Evaluating the Management of a Knowledge Management System Implementation

A knowledge management system (KMS) project transcends functional departments and business partners. The success of KMS implementation is highly contingent upon a well-orchestrated integration of multiple systemic contexts, such as communication channels, user involvement, power structure among stakeholders, corporate culture, project champion, interorganizational networks, etc. These organizational factors are embedded throughout the life cycle of a KMS project and within an organization. Understanding the influences of these organizational factors to the success of KMS projects can provide lessons for systems developers and management to increase the success rate of system implementation. The study is based around AMC, a major Taiwanese motor company faced with the challenge of deploying a knowledge management system. Over a period of 3 years (1999-2002) structured interviews were conducted to examine organizational factors contributing to the success of KMS efforts in AMC. The major emphasis of this chapter is to apply the concepts of structuration theory to assess the interaction of corporate management with users of a knowledge management system. Our findings suggest that management and users must be engaged in a sustained and reciprocal communication method when implementing a KMS. The pattern of communication, power structure, sanction power, and degree of cooperation are dynamically changed during the interaction process. Therefore, it is important to maneuver these factors into a win-win situation for management and users to successfully implement a KMS. Practical implications resulting from this research provide feasible real solutions to improve the relationship between users and management during a KMS implementation. Theoretically, this chapter contributes to the growing body of knowledge management (KM) literature from the structurational theory perspective.

Helping to Develop Knowledge Management Systems by Using a Multi-Agent Approach

Efforts to develop Knowledge Management have increased in recent years. However, many of the systems implanted in companies are still not greatly used by the employees because the knowledge that these systems have is often not valuable or on other occasions, is useful but employees do not know how to search for that which is most suitable. Moreover, employees often receive too many answers when they consult this kind of systems and they need to waste time evaluating all of them in order to find that which is most suitable for their necessities. On the other hand, many technical aspects should also be considered when developing a multi-agent system such as what knowledge representation or retrieval technique is going to be used. To find a balance between both aspects is important if we want to develop a successful system. However, developers often focus on technical aspects giving less importance to knowledge issues. In order to avoid this, we have developed a model to help computer science engineers to develop these kinds of systems. In our proposal, first we define a knowledge life cycle model that, according to literature and our experience, ponders all the stages that a knowledge management system should give support to. Later, we describe the technology (software agents) that we recommend to support the activities of each stage. The chapter explains why we consider that software agents are suitable for this end and how they can work in order to reach their goals. Furthermore, a prototype that uses these agents is also described.

An Evaluation of Factors that Influence the Success of Knowledge Management Practices in U.S. Federal Agencies

This research chapter investigates the status of knowledge management (KM) practices implemented across federal agencies of the U.S. government. It analyzes the extent to which this status is influenced by the size of the agency, whether or not the agency type is a cabinet-level department or independent agency, the longevity of KM practices implemented in the agency, whether or not the agency has adopted a written KM policy or strategy, and whether the primary responsibility for KM practices in the agency is directed by a chief knowledge officer (CKO) or KM unit versus other functional locations in the agency. The research also tests for possible KM practitioner bias, since the survey was directed to members of the Knowledge Management Working Group (KMWG) of the Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council who are KM practitioners in federal agencies.

Knowledge Fusion

The chapter proposes a simple framework termed ‘knowledge fusion’ to extend the rigor and relevance of knowledge management (KM). It points to some gaps in the current body of knowledge about KM, and provides a parsimonious set of ‘partitions’ that link to and from traditional knowledge management research and practice. It proposes that attention be paid to knowledge mobilization that reflects the demand side that is dominated by knowledge being part of individual identity and hence personal choice of whether, where, why and with whom to share knowledge and expertise as oppose to just understanding the traditional knowledge management that addresses only the supply side of information and the creation of environments for communication and collaboration, especially those “knowledge” largely being independent of the individual.

Knowledge Elicitation and Mapping

This chapter is concerned with engaging end-users in the design and development of knowledge management systems. The identification, capture and use of contextual knowledge in the design of knowledge management systems (KMS) are key development activities. It is argued that tacit knowledge, while often difficult to capture, can be extremely useful as contextualising knowledge to designers of KM systems. A methodology was developed to combine soft systems methodology, causal cognitive mapping, and brainstorming to provide a set of knowledge requirements. The methodology appears to offer an effective platform for making sense of non-routine yet rigorous knowledge work. The interventions enacted by the consultant and involving project stakeholders and end users facilitates individual, group and organizational learning through a metacognitive process of understanding the relationships and dynamics of shared group knowledge. Engagement with the methodology, in addition to causing tacit knowledge to be made explicit, enables second-order ‘deutero learning’, or ‘learning how to learn’. The combination of activities presented forms a metacognitive process which is both a form of proactive individual and organizational learning and an endeavour which adds to organizational memory. The identification, capture and use of contextual knowledge and their use in engaging end-users in the design of KMS will result in better user-system interaction.