What is the role of IT in supporting Knowledge Management Systems?

Introduction

For the last ten years, Knowledge Management System (KMS) has become one of the most significant topics in Information Technology and Business circles. Now it becomes a necessity for an organization to have KMS to show the world their intellectual capability. Still most of the companies think by deploying state of the art IT system will resolve their knowledge problems (Croasdell, 2001). According to McDermatt

"the Great trap in knowledge Management is using information management tools and concepts to design knowledge management System" (1999).

The question arises, what happens if the group of people does not have contact with each other and don't understand the information which will be helpful to perform their work better. Installing IT infrastructure will not help them in this situation. Most of the Knowledge managing efforts in an organization are based on Information technology improvement and consider culture and environment as secondary. Knowledge management in organization is about linking people to get knowledge flow and information technology could support to create this link. Second section will explain how different companies change their product name to knowledge product, third explains what when wrong when companies use just IT system in their KMS, last role of human resource development in knowledge management and finally conclusion

Renaming of IT System

Information system was developed to assist management and workers to process vast amount to data and information easily and quickly. It includes the MIS, DSS and EIS that interact with individual set of data and help in improving the organization process. But after the introduction of knowledge management or Intellectual Capital idea, the name of Information system has been reframed in to knowledge management system (Wilson, 2002). Data Base, Data Mining application and data warehousing software, market intelligence system, groupware and Intranet Web Portal are now renamed as knowledge management system and application. "Many existing business practices (such as information management and intelligence gathering) are coming under the knowledge management umbrella." (Skyrme, 1998) This branding of application divert focus on real purpose of Knowledge Management System, which was to help organization to access knowledge which was already there and help employees not to invent wheel again, during their daily activities .Furthermore, consultant of Knowledge management system also forcing IT and business related aspect rather than human related aspect .One of the top consultant Karl-Erik Sveiby in his paper "What is Knowledge Management?" 'First published in 1996' (2001) clearly suggests that Knowledge management got two tracks. "IT-Track" where knowledge is treated as an object and "People-Track" where knowledge is in processes .Despite these differences, we emphasize more on the IT part rather than People track.

What went wrong in Knowledge Management Systems?

Mostly KMS are designed on database, Information technologies and best practices. Due to the popularity of KMS, organizations are installing this system which codify, store, captures and shares the knowledge of individual and group within organizations. Despite the new technology used in KMSs, they fail with uncertainty because they could not fully understand the need, culture and environment of the organization. IT experts use complex system which is expensive to install and manage. But the end users do not have time to train and understand these systems due to this complexity. Another reason to KMS failure is trust of employees on information stored and the time required to retrieve this information. In most of the IT systems, the user downloads a file and finds that information is not accurate or useful. This could decrease the trust on the system that leads to its failure. In the example of Andersen Consulting (Benassi at el 2002) the first KMS was successful because workers were given freedom to manage their knowledge (Benassi at el 2002) according to their desire although they could not share document with other groups with the companies. Hence there were no rigid boundaries. Then they used second KMS which allow "peer to peer communication system"(Benassi at el 2002). This system was a success. But later it became crowded and people stopped using it. This shows that we cannot allow information to be shared with each other and there must be boundaries which allow user to have confidence in information store system.

Role of Human Resource Department in KMS

From above examples it is clear that Information Technology is not a key driving force in Knowledge Management Systems. These systems are all about people not technology and IT just has a supporting role. The second department which plays key role in organization KMS is Human Resource (HR) (Soliman & Spooner, 2000) because KMS is about business, people, environment and culture of organization. Many organization's culture is not knowledge friendly and often appraisals are judged on the basis of strict timelines, which force them to put aside knowledge sharing activities .In this situation HR department plays a significant role to improve the culture of the organization by

• Creating knowledge supported environment which allows social gathering of staff.
  
• Providing open office structure which enables frequent interaction of staff.
  
• Improving the trust with the employees and management by introducing the tolerance of error policies and involving senior management.
  

All this will provide addition motivation to staff (Soliman & Spooner, 2000). HR department encourages employees to initiate knowledge and share environment and IT provides service to capture that knowledge.

Conclusion

It is a delicate balance between the technology system and organization which must be understood to achieve successful knowledge management system. In our previous report KMS at VOSAPA Inc. (2009). We used new recruitment policy, improve reword system, brainstorming session with in organization and staff training to create the environment of trust to flourish knowledge .To support our KMS we use intranet, extranet, data mining technique to capture and codify tacit and explicit knowledge and use collaboration tools to make it available to improve tacit knowledge of our employees.

Reference List

Benassi M., Bouquet P. and Cuel R., 2002, Success and Failure Criteria for Knowledge Management Systems, Technical report, December 2002, Trento – Italy, Inform it online http://fandango.cs.unitn.it/rcuel/publication.htm (accessed march 26, 2009).

Croasdell, D.T., 2001, IT's role in organizational memory and learning, Information systems management, vol. 18, no1, pp. 8-11 (18 ref.) ISSN 1058-0530

Dr Skyrme D.J., Knowledge Management Solutions - The IT Contribution, Inform it online http://www.skyrme.com/pubs/acm0398.doc (accessed march 25, 2009).

McDermott R. 1999, why Information Technology Inspired but cannot deliver Knowledge Management, California Management Review, Vol 41 No4 summer 1999

Sveiby K. E., 2001, What is Knowledge Management? Inform it online http://www.sveiby.com/articles/KnowledgeManagement.html (accessed march 25, 2009)

Soliman F. and Spooner K., 2000, Strategies for implementing knowledge management, Journal of Knowledge Management, Volume 4, Number 4, P 337-P 345

Wilson T.D.2002, The nonsense of knowledge management, Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002, http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144, viewed on 23-march-2009