May the force be with you The force to implement KM organiza

In a business-world where focus switch from industrial to intellectual assets, companies try to adapt to the new order. To be able to do so knowledge intensive companies started to adapt a new strategy, Knowledge Management (KM). Almost half of the respond

May the force be with you

The force to implement KM organizational wide

Tomas Lindroth

Tomas@laboratorium.htu.se

Laboratorium for Interaction Technology

Department of Economy and Computer Science

University of Trollhättan/Uddevalla, Sweden

Abstract

In a business-world where focus switch from industrial to intellectual assets,

companies try to adapt to the new order. To be able to do so knowledge

intensive companies started to adapt a new strategy, Knowledge Management(KM). Almost half of the respondents on a KM report said to have KM initiativein place. Some of these initiatives have been successful, but many have been

failures. This article aims to show how crucial it is to anchor a KM initiative topersons in the organ ization with enough time, power and knowledge to

address the company as a whole. Particularly, the planning process is

analyzed. These results are based on a three month field study in an US-basedIT consulting company during the initial face of a KM initiative. The purposeof the KM initiative in this US company was to address the problem with

growing amount of unstructured information and the organizations exceptionalgrowth.

Keywords: Knowledge management, Organization management

1. Introduction

In the 1990:s the western world has more and more moved from the traditional industry wheremachines, real-estate and products has been seemed as the most valuable assets towards amore soft and human asset, knowledge. Knowledge is widely acknowledged by businessleaders as one of the most important assets of an organization (KPMG, 1998). When tangibleassets as computers and other machines is seen as a secondary source of value, new way ofthinking is required to adopt the organization to the new order. In the industrial economy,companies developed efficient processes and technologies to produce inexpensive componentsand products to meet the open market needs. Their processes were developed under certainassumptions and conditions of a stable market and a demand for a certain product for a certaintime. When these assumptions no longer are true and when an ever-changing environmentsurrounds the business, these processes are no longer valid (Alavi, 1998). Organizations haveinvested a lot of money to develop these processes and are not willing to drop them easily. Theprocess becomes a burden instead of help. A result of this might be that organizations lack thepower to react on new markets and even worse, lack of knowledge to see markets dying(Dahlbom, 1998).

The answer to this persified market has been a more adhocrative way to work. Aproject based environment where subject matter experts and developers form different projectProceedings of IRIS 23. Laboratorium for Interaction Technology, University of Trollhättan Uddevalla, 2000.L. Svensson, U. Snis, C. Sørensen, H. Fägerlind, T. Lindroth, M. Magnusson, C. Östlund (eds.)

In a business-world where focus switch from industrial to intellectual assets, companies try to adapt to the new order. To be able to do so knowledge intensive companies started to adapt a new strategy, Knowledge Management (KM). Almost half of the respond

groups depending on what type of knowledge the task requires. Another reaction to the

unstable environment is of course flatter organizational structure where decisions are made closeto the situation they will affect. Today we can see clear result of these changes in leadingcompanies. Organizations at the top are the ones that have been able to react to new

technologies and markets (Dahlbom, 1998). When more and more organizations adopt thisstrategy of flat organizations and project based work groups new methods are developed tostay at the top. Organizations ask themselves what the next “thing” will be. The “thing” thatmakes their organization stay ahead of the competitors. The answer to this question has, underthe last year of this millennium, become clear.

The ability to know what you already know and the ability to reuse this knowledge sothat you don’t spend time reinventing the wheel or to put it in two words: Knowledge

Management (KM). KM is expressed in different ways. A distinction between document andinformation management that tries to make routine work more efficient is that KM tries to makeinnovation and knowledge creation efficient (Braa et. al.).

My main goal with the three month participating observations article is to report from anKM initiative and analyze the initiative from a organizational and knowledge perspective. Bylearning from specific field studies we get to know actual circumstances of KM initiatives in anorganizational setting. Especially the planning face is of interest when I try to identify and analyzeobstacles related to KM. The reason for the KM initiative in this US based company was dueto a growing amount of unstructured information repositories and that the company had anexeptionel growth both by accusisions and organic, national as well as international.

In the upcoming part (2) I will describe the theoretical framework used to exemplify thenature of knowledge and knowledge creation. Part 3 talks about the research approach andoutlines the case. In part 4 I discuss the findings of the paper and in part 5 we have theconclusion!

2. Framework

Knowledge Management is a persified field of different theories, though there is no widelyaccepted ones. I will outline Alavis and Nonakas theories about information, knowledge andorganizations and how they relate to each other. With this I intend to show how extensive thefiel …… 此处隐藏：34583字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……