Role of IT in supporting Knowledge Management Systems

The key to the success of any organization is knowledge that it gains over time and it is like the Holy Grail or immortal resource that would give any organization the Competitive advantage over others. The most common question that is lingering around in the market is can information technology be the solution to knowledge management issues, thought this topic is vague many scholars have tried to address this issue. Evidence in literature shows that all the knowledge management projects in the past were primarily technology driven, (Tsui 2005) and the most common technologies used were search engines, retrieval tools, classification tools, portals and content management systems. Reading from the literature one can come to a conclusion that there is a balance in successful and failed KM projects. In addition to this Eric says that technology can act like a “catalyst” for the KM project but in order to get successful results it has to be well aligned with the organizational strategy.
On the other hand Petruzzelli et al (2007) argue that knowledge can be captured either by external learning process which involves learning my imitation and learning by interaction and internal learning process which involves research & development activities. And these learning process can be addressed by collaborative learning programs which should be interactive and user-centric, (Eales 2004) he also argues that organizations invest heavily in IT to manage knowledge but they neglect about their key resource i.e. their employees who might lack basic IT skills, and it is unreasonable for any organization to expect its employees to develop the required IT skills in isolation and this can be achieved by encouraging communities of practice. Eales describes three steps which would help organizations tap intellectual assets they are; motivating users during end user skill development programs where they would be trained with basic computer skills and these trainings should highlight the way organizations want its employees to share information. Next is the user effort, the organization must understand that users make a lot of effort to learn and develop the basic computer skills so organisations must make sure that user interface for sharing information should be easy to use. And the last one is user sensitivity, users are very sensitive about the way they work or they are shy to ask for help and may also have the fear that the management might be monitoring their work. So care must be taken by organizations to deal with such issues.
To get a better picture about the role of IT in knowledge management one must have a look at the example mentioned by Merali and Davis (2001) about jasper II which is a knowledge sharing environment [KSE]. Jasper II does not store the actual information but stores the relevant meta information which is used as index to these information. It uses the “vector space model” (Merali, Davis 2001) to associate the information to individual users. And it has a share request which will send the shared information to a particular user or to a community of users. It also involves virtual social network and virtual community of practice which facilitates for better knowledge sharing.
In another scenario where the focus is on senior managers or employees who cannot share their knowledge even thought they want to share, the main demotivating factor identified by most senior employees is that the technological tools comes with a predefined data structure which is hard to match with the tacit knowledge . Research made by Liu and Fidel (2007) on a US public sector organization and these senior employees were interviewed, this organization used a backend logistics and asset management system [BES] provided by IBM and the employees working in the field were provided with a Wireless connected mobile MAXIMO. The problem here was these mobile units came with a pre-loaded set of data in the form of drop downs and the worst part was there were no provisions made to add the new problems faced and the solution to the same. So in the process the solutions remained tacit in the mind of employees. So this was the downside of technology in the process of knowledge creation.
So after reviewing the literature and some case studies it is clear that technology is one of the key aspects of managing the knowledge with a caution that the focus of IT tools should be on its key users.

References:
• Antonio M. Petruzzelli, Vito Albino and Nunzia Carbonara., 2007, Technology districts: proximity and knowledge access, Journal of Knowledge management Vol. 11 No. 5, pp. 98-114.

• Eric Tsui, 2005, the role of IT in KM, Journal of Knowledge management, Vol. 9 NO. 1, pp. 3-6.

• Jim R. T. Eales, A Knowledge Management Approach to User Support, 2004, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 53, pp 33-38.

• Shuhua Liu, Raya Fidel., 2007, Managing Aging Workforce: Filling the Gap Between
What We Know and What Is in the System, ICEGOV '07, pp 121-128.

• Yasmin Merali and John Davies., 2001, Knowledge Capture and Utilization in Virtual Communities, International Conference on Knowledge Capture, ACM, pp 92-99.