The debate about the role of information technology in knowledge management has been lively and ongoing. Great claims have been made by KM theorists about the use of information technology in KM. Dash in 1988 stated that "successful KM requires a skilful blend of people, business processes and IT".
A study at American Productivity and Quality Centre revealed that implementation of KMS requires setting up a suitable IT infrastructure. Cole-Gomolski states that the idea behind KM is to stockpile worker’s knowledge and make it accessible to others via a searchable application. With this we are sure of one thing that KM does require information technology. But till what extent it is required and how important IT is in KM?
The sphere of knowledge management revolves around three important aspect People, Process and Technology. The ultimate purpose of implementing a KMS is to benefit/support the organization in whichever ways possible. People being the end users are the ones responsible for the attainment of this purpose. Without people it would have never been possible. You can have sophisticated infrastructure and technology but without the interference of human it’s just useless. But some people in a CoP go out of the limb and say that process is more important than people. Their reason in saying so is that in an organizational context the other two can change but only through a deliberate and established process the objectives of KM can be achieved. Even their part is right to an extent; say that we have good people and a decent technology and are poor in the process. The objectives won’t be achieved. Others say that good People overcome bad process and technology. But isn’t it hard to have a lot of good people in one place. Whereas technology can only automate the process, speed it up and get decisions quickly. But then recently why there has been so much emphasis on technology. We will take a small example of Facebook website to understand this, at Facebook all the people come together and share their views. The process is by joining a CoP within Facebook or sharing what they are currently doing. But would that be possible without the technology which is the Facebook itself.
Despite the differences Harris states that KM can be defined as a set of practices allowing organizations to create, refine, store, and share knowledge, often through information communication technology (ICT). One of the reasons why KM system fails is that they are not effectively used by the people. And why they are not used is that they do not satisfy the needs of the people. That means the process and the technology is not effective.
So do the three spheres of knowledge management play an equal part in the successful implementation of a KMS? Well to me it depends. They are actually a shifting set of variables where emphasis is giving to a specific one but all three are required for the KMS to work. It depends on what you are trying to achieve and how big is your organization. If the organization is large then definitely a good technology is required as scalability comes into picture. Here more emphasis will be given on getting a good technology as people and process won’t be an issue. Whereas in some other case technology is easy available and people and process are given more emphasis. While in the case of Social Software (Web 2.0) all three are given equal importance as all three are required for its successful working.
Nirmala Palaniappan, KM head at Oracle have very rightly compared the people, process and technology sphere of knowledge management to Body, Mind and Soul. Soul is the people; mind becomes the process and body the technology. The knowledge is the blood which flows and keeps the system working.
My personal experience was a little bit different as we didn’t have any technology for knowledge management but still we practised knowledge management. I was working for a very small search engine marketing firm where what we did was market products/services on Google, Yahoo and MSN. How we practised knowledge management was through three different get together of one hour each every week. First was a presentation or a book review. Here what we had to do was present on a recent happening or review a recent book. Second was “Know Your Client”. In this we had to present everything about the client we were handling, how we researched the client, their competitors and how we made our online campaign. Each and every detail of how we handled the client was presented to others in this. The last thing was a Quiz. This was like any other quiz. Every week we had a different topic. End of every get together was a small discussion related to advertising where we tried to fit online advertising to that particular topic of the get together.
References:
Cole-Gomolski, 1997, “Users loather to share their know how”, Computerworld
Dash, J., 1998, ‘Turning technology into TechKnowledge’ Software Magazine
K. Harris and M. Fleming and R. Hunter and B. Rosser and A. Cushman, The Knowledge Management Scenario: Trends and Directions for 1998-2003, Gardner Group 1998.
Nirmala Palaniappan, Paper on KM at the SEPG International Conference - 2002
