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Unit 13: Knowledge Management

There is a lot of knowledge in an enterprise that can be used to organize new knowledge that is Notes
coming in. People understand new knowledge in terms of what they already know. A smart KM
system must know a lot of about an industry and a particular enterprise before it starts up. This
is hard but by no means impossible. And it is the future of software – namely software that
really knows a great deal about your business.
Simply put, any business could use someone who knew all about every job, and every person
doing that job and every experience the company had had in the past and what its goals and plans
were at the moment and could use all that knowledge to know what to do with new information
it has just received. That senior citizen of the company used to exist, and he can exist again. Only
this time he will be a computer equipped with a very new kind of KM system one that is not about
document retrieval but about delivering just in time advice to those who need it.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
12. A ................... memory is one that can change its own organization when new experiences
demand it.

13. If we choose to give up generalizability, then we can use a ................... based organization
for a KM system.

13.5 Success in KM Processes

A KM process is put in place to optimize knowledge use and evolution in an enterprise.
It concerns in crucial manner knowledge actors: experts, specialists, competent people without
whom the knowledge capital would not have added value. As it is an element of strategic
management, management must be strongly implicated to many hierarchical levels. Here resides
both strength and weakness Knowledge Management of: the cohabitation of two fundamental
networks: the knowledge network and the power network. It is why a KM project doesn’t look
like a classic project, because two poles of decision, completely different, must cohabit to construct
a common system: a Knowledge Management system.
The setting up of a Knowledge Management in an enterprise is therefore delicate, and a certain
number of unusual factors for a classic project must be taken in account. We enumerate some of
them here.

13.5.1 Water Lily Strategy

One key changes factor in a Knowledge Management project is the strategy of project deployment.
There is a radical change compared to a classic project.
Let’s take the example of an Information System project. The project deployment strategy is
composed by a needs analysis, a specification and a roadmap that foresees a progressive and
linear implementation, integrating progressively the users, though, in most of cases, a training
program. One now knows advantages and inconveniences of this project deployment type:
more mistakes are upstream the process, more they are costly; risks of failure near the end of the
process are far from being negligible, early endings are not exceptional, etc.
Project management is centralized in general by dedicated professional in information systems,
it is linear (for example, the cost of realization of the last half is the half of the total cost), it is
planned, users are implied in a sporadic manner (sometimes in beginning of project, and in the
end for training) etc. Those types of “roadmap strategies” for a Knowledge Management strategy
(except if, of course, it is reduced to an information system project) are revealed to be often a
failure. It is too linear and don’t take enough in account incentive factors.

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