Knowledge Management Systems

Agnes BuiMIS 65012/01/2004

Definition

• Intranets are powerful knowledge management systems.  Organizations develop intranets to be used only within the company and its employees.  Its purpose is organizational learning.  It is a communication medium to share individuals learning, insights, or experience with the rest of the organization.

• www.iorg.com/papers/knowledge.htm

Advantages of KMS

• Many lawyers have taken advantage of the knowledge management system.  Lawyers use email as a communication tool for clients and to contact other cousels to work on their cases.  With so many emails coming in and out each day lawyers need to find a way to organize emails accordingly.  A product called KnowledgeMail by Tacit Knowledge Management Systems, Inc. has developed an approach to help lawyers compile their emails and make it available to other users in order to share information. Although this product seems very promising, no law firms has yet to implement this new system.

• Jones, Ashby. "On the E-mail Trail", American Lawyer, Sept 2002 v24 i9 pS27(1), 2002.

Advantages continued

• To get the most value of a knowledge management system, companies need to maintain a foundation system that can be shared throughout the company.  It improves customer service by increasing response times, enhances employee retention, and eliminate redundant or unnecssary procesesses when searching for solutions or information.  When the information is easily accessible it improves employee productivity.  To do so, companies implement a centralized database system.  This system is used as a tool and should be constantly updated for good business practice.

• www.cio.com/research/knowledge/edit/kmabcs.htm#benefits

Disadvantages

• I’ve read many articles stating why knowledge management systems will benefit a company. But we also need to learn about the downside of this type of system. This article explains why knowledge management systems fail and how risk of such failures may be minimized. Because these systems define inputs as data or information they do not represent inputs from motivation, creativity, or even innovation. Also this article has a table that lists many enablers and constraints of KMS. The lists include challenges that relate to recent evolution in business and technology strategy, organizational control, information sharing culture, knowledge representation, organizational structure, managerial command, and economic returns.

• http://www.brint.org/WhyKMSFail.htm

Purpose of KMS

• Effective management of knowledge focuses on solutions that encompass the entire system: organization, people and technology. Computers and communications systems are good at capturing, transforming and distributing highly structured knowledge that changes rapidly. Some companies are using analysis, planning and computer supported work systems to radically improve decision making, resource allocation, management systems, access, and promulgate process know-how and overall performance as a way to develop core strategic competencies. 

• http://www.mccombts.utexas.edu/kmananswers.htm#howdoes

Management Goals

• Here is a listing of corporate attitudes: 1)Management involvement is high and has increased over the past three years (51% of organizations indicate the role of the board has increased). 2) Companies are missing out on key business opportunities by failing to exploit knowledge effectively (6% of revenue is being lost through failure to exploit knowledge effectively). 3) The cost of KM is low and has proved to be an investment with a positive return. 4) KM is applied in all business areas, with a core in operations. 5) KM initiatives are shifting focus from internal to external and will increasingly be embedded in the daily workflow. 6) Companies underestimate the cultural change needed to implement KM through busy employees. 7) Implementation is the key challenge ahead for further successful deployment of knowledge management.

• http://www.infoconomy.com/pages/information-age/group86305.adp

Management Tools

• In this ITworld.com article David Essex, reports that: "Most practitioners agree that Knowledge Management is about getting the right information to the right people when they need it. Knowledge Management captures, stores, and distributes expertise throughout an organization. It encourages people to share what they've learned."

• In order to get employees to pass knowledge incentives should be implemented as a way of rewarding the employee to share their knowledge.

• http://www.pcd-innovations.com/knowledge_management_tools.htm

KMS Perspectives

• This article describes two perspectives of the knowledge management system. 

• Knowledge can be viewed as "Knowledge = Object" which relies upon concepts from "Information Theory" in the understanding of knowledge. These researchers and practitioners are normally involved in the construction of information management systems, AI, reengineering, etc. This group builds knowledge systems, while the next group changes the way we use knowledge, which ultimately changes human behavior.

• Knowledge can be viewed as "Knowledge = Process" which relies upon the concepts from philosophy, psychology, and sociology. These researchers and practitioners are normally involved in education, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc. and are primarily involved in assessing, changing and improving human individual skills and behavior.

• http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/history/knowledge.html

Document Management

• Document management refers to the management of information in electronic and paper form, while knowledge management means technology that provides better control of networks through control over information and the way they are handled over complex networks. These types of management will be converging making managing knowlege simpler.  One example of such convergence is Open Text, a document management system vendor which has reaped more success with Livelink Intranet, a knowledge management tool that incorporates document management, workflow, search, project management and workgroup capabilities.

• Brooks, Andrew.  Managing Documents is Managing Knowledge, Computing Canada,   Mar 2, 1998, v24 n8 p31.

Explicit Knowledge

• Here is a listing i found dealing with KMS primarily with explicit knowledge.

• Intranets  Document Management Systems  Information Retrieval Engines  Relational and Object Databases  Electronic Publishing Systems  Groupware and Workflow Systems  Push Technologies and Agents  Help-Desk Applications  Brainstorming Applications  Data Warehousing and Data Mining Tools  Technologies that should be included knowledge management 

• http://www.moderas.ac.ir/elearnning/mnaderi/Genetic%20/engineering%20course%2011/Pages/knowledge_management.htm

Capturing Knowledge

• Some wireless devises, PDA's and or tablets can get workers to put down the information they use to perform their every day task.

• Incentives when other workers share their knowledge by training others.

• Another great way is implementing a corporate skills register so that colleagues can locate/discover those with whom to collaborate. Because we all like to advertise our capabilities!

• http://knowledgemanagement.ittoolbox.com/documents/document.asp?i=270

Benefits of KMS

• 1) Knowledge Capturing and ExtractionAutomation of information extraction from ecommerce applications and e-business applications.

• 2) Knowledge Representation and OrganizationData warehouse technology stores and organizes vast amount of data for easy retrieval and data mining.

• 3) Knowledge Sharing and Decision Support Decision Support Systems enhances the natural process of decision making by generating and evaluating many options.

• http://ebusiness.insightin.com/knowledge_management/knowledge_management_benefits.html