•Three
key critical issues:
1.Access
issues :
What political issues govern Internet information seeking? What are some of the
factors hindering employees from accessing critical knowledge within their
organizations?
2.Organizational
issues :
What is the political context of the organization, and how does this context
affect KM? How can a KM-friendly culture be encouraged? How can one provide
incentives for knowledge sharing?
3.Valuing
Issues :
What is the impact of a shift from resource-based assets to knowledge-based
assets? How can knowledge assets be valued?
Political Issues Regarding
Internet Search Engine
•Information
overload issues :
the number of hits that are returned for a given search term is incredible and
yet not particularly useful.
•Search
engines systematically exclude (in some cases by design and in other
cases accidentally) certain sites and certain types of sites in favor of
others, systematically giving prominence to some at the expense of others.
•Search
engines are only partially effective at finding things and a
great deal of the web remains “hidden”.
The Politics of Organizational Context and Culture
•KM
must address not only the information itself, but also the business practices
and processes that generate the information.
•The
organizational context will thus affect KM implementation, and the evaluation
of how successful this implementation was.
•Five
models of information politics can be used to characterize the politics
of organizational context and culture (Klein, 1999; Davenport, Eccles and Prusak,
1992).
Five models of information politics
Shift to Knowledge-Based Assets
–Knowledge
assets are a source of competitive advantage for firms that possess them. Yet the way the possession
of knowledge translates into a competitive
advantage
is not well understood.
–Of
course, obtaining
this advantage does not happen automatically—a
firm has to know how to extract value from
knowledge
assets. There are also definite costs incurred in managing knowledge assets.
In
general, most approaches concur that there are three different types of
intellectual capital (IC) to be considered:
1.Human
Capital. The
ability of individuals and teams to apply solutions to customer needs,
competencies, mind-sets.
2.Organizational
Capital. The
codified knowledge, culture, values, norms.
3.Customer
Capital. The
strengths of customer relationships, superior customer-perceived value and
customized solutions.
Intellectual Property Issues
How to Provide Incentives for Knowledge Sharing
One
common and useful taxonomy developed by Callahan (2004) divides incentives into
three broad classes :
1.Remunerative
incentives (or
financial incentives) are said to exist where an agent can expect some form of
material reward-especially money in exchange for acting in a particular way.
2.Moral
incentives are
said to exist where a particular choice is widely regarded as the right thing
to do, or as particularly admirable, or where the failure to act in a certain
way is condemned as indecent.
3.Coercive
incentives are
said to exist where a person can expect that the failure to act in a particular
way will result in physical force being used against him or her by others in
the community-for example, by punishment, imprisonment, firing or confiscating
or destroying their possessions.
Traditional incentives, such as pay
bonuses, are not always enough to change
behavior. Sevens (2000) surveyed seven organizations about their efforts
to encourage knowledge sharing.
1.Hire
people who are willing to encourage knowledge sharing from the beginning and to
catalyze the necessary cultural
change.
2.Develop
trust
3.Vary
motivations by providing different types of incentives at different levels
within the organization in order to
better reward executives, department heads and individuals.
4.
Reorganize for sharing to leverage the fact that people naturally share
knowledge with others in their own team and/or community of practice.
5.Encourage support, and sustain communities to promote
the sharing of expertise, skills, technical knowledge, or even just
professional interest in a particular subject matter.
6.Develop
leaders and role models, for even a small group of KM enthusiasts within a
company can be a powerful catalyst for knowledge sharing.
Future Challenges for KM
•Before
KM, the way in which people shared knowledge was person-to-person, just-in-time, and
in the context of solving a specific business problem.
•With
the increasingly widespread adoption of KM, knowledge management processes such
as knowledge creation/capture, knowledge sharing/dissemination and knowledge
acquisition/application have begun to form part and parcel of how organizations
conduct their core business and how knowledge workers conduct their work
activities in an efficient and effective manner
A Postmodern KM
•Weinberger
(2001) introduced the term postmodern KM to distinguish it from traditional KM, which he views as
having traditionally suffered from the
belief
that we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code.
The idea was that we should capture and
organize bits of “knowledge” in central databases.
•Postmodern
KM operates within and on the basis of existing
behavior patterns, mining conversation
streams
and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already
manipulate. It fosters human intelligence
and interaction rather than trying to replace them.
Some
recommendations:
1.Improving
access to information and knowledge
2.Promoting
knowledge sharing through learning circles and vertical/horizontal coalitions,
peer-to-peer technology, CoP, infomediaries,
help desks, e-learning and better interaction/mutual learning with target
groups.
3.Networking
international and regional cooperation
4.Other
issues include the development of local content in local languages and
dissemination channels besides Internet, capacity building, and QC standard.
5.Avoid
weak incentives.
