Future Challenges for KM

•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.