Successes and Failures of Knowledge Management

Jay Liebowitz

• Editore: Morgan Kaufmann
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780128053379
• Argomento: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoria: Informationsmanagement

Successes and Failures of Knowledge Management highlights examples from across multiple industries, demonstrating where the practice has been implemented well—and not so well—so others can learn from these cases during their knowledge management journey.

Knowledge management deals with how best to leverage knowledge both internally and externally in organizations to improve decision-making and facilitate knowledge capture and sharing. It is a critical part of an organization's fabric, and can be used to increase innovation, improve organizational internal and external effectiveness, build the institutional memory, and enhance organizational agility.

Starting by establishing KM processes, measures, and metrics, the book highlights ways to be successful in knowledge management institutionalization through learning from sample mistakes and successes. Whether an organization is already implementing KM or has been reluctant to do so, the ideas presented will stimulate the application of knowledge management as part of a human capital strategy in any organization.

• Provides keen insights for knowledge management practitioners and educators
• Conveys KM lessons learned through both successes and failures
• Includes straightforward, jargon-free case studies and research developed by the leading KM researchers and practitioners across industries

Chapter 1

Parameters of knowledge management success

C.W. Holsapple^*

S.-H Hsiao^**

J.-Y. Oh^†
* Gatton College of Business, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
^** Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, MI, USA
^† Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA

Abstract

We offer a perspective on knowledge management (KM) activities that can occur in most any organization, viewing them as parameters in a functional specification of organization effectiveness. Nine such activities are examined; they are mutually exclusive, relatively comprehensive, and segmented into those that focus on direct manipulation of knowledge resources (first order) and those that are managerial influences on the conduct of knowledge management (second order). We argue that any of the activities can be adjusted in the interest of achieving greater success from an organization’s KM efforts. Together, the nine parameters form a checklist for auditing how KM is being handled in an organization, for systematically formulating new KM initiatives, for studying how to improve an organization’s practice of KM, and for avoiding blind spots in a search for avenues to KM success.

Keywords

competitiveness

knowledge management

organization effectiveness

PAIR model

SPED taxonomy

success parameters

Introduction

The effectiveness of an organization is a function of the resources that it has at its disposal, how those resources are used, and characteristics of the environment in which it finds itself. It is commonly understood that an organization has four basic kinds of resources: human, material, financial, and knowledge. How an organization’s knowledge resources are used is a focus of the knowledge management (KM) discipline, which is also concerned with related matters such as the nature of knowledge resources, the interplay between knowledge and the other organizational resources, and the impacts of environmental phenomena on an organization’s management of knowledge (and vice versa). Knowledge management success contributes to, or can even drive, an organization’s success.

Success and failure are two sides of the “effectiveness coin” and, at the edge, we have gradations where the two meet. At an organization level, two common ways of thinking about effectiveness are performance and competitiveness—each of which is a way to gauge the outputs emanating from the organization’s activities and fourfold assets. Success, then, has occurred when results of organization actions meet criteria for effectiveness, while simultaneously maintaining an alignment with its mission, vision, and values. Failure has occurred when results of organization actions do not meet criteria for effectiveness, or they fall out of alignment with the organization’s mission, vision, or values. There are, of course, degrees of success and failure, where the two blend as we assess the organization results. Notice that an output or result can be directed in an inward and/or outward direction.

Performance is concerned with measures of how well something is done relative to criteria established for effectiveness. These criteria may be established by the organization itself (eg, average customer-service representative score in excess of 4.20 on a 5-point scale), or imposed by external forces of its environment (eg, government-mandated miles-per-gallon level for a new vehicle model). From another angle, we can distinguish between performance criteria with an inward orientation (eg, production defect rate of less than 1%) and those with an outward orientation (eg, same-store sales boost of 5% compared to the prior year). Yet another angle recognizes short-run versus longer-run performance criteria (eg, quarter vs annual). No matter the source of criteria, the orientation of criteria, or the temporal scope of criteria, KM can play a role in successfully meeting them.

There are many case studies describing KM initiatives that enhanced the performance of specific organizations in terms of criteria dealing with such features as cost reduction, greater responsiveness, improved processes, new revenue streams, and higher customer loyalty; examples include investigations by Leonard-Barton (1998), Rubenstein-Montano et al. (2001), Smith and McKeen (2003), O’Dell et al. (2003), Wolford and Kwiecien (2003), Oriel (2003), and O’Leary (2008). Each such performance measure can serve as a gauge for assessing the degree of success achieved by a KM initiative.

More directly, and on a larger scale, we can ask whether superior KM can predict superior performance by a for-profit organization as a whole (Holsapple and Wu, 2008a; Zack et al., 2009). For instance, can KM be performed in ways that predict superior bottom-line numbers, such as a firm’s earnings per share and other financial ratios? Or, can it be performed in ways that predict superior market performance for the firm, such as price-to-book ratio? There is empirical evidence, based on analysis of archival data, that the answer for each question is “yes” (Holsapple and Wu, 2008b; 2011; DeFond et al., 2010; Wu and Holsapple, 2013). Now the question is: What are the parameters that deserve attention when striving for KM success or superiority? We suggest an answer to this later in the chapter.

Aside from performance, competitiveness is another way of looking at an organization’s effectiveness. Competitiveness is related to performance in the sense that higher performance is often associated with higher competitiveness. For example, a firm that has superior performance in cultivating supplier relationships may well have an edge over competing firms that are not so well attuned with the organizations that supply its needs. Note that development and maintenance of supplier relationships is a knowledge-intensive endeavor whose success contributes to competitiveness of a purchasing firm (Chen et al., 2015). In other words, how knowledge management is conducted can contribute to an organization’s competitiveness (Holsapple and Singh, 2000).

In its most fundamental sense, competitiveness is about survival. As a raw baseline, survival is an indicator of competitiveness (excluding instances where an organization’s existence is protected by some external force in its environment). But, as organizations strive to achieve the same...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Parameters of knowledge management success
• Chapter 2: Why are companies still struggling to implement knowledge management? Answers from 34 experts in the field
• Chapter 3: REAL knowledge and the James Webb Space Telescope: success and failure coexisting in NASA
• Chapter 4: Processes: Still the poor relation in the knowledge management family?
• Chapter 5: KM successes and failures: some personal reflections on major challenges
• Chapter 6: Lessons learned from nearly 200 cases of KM journeys by Hong Kong and Asian Enterprises
• Chapter 7: Knowledge loss and retention: the paradoxical role of IT
• Chapter 8: Knowledge and knowledge-related assets: design for optimal application and impact
• Chapter 9: Knowledge management success and failure: the tale of two cases
• Chapter 10: Social knowledge: organizational currencies in the new knowledge economy
• Chapter 11: Knowledge management and analytical modeling for transformational leadership profiles in a multinational company
• Chapter 12: Success and failure in improvement of knowledge delivery to customers using chatbot—result of a case study in a Polish SME
• Chapter 13: Don’t neglect the foundation: how organizations can build their knowledge architecture and processes for long-term sustainability
• Chapter 14: Semantic technologies for enhancing knowledge management systems
• Subject Index