Knowledge Management Systems - How To Make Them Successful

Knowledge Management is now a crucial issue in companies: Create, capitalize and share its Knowledge Capital is a need of any innovative organization. In an increasingly competitive world a firm's only enduring source of advantage is its knowledge - the knowledge that gets built into structures and systems. The reality is that firms have been managing their knowledge since dawn of time.

The Knowledge Management is a strategic vision, that can potentially develop managers on their Corporate Knowledge, make them define global objectives in order to optimize that resource. Those objectives are always structured by three key issues: Capitalize (“to know where you are and you come from to better know where you go”), Share (“switch from individual to collective intelligence”), Create (“create,innovate to survive). We need to build a knowledge management system that can provides ways to create and search tacit information, data and documents stored. Knowledge is a “material” elaborated by people for people, it is tightly related to culture, to personal features.

Potential reasons for the KMS system failures

• People in the organization are feeling it as intellectual property and limiting the information or passing along in a cryptic manner that is not easily consumed by other people
• Tacit knowledge in the organization which supplements explicit knowledge was not captured - this is clearly evident as one partner left the firm he took way clients as well and there may be no information about these clients
• There is no incentive to share the information as the contributions are coming through anonymous channels - This also can impact the content and quality which is key for a successful KMS
• KMS is not used regularly - probably there may not be easy ways to reach the content - missing or not properly created indexes or search features

Making KMS work in your organization -

• Yellow pages - Which provides information on who has expertise in what competencies or industry sectors - "Do we know who is a good resource to ask?"
• Firm Repository - highly sophisticated indexed system that provides libraries of information about their proprietory methodologies, clients. previous engagements. This is the essentially repositories of codified knowledge. This do not capture the tacit knowledge or expertise of leading partners, but they provide a form of collective memory that consultants can tap into quickly and efficiently
• Map the stocks of knowledge and use them to encourage sharing of  best practice - Identify key sources of information in the company
• Raise the visibility of knowledge management activities
• Use incentives to institutionalise new knowledge sharing activities - this will reduce the anonymous posts in the KMS - typically a section of the annual performance review in which an individual's contribution to the company's knowledge is recorded and evaluated.
• Internal Wikipedia - This can help define acronyms or terms used in the organization or at client places which will help understand and cryptic material shared. Also this provides ability for consultants to update the information real time if any part of it becomes obsolete
• Social Network Knowledge Sharing - the groups of people who have lunch together in the same city or over the virtual live meetings to encourage information sharing during sessions every month or quarterly as well as encouraging consultants to participate. Create a directory to store these videos for future views and mention the links or URLs in all the sessions to penetrate the availability of information
• Protect information - Information need to be protected and limit the access to the consultants of the firm

Making knowledge management effective in the long term requires a fundamental shift in the behavior of employees. The senior leadership team or partners have an important role to play in this process, by raising the visibility of knowledge management and by demonstrating its importance.