Challenges in KM

Introduction

Implementing KM within an organization has its challenges as do all organizational level initiatives. Here we will be going through some of the challenges that could be encountered whilst implementing a KM within your organization.

Challenges

Culture

• changing the organization's view of sharing knowledge

• adopting a sharing instead of hoarding culture. Knowledge Hoarders relates to individuals that do not feel the need to contribute to the knowledge repository and/or in general do not share knowledge.

Costs & Measuring Knowledge

• having dedicated Knowledge Journalists or Chief Knowledge Officers with the necessary supporting structure/team will incur additional costs to the organization who may deem KM initiatives as low priority or something that just happens.

• Opportunity costs incurred i.e. experts will need to share their tacit knowledge and experts are those individuals that are critical to the organization's goals. By taking time away from their projects to perform KM activities, this would mean that their deliverables will be pushed out.

• There is a difficulty in measuring knowledge within the organization especially tacit knowledge

• Unfortunately, KM is an area in which companies are often reluctant to invest, because it can be expensive to implement properly, and it is extremely difficult to determine a specific ROI (which are often unquantifiable).

Information overload

• There is a vast amount of information available today, creating a huge volume of information that can be sourced from the knowledge reservoirs. This has resulted in information overload where many organizations are unable to sift through the volume of content, find valuable knowledge and manage the knowledge collected.

• This could be stated as finding the correct needle in a stack of needles.

Matching User Needs and Content

• User needs should be well understood in order for the correct content to be sourced and made available for access.

• KM and Information Systems diverge here in the sense that, content must be provided in the explicit format as well as in the tactic format e.g. directing a user to the correct SME to obtain knowledge.

• The term “cybrarian” is sometimes used to describe the new knowledge professional role. The key tasks are to organize knowledge content; maintain timelines, completeness, and accuracy; profile users’ information needs; access/navigate/filter voluminous content to respond effectively to users’ needs; and help train users with new knowledge repository technologies (information literacy)

Storing the wrong type of information

• There is a tendency toward warehousing of all knowledge, which should not be the focus of KM. The point of the exercise is not to post everything on the company intranet.

• Experience (Tacit knowledge) must be generalized so that it becomes applicable to a wider range of audience especially for organizational consumption.

Lack of Incentive

• Practice has proven that knowledge sharing does not succeed without any heavy direct pay-per-contribution schemes; nor does it succeed with equally onerous processes or punish-the-withholders mentality.

• To facilitate knowledge sharing successfully, it should be of benefit to both the organization and the individuals.

No Consensus on defining KM

• As discussed in Defining KM, there are many views on the definition of KM.

• With multiple definitions and understanding of KM, this leads to varying expectations of KM and could have widely different goals, scope, and success criteria.

  • For some knowledge is information vs for others knowledge is inclusive of concepts such as experience, know-how, know-what, understanding, values, etc.

• The definition of KM may not be a specific challenge or failure when it comes to implementation, however, it is widely recognized as an issue which affects every study, discussion and/or recommendation within KM

• One could argue that KM failures is misleading if the goal of the KM initiative was to just dump data onto a sharepoint and the organization met that criteria then it would be successful internally, but not according to others where KM structures needed to be put in place to ensure the KM lifecycle can occur.

• Therefore, whenever you deal with KM in your organization, make sure everyone is on the same page as to what KM is and hopes to achieve.