Why do organizations engage in knowledge management? The following list, compiled and categorized by Liebowitz, provides the various critical success factors that organizations strive to achieve in implementing their knowledge management initiatives:
Adaptability/Agility
Anticipate potential market opportunities for new products/services
Rapidly commercialize new innovations
Adapt quickly to unanticipated changes
Anticipate surprises and crises
Quickly adapt the organization's goals and objectives to industry or market changes
Decrease market response times
Be responsive to new market demands
Learn, decide, and adapt faster than the competition
Creativity
Innovate new products or services
Identify new business opportunities
Learn not to reinvent the wheel
Quickly access and build on experience and ideas to fuel innovation
Institutional Memory Building
Attract and retain employees
Retain expertise of personnel
Capture and share best practices
Internal Organizational Effectiveness
Coordinate the development efforts of different units
Increase the sense of belonging and community among employees in the organization
Avoid overlapping development of corporate initiatives
Streamline the organization's internal processes
Reduce redundancy of information and knowledge
Improve profits, grow revenues
Shorten product development cycles
Provide training, corporate learning
Accelerate the transfer and use of existing know-how
Improve communication and coordination across company units (i.e., reduce stovepiping)
External Organizational Effectiveness
Reach for new information about the industry and market
Increase customer satisfaction
Support e-business initiatives
Manage customer relationships
Deliver competitive intelligence
Enhance supply chain management
Improve strategic alliances
According to the "State of Knowledge Management" survey (Knowledge Management Magazine, May 2001) of 566 respondents, the following results were compiled (note: only the top 3 responses in each category are shown):
CATEGORY | TOP THREE RESPONSES |
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Reasons for Adopting KM |
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Business Uses of KM Initiative |
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Leader of the KM Initiative |
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Planned Length of Project |
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Implementation Challenges |
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Types of Software Purchased |
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Spending on IT Services for KM |
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Software Budget Allotments |
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From the survey data, it appears that companies generally understand the reasons for deploying knowledge management solutions. However, the data also indicates that the implementation challenges facing knowledge management initiatives are significant and deal mostly with people and culture-oriented issues. In fact, a mantra in the knowledge management community is that KM is mostly people, culture, and process (80 to 90 percent), with technology being only 10 to 20 percent.