Managing knowledge through everyday activities

Ever since man first shared the knowledge of how to make fire with his fellow human beings, the management of knowledge has been employed by masters training their apprentices and by parents teaching their children. Managing knowledge is hence no new phenomenon. In recent years, however, the importance of knowledge in business and industry has risen dramatically, and shifted from being one resource amongst many to becoming the primary resource. Being able to effectively manage this resource has thus received the attention of many chief executives and Knowledge Management (KM) as a concept has become a vividly debated topic. Although knowing is a profoundly human ability, and acknowledging that an organization’s ability to apply its knowledge depends heavily on social factors, many commentators have argued that information technology (IT) can have a positive influence on an organization’s KM processes. Attempts have been made to design and apply many sorts of IT artefacts for creating, storing, transferring, and applying knowledge, and software vendors offer a multitude of KM systems (KMS). Practical results from KMS research, however, suggest that these systems often fail when implemented in the everyday practice of modern organizations. One possible explanation for the under-utilization that I have come across in my research is the imbalance between the additional workload required by the organizational members and accuracy and timeliness of the content needed for the KMS to be attractive (see Lindgren and Stenmark, 2002). This imbalance leads to a maintenance problem, which in turn results in systems that are of little use. Although KMS maintenance has been acknowledged as an important research issue, it remains a serious practical problem for organizations and there is little advice to be found in the literature. However, as indicated in my recent research, there are ways forward (see Stenmark & Lindgren, 2004). It is widely recognized that contributions from all organizational members are an important prerequisite for successful KMS (see e.g. Hahn and Subramani, 2000). Concurring with this, I argue that KMS must be designed so that the technology itself actively affords user participation. Drawing upon experiences from my work with three KMS implementations at Volvo in Sweden and lessons learned from the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) in the 1980s, I present general design principles describing how KMS can be integrated with everyday work to leverage user practices. The objective is to demonstrate how KMS can be designed to better support knowledge application in organizational knowledge work processes and at the same time avoid the maintenance problem mentioned above.