Rapid Appraisal of Organizational Knowledge Management Needs: the case of an Information Technology Services Company MOT113

Knowledge Management (KM) encompasses a broad and heterogeneous domain of business practices, with roots in management of human resources, information, information technology, strategy, and accounting. Although its core concepts are not difficult to understand, KM is notoriously challenging to put into practice because it deals in intangibles that are difficult to observe, measure, and evaluate. Its processes cut across functional organizational boundaries, and the technologies that support it are new and complex. Furthermore, few KM reference management practices have been described and assessed. Consequently, even when they already practice some forms of knowledge management, organizations that are undertaking KM initiatives usually face a steep learning curve. Many prescriptive approaches and diagnostic tools have appeared in the literature to guide organizations’ KM initiatives, frequently offering comprehensive road maps to KM implementation. However, the organizational-cultural challenges of knowledge management practice are so complex that organizational capability to manage knowledge management must be explicitly fostered. This especially requires a shared experience in sensemaking among organizational members regarding the organization’s knowledge management priorities. The present paper describes such an experience, based on the technique of rapid appraisal that is frequently used in natural resource planning, rural development, and healthcare planning. Using elements of Bukowitz and Williams’ (1999) KM diagnostic questionnaire, about twenty-five middle-management participants in one of a series of knowledge management courses in an information technology services company (“Infotech”) were asked to appraise their organization’s KM processes and propose ways to remedy shortcomings and share good practices. This paper describes the results and interprets them in terms of Terra’s (2001) seven organizational vectors of knowledge management: organizational culture and values, information systems, management of human resources, organizational structure and roles, measuring results, learning from the environment, and senior management vision and strategy. The profile that emerges from this diagnosis portrays a firm that has mastered the formal technology tools, discourse, and some of the organizational features and processes of KM but has not developed an internal culture or many internal business processes necessary to sustain KM capability or demonstrably derive benefits from it. Infotech’s KM strengths lie in the quality of its IT system, the explicitness of senior management’s commitment to KM, the firm’s learning-oriented interactions with customers and suppliers, its willingness to retrain rather than replace workers, and its ability to extract lessons from success and failure. Its weaknesses lie in its administrative rigidities, its excessively formal and hierarchical culture, its inability to link KM processes to strategic outcomes such as knowledge acquisition or revenue generation, its lack of an incentive system for knowledge sharing, and the negative consequences of failure. Our rapid appraisal of Infotech points to the need to develop initiatives to institute cultural change within the organization, to improve strategic planning and investment processes and asset valuation metrics, and to amplify internal knowledge transfer processes, including those relating to knowledge management practices. Rapid Appraisal of Organizational Knowledge Management Needs International Association for the Management of Technology (IAMOT 2002), Miami