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Exploring knowledge management software implementation from a knowing-in-practice perspective

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Abstract

This paper draws attention to a major issue of Knowledge Management (KM) technology implementation: potential sources of incongruence between KM software and the adopting organization. Using the case of a global consultancy firm, the paper explains KM software-organization incongruences as the consequence of differences between organizational and KM software developer’s knowledge work context and practice. Such differences reflect the differing ‘situated’ knowledge work practices that KM software developers and adopting organizations deliberately acquire and evolve over time. Theoretically, this paper gives a more comprehensive account of how knowledge work practices emerged and were then embedded into the software or the organization. Practically, this study would help make organizations more aware of the factors influencing KM software adoption and implementation, particularly in the case of large firms that are characterized by high-value, text-based content for decision-making such as professional service, R&D, and healthcare organizations.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we use the word ‘technology’, ‘software’ and ‘portal’ interchangeably.

  2. Given the context of using an IS in an organization, normative structures represent the rules imposed by an institutional context or environment (which users must abide or follow) while authoritative structures refer to the norms and standards specified by designers. Additionally, interpretive structures denote users’ shared belief of how the work should be performed by using an IS to achieve their goals or objectives. Social structures also mean some forms of allocative ‘resources’ available for such rules, standards, norms and beliefs to be adopted and exercised (Orlikowski 2002, 2000).

  3. Their propositions and intentions for instance involve making a number of choices about what pages to include and exclude in the reference database, and how to sort and rank such pages in the database. For more information about how Google search engine works and how users can even manipulate such page ranks for their own interests, please access: https://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory.

  4. This is an industry term meaning without modifications.

  5. Practice is defined as the “organization’s routine use of knowledge and often has a tacit component, embedded partly in individual skills and party in collaborative social arrangements” (Szulanski 1996: 28). Generally, organizations, both software vendors and adopters alike, are attempting to adopt new managerial ideologies and practices in order to retain legitimacy within their particular field, rather than simply to improve efficiency (Meyer and Rowan 1997).

  6. The company name has been disguised to respect confidentiality.

  7. Information about the KM group can be found in Table 1.

  8. The KM group has 20 members who are also senior consultants in their service sectors.

  9. Organizational metadata describes the name of the project bid and document, content type, author, service sector, publishing and modifying time, priority, keywords, etc. for effective classification and archiving.

  10. There are two service teams: one in Bangalore, India and the other in the Philippines. These teams designed and developed archiving solutions for content and ‘cradle to grave’ content management lifecycles. In 2008, they were responsible for over 1.2 million documents held within PelicanAce’s group-wide workspaces environments and over 3300 project summaries collected and published in the group knowledge repository.

  11. ‘Active’ means that they spend 100 % of their time on current or recently completed projects.

  12. A super-user is a well-known or very experienced expert in a particular service sector who can provide advice to help resolve problems facing the project.

  13. To receive approval, a report justifying adding the super-user to the project has to be filed to the corporate administrators. It normally took at least 3 working days to know the decision.

  14. Metadata helps to identify a particular workspace among hundreds of workspaces operated by teams throughout the world by including the title (URL) of the workspace, the name of the business group owning it, owning operation and owning business, active status, languages, keywords and sub-types, default reader group, and the default site collection admin group.

  15. These two IT professionals are also member of the CIO office (See Table 1). They neither opposed the views of central administrators, nor supported local administrators.

  16. The KM group surveyed and received feedback from over 35 local administrators (out of 52 local administrators in total) in three key areas: The Nordic countries, the Middle East, and the central Europe (the UK, Germany and France).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management & Information Systems, College of Business, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    Khuong Le-Nguyen

  2. School of Management, Royal Holloway College, University of London, London, UK

    Romano Dyerson & G. Harindranath

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  1. Khuong Le-Nguyen
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  3. G. Harindranath
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Correspondence to Khuong Le-Nguyen.

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Le-Nguyen, K., Dyerson, R. & Harindranath, G. Exploring knowledge management software implementation from a knowing-in-practice perspective. Inf Syst Front 20, 1117–1133 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-016-9713-3

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