Article 2: Knowledge Management System (KMS)

2.1. Introduction:

In the growing competitive world, every organization has responsibility to improve or to share the individual’s knowledge within the organization. But managing and maintaining knowledge within an organization is a very challenging process. Application of the KMS in an organization plays a major role to survive in the competitive world to store, combine and share the knowledge. Therefore the major challenge of Knowledge Management System is the capability of organizations to be flexible and respond more quickly to the changing market conditions and the ability to be more innovative as well as improving decision making and productivity (Stata, 1997; Harris, 1996). The challenge of managing knowledge is more depend on the capture and combination of knowledge (Grant, 1996; Davenport, 1997a). The effective Knowledge Management System will be support the creation and dissemination of knowledge within the organization members, (O’Brien, 22). Therefore, individual tacit knowledge will be captured, stored and distributed in a systematical way for the use of organization members in the future usage to improve the productivity of organizations growth, (Mc Lure, 20; Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Cody et al, 2002; Liao, 2003; Feng et al, 2004).

The knowledge will be managed with the support of IT, therefore the KMS is like a specific information systems, (Alavi and Leidner 2001) that mainly focus on organizational knowledge resources and process. The KMS include variety of Knowledge management applications such as DSS, CIS, DRMS, SCMS, GIS and EIS etc…. The improved new Knowledge Management System must provide the dynamics for effectively solving problems, enabling innovation, and providing the environment for continuous process and product improvement. I would like to discuss this point with my past employment experience.

2.2. Criticise with real life situation:
When I was working in the United Nations in Sri Lanka as a Information Systems Officer my main responsibility was to combine, manage and share the information from other stakeholders. The organization was facing some difficulties in how to collect, store, process, manage and share the knowledge from other organization members and publics. The collecting data was not a difficult part in our organization process, but combining the collected datum systematically and making the information quickly accessible by all the members our organization and the other organizations. On the other hand responding quickly to other members and organizations requests was the vital part in our project management, (O’Brien, 22).

Without the support of IT Management Systems we can’s store, combine and share large amount of information of other stakeholders. I had some situations where I had to manage, and share information and to respond quickly to other stakeholders. In this situation I faced some difficulties as we do not have proper systems. I raised some questions in our monthly conference as follows, for a long term view without any system how can we manage the information or knowledge? Is there any possibility to manage manually with high efficiency? And I answered for my second questions as, ‘definitely not in my experience’.

At the end of many meetings and discussions our organization decided to develop a information system to handle huge amount of data and information, (Alavi and Leidner, 2001). This system was called as Coordination and Planning System (CAPS). This CAPS system stored large amount of data to combine, interpret and quickly give the responses to other stakeholder’s requests. The CAPS system was helping me to easily find answer for where, when, who, why, which (W5) questions. And also this new system avoids the duplication of work, save plenty of time. In addition it’s was helping to take a decision easily, lessen the complexity of work etc. In this scenario the CAPS is an application of Knowledge Management System where the knowledge was captured, stored, combined, processed and shared with the support of IT.

2.3. Conclusion:
As I have real world experience without working, and then working with a proper system, I could say that the knowledge management system is very helpful in managing the information and sharing them within the organization and out side the organization in an efficient way. The improved new knowledge management system must provide the dynamics for effectively solving problems, enabling innovation, and providing the environment for continuous process and product improvement.

2.4. Reference
Stankosky. M. (2005) Creating the Discipline of the Knowledge Management
Anna Griman, Teresita Rojas, Maria Perez (2002) Methodological Approach for Developing KMS

Christopher Lueg and Xavier Alaman (2002) Knowledge Management and Information Technology

G.C. Mohanta, V. Kannan, K.P.Thooyamani (2006) Strategies for Improving Productivity of Knowledge Workers

Mohamed Khalifa, Angela Yan Yu and Kathy Ning Shen (2008) Knowledge management systems success: a contingency perspective

Jun Xu and Mohammed Quaddus (2004) A reality-based guide to KMS diffusion