Is KM technology successful only when a company has no cultural obstacles to overcome?

Knowledge management as a discipline has the greatest chance of succeeding when companies apply it to a specific strategic business goal. Of course, concerns about the role of organizational culture remain. Do companies succeed at KM simply because their cultures support sharing and reusing? Will a company without such a culture find itself making massive IT investments in a fruitless pursuit of knowledge?

Lotus adds unique value to the knowledge management equation by incorporating an understanding of human behavior into

Its technology.

That depends. True, the relatively few KM successes in today’s market typically reveal more about a company’s cultural preparedness for knowledge management than about the virtues of any one technology. But our real-world experience suggests that technology can offset or even overcome some cultural disinclination towards knowledge management. In fact, most companies are not hostile towards sharing. Sharing is just not built into the way people work. People share all the time — in the hallway, on the phone, via e-mail, etc. But it isn’t systematic. Even though technology can capture all that tacit knowledge in a database, the onus is on the employees to input it. But without an incentive — without making it a natural part of the way a person works — employees are unlikely to comply.

Designing Technology to Overcome Barriers

Users will always ask, “What’s in it for me?”

The key is to explicitly design technology to overcome — or at least offset — these human barriers. For example, if you asked employees to keep their resumes up to date so everyone would know where to find needed expertise, chances are they’d let that slip on their to-do lists. But, if the price of entry to a valuable discussion group was that an employee had to submit an updated resume, well, they would probably do that without a second thought. The immediate reward more than compensates for the effort required.

Effective knowledge management technology anticipates natural human behavior, which is biased toward minimizing added work.

Similarly, an employee might regularly save documents to a database without ensuring that everyone is made aware of what was saved and where. But if the system made some simple demands — for key words, categories, etc. — chances are she or he would be happy to comply. And if the system could do a lot of the “housekeeping” for the employee, like refreshing the taxonomy, deleting old/obsolete material, updating a skills/expertise document, then even better. When knowledge management technology is designed with an understanding of human behavior, employees are far more likely to participate in the sharing and reusing of knowledge.

Lotus and IBM are transforming insights into solutions.

This is the focus of our product development. We are paying careful attention to what makes one document library thrive and another one fade away. What makes one group discussion directed and succinct and another spin off into tangents and irrelevance. How do basic knowledge management activities (e.g., creation of an expertise map) relate to other, high-end knowledge management solutions (e.g., a “war room” application to manage a crisis).

Moreover, we are taking our research findings and using them to enhance Notes as a knowledge management platform and to inform how we develop specific applications and services. Together, our platform, applications and services offer a capacity to deliver immediately beneficial and highly scalable knowledge management solutions that is unmatched in the industry.