Knowledge Management Initiatives: Learning From Failure

 

Many organizations are launching knowledge management initiatives and large proportion of those initiatives fail, but still no detailed attention has been paid to know the actual reasons for those failures. It looks like the practice of Knowledge Management (KM) tends to be too IT focused and many times IT directed. In this article, I’m going to analyze what went wrong with KM initiatives and to identify the key learning point.

Reasons for Knowledge Management Failure

There seems to be four distinct categories of KM failure like technology, culture, content and project management.

Some of the failure factors: 

• Lack of organizational incentive to create and transfer knowledge
• The organizational structure and absence of clear vision
• The existing organizational culture and low business priority
• Conflicts among stakeholders will hinder knowledge retrieval and transfer within an organization.

Knowledge management is a business practice rather than technology. The matter of fact is that getting employees to share what they know is no longer a technology challenge, but it should be considered as a corporate culture challenge. If the organization continues to reward people for keeping content rather than sharing it, then it’s never going to be successful. After all KM should be viewed as an integral part of the business operation rather than an optional and “nice-to-have” feature.

Conclusion

Organizations should consider knowledge sharing as a part of building competitive advantage among their competitors. I think by using the right tools organization can increase collaboration, communication, trust, and productivity. When the employees know that they have access to the resources they need and have a positive environment they are more likely to share information and allow to grow the organization’s competitive advantage.