A Consultancy Report on the Challenges of Successfully Implementing a Knowledge Management Initiative
1. Introduction
This report aims to highlight and evaluate the challenges ‘Smartphone Development Labs’ (SDL) face when tasked with implementing a successful Knowledge Management Initiative in support of the development engineers. There will be a break down of each challenge and finally recommendations on what SDL should do to begin the implementation successfully and overcome these challenges.
2. Challenges
Despite on the surface the workforce at SDL appears to be pro active, creative and dynamic there are a number of challenges that would present themselves in the occurrence that a Knowledge Management Initiative be implemented.
Outlined below are three key challenges that without detailed evaluation could hinder the implementation process of such initiative.
3.1 Lack of time to codify tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge is extremely hard to codify as it is bound to individuals (Smith, 2001). It can be time consuming to define and share as it represents knowledge that people possess, but which is inexpressible (Hislop, 2009). The knowledge of the engineers working for SDL is context specific. The engineers are allocated to different project groups on the basis of their knowledge, prior experience and workload. Attempting to codify knowledge from over 280 development engineers is a colossal task and could cost the company greatly in ‘wasted time’.
Even if the use of an IT based knowledge sharing system was implemented to speed the process up there is still no saying how long it would take, whether or not it would be successful or whether the budget would allow for it. Knowledge sharing is recognised as an increasingly important Knowledge Management problem because it influences the capacity of the organisation to absorb and profit from individual knowledge and to transform it to organisational asset (Antonova et al, 2011). However,...