INTRODUCTION
The Knowledge Management (KM) is a recent discipline that was born under the idea of explicitly managing the whole existing knowledge of a given organisation (Wiig, 1995) (Wiig et al., 1997). More specifically, the KM involves providing the people concerned with the right information and knowledge at the most suitable level for them, when and how best suit them; in such way, these people will have all the necessary ingredients for choosing the best option when faced with a specific problem (Rodriguez, 2002).
As the knowledge, together with the ability for its best management, has turned into the key factor for the organizations to stand out, it is desirable to determine and develop the support instruments for the generation of such value within the organisations. This situation has been commonly accepted by several authors as (Brooking, 1996) (Davenport & Prusak, 2000) (Huang et al., 1999) (Liebowitz & Beckman, 1998) (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) and (Wiig, 1993) among others. Technological tools should be available for diminishing the communication distance and for providing a common environment where the knowledge might accessible for being stored or shared.
As KM is a very recent discipline, there are few commercial software tools that deal with those aspects necessary for its approach. Most of the tools classified as KM-related are mere tools for managing documents, which is unsuitable for the correct management of the organisations knowledge. Bearing such problem in mind, the present work approaches the establishment of a KM support software tool based on the own definition of KM and on the existing tools. For achieving this, section 2 presents the market analysis that was performed for studying the existing KM tools, where not only their characteristics were analysed, but also the future needs of the knowledge workers. Following this study, the functionality that a KM support tool should have and the proposal for the best approach to that functionality were identified.
BACKGROUND
The first step for developing a complete KM support tool according to the present and future trade needs is the performance of a study of the existing market. After the initial identification of the characteristics that a KM support tool should have, a posterior work reveals how the studied tools provide support to every one of the previously identified characteristics. Lastly, an evaluation of the obtained results will be performed.
Characteristics to be Considered
The previously mentioned definition of KM was the basis for the identification of the characteristics to be considered, bearing in mind the different aspects that should be supported by the tool.
A KM tool should give support to the following aspects (Andrade et al., 2003a):
• Corporate Memory
• Yellow Pages
• Collaboration and Communication mechanisms
1. Corporate Memory
The Corporate Memory compiles the knowledge that exists within an organisation for its workers disposal (Stein, 1995) (Van Heijst et al., 1997). Due to this, to compile and to make the relevant knowledge explicit is equally important than providing the suitable mechanisms for its correct and easy location, as well as recuperation.
2. Yellow Pages
A KM program should not make the mistake of trying to capture and represent the whole existing knowledge of the organisation, as this attempt would not be feasible; in this sense, the relevant knowledge for the performance of the organisation should be the one to be included. However, not making all the knowledge explicit does not mean that it has to be obviated; for that reason, it is important to determine which knowledge has every individual at the organisation by means of the elaboration of the Yellow Pages. These ones identify and publish additional knowledge sources, human and non-human, that are at the organisation disposal (Davenport & Prusak, 2000).
3. Collaboration and Communication Mechanisms
At the organisations the knowledge is share, as well as distributed, regardless of the automatism, or not, of the process. A knowledge transfer occurs every time that an employee asks a workmate of the adjoining office how to perform a given task. These daily knowledge transfers made the routine of the organisation up but, as they are local and fragmentary, some systems for user collaboration and communication should be therefore established. An adequate KM support tool should include mechanisms that guarantee the efficiency of the collaboration and the communication, regardless of the physical or temporal location of the interlocutors.
Analysed Tools
Once the aspects that a KM support tool should consider have been identified, the following step involves analysing how the current tools consider them.
With such purpose, the main so-named KM support tools that exist currently were analysed, discarding certain tools such as information search engines or simple applications for documents management, as they merely offer partial solutions.
Table 1. Tools analysed
| Corporate Memory | Yellow Pages | Collaboration and communication mechanisms | ||
| K-Factory | / | |||
| Norma K-Factor | / | / | / | |
| Hyperwave | / | / | / | |
| GTC | / | / | ||
| Epicentric | / | / | / | |
| Plumtree | / | / | / | |
| Intrasuite | / | / | / | |
| Coldata | / | / | / | |
| Intranets | / | / | / | |
| WebSpace | / | / | ||
| Knowledge Discovery System | / | / | ||
| Documentum 5 | / | / | ||
| Livelink (Opentext) | / | / | ||
| Adenin | / | / | ||
The analysis included thirteen tools (Table 1), all of them approaching at least two of the previously mentioned aspects. It should be highlighted that all the tools implement the Corporate Memory as a document warehouse, while the Yellow Pages appear as a telephone directory.
Results Evaluation
After the tools were analysed it was noticed that, for every aspect considered, there are some common elements. Bearing in mind these elements and the current needs, table 2 shows the desirable characteristics that a KM support tool should have.
The conclusions drawn after a deeper study on how the analysed tools approach the desirable characteristics are following presented.
Firstly it was observed that none of the tools classified as KM ones has the necessary structure for best identifying, formalising and sharing the relevant knowledge, as they solely perform documental management complemented, in the best of the cases, by some descriptive fields, the association to a contents tree or by means of links to another related documents. Such fact creates many problems, especially and due to the great data volume, the difficulty for selecting the adequate knowledge that the user might need at a given moment. Therefore, and as it has been pointed previously, for the best use of the knowledge, it should be somehow structured. The communication supports are also quite important.
The characteristics of a KM support tool should be then necessarily defined, together with a guide for approaching them.
RECOMMENDED FEATURES
The approach to every one of the detected characteristics should be initiated as soon as the functionality that a support tool for the explicit management of the corporative knowledge might have been determined.
1. Corporate Memory: the organisation knowledge has to be physically stored somehow by means of a Corporate Memory for being adequately shared.A Corporate Memory is an explicit, independent and persistent knowledge representation (Stein, 1995) (Van Heijst et al., 1997) that can be considered as a knowledge repository from the individuals that work at a given organisation. The Corporate Memory should include the following aspects:
Table 2. Desirable characteristics of a KM support tool
| Aspect | Desirable characteristic | |
| Knowledge formalisation | ||
| Corporate Memory | Knowledge Incorporation New knowledge notification Search | |
| Yellow Pages | Experts search Integration | |
| Workgroup | ||
| Workflow | ||
| Management of time, tasks and resources | ||
| Asynchronous | ||
| Collaboration and
communication mechanisms |
communication | Forum
Suggestion box Notice board |
| Synchronous | Chat | |
| communication | Electronic board
Audio-conference Video-conference |
1.1. Knowledge formalisation. Before being included into the Corporate Memory, the knowledge has to be formalised by means of the determination of, not only the relevant knowledge, but also the attributes that describe it. When performing this formalisa-tion it should be born in mind that there are two types of knowledge; on one hand, the Corporate Memory must include the knowledge needed to describe the operations for performing an organisational task. On the other side, it is necessary to capture the knowledge that has been acquired by the individuals after their experience and life time. This markedly heuristic knowledge is known as Learned Lessons: positive as well as negative experiences that can be used for improving the future performance of the organisation (Van Heijst, 1997), and therefore refining its current knowledge.
a. Organisational knowledge (Andrade et al., 2003b). A KM system should consider different types of knowledge when structuring the relevant knowledge associated to the operations that exist at the organisation:
• Strategic or control knowledge: it indicates, not only what to do, but also why, where and when. For that reason, the constituents of the functional disintegration of every operation should be identified.
• Tactical: it specifies how and under what circumstances the tasks are done. This type of knowledge is associated with the execution process of every last-level strategic step.
b. Learned lessons. It is related to the experience and the knowledge that the individuals have with regards to their task. It provides the person who possesses it with the ability for refining both, the processes that follows at work and the already existing knowledge, in order to be more efficient. Whereas it’s appropriate to create systems of learned lessons (Weber, 2001) in order to save this type of knowledge.
1.2. Incorporation mechanisms. The knowledge can be incorporated in an active or passive way (Andrade et al., 2003c). The active incorporation is based on the existence of a KM group in charge of looking after the quality of the knowledge that is going to be incorporated. This guarantees the quality of the knowledge included into the Corporate Memory but it also takes human resources up. Differently from the previous way, at the passive incorporation does not exist any group for quality evaluation, as the own individual ready to share knowledge and experience will be responsible for evaluating that the proposal fulfils the minimum requirements of quality and relevancy. The main advantage of the second alternative is that it does not take additional resources up. Bearing in mind the previous considerations, the active knowledge incorporation is preferred whenever it might be possible, as in such way the quality and the relevancy of the knowledge will be guaranteed.
1.3. Notification mechanisms. All the members of the organisation should be informed when a new knowledge is incorporated as this enables the refinement of their knowledge. The step previous to the notification is the definition of the group of people tan will be informed of the new appearance of a knowledge item. There are two alternatives (Garcia et al., 2003): subscription, where every individual at the organisation might take out a subscription to certain preferred specific issues, and spreading, where the notification messages reach the workers without previous request. At the spreading, the messages can be sent to all the members of the organisation, but this is not advisable as the receptor would be not able of discern which ones of the vast amount of messages received might be interesting for him/her. Other spreading possibility would rely on an individual or a group that would be in charge of determining the addressees for every given message; this last option is quite convenient for the members of the organisation but it takes up a vast amount of resources that have to contain themselves a lot of information regarding the interests of every one of the members. 1.4. Localisation mechanisms. The tool should be provided with some search mechanism in order to achieve the maximum possible profit from the captured and incorporated knowledge (Tiwana, 2000). It is necessary to reach an agreement between efficiency and functionality, as enough search options should be available without increasing the system complexity. For this reason, the following search mechanisms are suggested:
• Hierarchy search: this search catalogues the knowledge into a fixed hierarchy, in such way that the user might move through a group of links for refining the search performed.
• Attribute search: is based on the specification of terms in which the user is interested, resulting into some knowledge elements that might content those terms. This type of search provides more general results than the previous one.
2. Yellow Pages: a KM system should not try to capture and assimilate the whole of the knowledge that exists at the organisation as it would not be feasible. Therefore, the Yellow Pages are used for including, not only the systems that store knowledge, but also the individuals that have additional knowledge. Their elaboration is performed after determining the knowledge possessed by every individual at the organisation or by any other non human agents.
3. Collaboration and communication mechanisms: at the organisations, the knowledge is shared and distributed regardless the process might be automated or not. The technology helps the interchange of knowledge and ideas among the members of the organisation, as it enables bringing the best possible knowledge within reach of the individual who requires it. The collaboration and communication mechanisms detected are the following:
3.1 Asynchronous communication. Does not require the connection between the ends of the communication at the same time.
• E-mail. The electronic messenger enables the interchange of text and/or any other type of document among two or several users
• Forum. It consists ofaWeb page where the participants leave questions that do not have to be answered at that very moment. Other participants leave the answers which, together with the questions, can be seen by anyone entering the forum at any moment.
• Suggestion box. It enables sending suggestions or comments of any relevant aspect of the organisation to the adequate person or department.
• Notice board. It is a common space where the members of the organisation can publish some announcements appropriate for the public interest.
3.2 Synchronous communication. This type of interactive technology is based on realtime communications. Some of the most important systems are the following:
• Chat. It implies the communication among several people through the computer, as all the people connected can follow the communication, express an opinion, contribute ideas, make or answer questions when they decide.
• Electronic board. It provides the members of the organisation with a shared space for improving the interchange the ideas where everybody draws or writes.
• Audio conference. Two or more users can use real-time voice communication.
• Video conference. Two or more users can use real-time image communication.
FUTURE TRENDS
As it has been mentioned before, there is not a current KM tool that might cover adequately the organisational needs. This problem has been approached in the present work by trying to determine the functionality that any ofthese tools should incorporate. This is a first step that should be complemented with subsequent works, as it is necessary to go deeper and determine better how to approach and implement the specified aspects.
CONCLUSION
The knowledge, either for its management or not, is transmitted within the organisations, although its existence does not imply its adequate use. There is a vast amount of knowledge where access is extremely difficult; this means that there are items from where no return is being achieved and that they are lost into the organisation. The KM represents the effort for capturing and getting benefits from the collective experience of the organisation by means of turning it accessible to any of its members. However, it could be stated that not a current tool is able to efficiently perform this task as, although there exist the so-named KM tools, they merely store documents and none of them performs the structuration of the relevant knowledge for its best use.
In order to palliate such problems, the present work proposes an approach based on a market research. It is as well based on the KM definition that indicates how to approach and defines the characteristics that a tool should have for working as facilitator of an adequate and explicit Knowledge Management.
KEY TERMS
Communication & Collaboration Tool: Systems that enable collaboration and communication among members of an organisation (i.e. chat applications, whiteboards).
Document Management: It is the computerised management of electronic, as well as paper-based documents.
Institutional Memory: It is the physical storage of the knowledge entered in an organization.
Knowledge: Pragmatic level of information that provides the capability of dealing with a problem or making a decision.
Knowledge Management: Discipline that intends to provide, at its most suitable level, the accurate information and knowledge for the right people, whenever they may needed and at their best convenience.
Knowledge Management Tool: Organisational system that connects people with the information and communication technologies, with the purpose of improving the share and distribution processes of the organisational knowledge.
Lesson Learned: Specific experience, positive or negative, of a certain domain. It is obtained into a practical context and can be used during future activities of similar contexts.
Yellow Page: It storages information about a human or non-human source that has additional and/or specialized knowledge about a particular subject.
