Adoption of Knowledge Management Systems: A Study on How Wiki Systems Should Be Adopted by Minimizing the Risk of Failure

Abstract

“Knowledge is power”. Knowledge is an important asset for any organization. Many organization are now considering knowledge as an intellectual property. Thus the emergence of organizational knowledge management technologies are observed especially in the twenty-first century. Many companies are seen investing heavily in developing or purchasing knowledge management systems (KMS). Among all the systems of knowledge management, wiki is one of the most popular system, which is easy to use, cost effective and required low maintenance. Hence hundreds of companies are currently using wiki as the central repository system. Unfortunately several researchers have identified that the technology adoption is sometimes very risky as the failure rate is very high, which may often cause huge financial losses if it fails to address the problem. In response to those researches, this study is done to know how wiki system should be adopted by overcoming the risk of failure. In order to meet the purpose of this study two success stories of wiki adoption by NBC universal and Peacock production were analyzed. The result shows that, in order to minimize the risk of failure to adopt a KM system, a company needs to choose the system based on functional, non-functional and transitional requirements for the system, as well as organizational strength and capacities. A particular KM system should be chosen, only if the system can meet all the requirements of KM processes. The organizational structure and the system functionality should be matched before adopting the system. The result also suggests, if the users of the system are collaborative, have the will to share the valuable knowledge and motivated enough to use and apply the knowledge gained from the knowledge management system like wiki in day to day operations, the success rate of KMS adoption and implementation increases. Due to the limitation of time only two success case stories were evaluated and since this is not an empirical study additional care should be taken in generalizing the research findings.

Keywords: Knowledge Management (KM), Knowledge Management Systems (KMS), KM processes, KOPE Framework, functional, non-functional and transitional requirements.