Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management (Literature Review)

Building part of my thesis on Enterprise 2.0 and how this tools address knowledge management issues I have drawn a literature review to study from an academic point of view what other experts have been writing about both terms:

"Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management (People)

Knowledge Management has been categorised as the forest for all the trees, where those ‘trees’ are business fads and enthusiasms of the late 20th century, from 1975 to 2000 (Koenig, 2006). The relationship between Knowledge Management (KM) strategies and Information Technology (IT) practices has always been difficult to align. Harris-Jones (2005) advised that collaboration tools are central to effective IT support for knowledge and information management, and many developments occurred in that sector in 2005. Some interesting changes have also taken place in such closely related areas as content management and search. Others argued that Knowledge Management initiatives could be successful without using IT tools, and IT should be adopted only when necessary (Mirghani et al., 2006). IT often believes that everything is in place for people to collaborate easily and effectively, but this doesn't correspond to users' experience. IT departments aren't consulting the people who will use the technology. Previos generations of knowledge management tended to be internally focused and not tied to strategic drivers. The connection between culture and technology can no longer be ignored when customer centricity moves to center stage (Saint-Onge, 2005). In the same line, other challenge faced by knowledge managers in the past has been that sophisticated KM products like EMC Software's Documentum put the burdem of management on the users, who must take aditional steps to access documents and register them with the system. And some IT departments dread the arrival of Microsoft's more user-friendly SharePoint because of its hunger for in-house server and support resources (Spanbauer, 2006). Nevertheless, the last also noted that recently, a new wave of smaller, lighter and less expensive tools has started to go where the larger KM systems often didn't, bringing corporate knowledge back out into daylight.

Change management 'good practices' will lead companies to address their organisational issues (Sicangco, 2006). Business managers, most often, cannot internalise the fact that changes are made by people and not by some new performance measurement system, or a new technology, or a new organisational structure. However, they are also confronted by uncertain and turbulent environments, changing customer demands and the need to constantly realign technology, strategy, organisational culture and business processes. On the other, individuals in organisations also face formidable challenges such as the possible obsolescence of one's skills and knowledge, finding satisfaction in their work, possible retrechment due to downsizing, economic insatisfaction, and maintaining human dignity in the work place. Therefore, both the organisation and the individuals in them are confronted by a constantly changing and increasingly demanding competitive business environment. Basically, organisational development is a process for teaching people how to solve problems, take advantage of opportunities and learn how to do that better and better over time. It focuses on issues related to human side of organisations by finding ways to increase the effectiveness of individuals, teams and the organisation's human and social processes. Since it is about how people and organisations function and how to make them function better, the field is based on knowledge from behavioral science disciplines. But attention, a notable aspect of this new generation of knowledge management tools is the way they offer themselves for casual involvement. Acting independently, and without need of server space or tech support, business units can simply try out the new KM systems, sometimes in stealth mode (Spanbauer, 2006).

Some understand Enterprise 2.0 as a part of the whole Knowledge Management saying E2.0 simply provides KM with some new tools that can help with the KM problem of participation, including but not limited to social media (Karrer, 2006). However, there are also experts considering that Enterprise 2.0 is much more than knowledge management but KM is a piece of it and Enterprise 2.0 helps KM to achieve its early, and often unfulfilled, promise. However, looking at knowledge management at the enterprise level raises a paradox. To be successful, KM and portals must focus on real business challenges at the functional and process level. This results in function specific solutions and business cases. Attempts to build a generic enterprise business case for KM can fall into such vague concepts as “saving everyone twenty minutes a day” which become meaningless to balance sheet (Ives, 2007).

The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won't make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won't make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won't be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic (Davenport, 2007).

The three easiest ways (ironic speech) to do Enterprise 2.0 according to Semple (2007):
Do nothing. And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.
The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can get out if the way.
The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you: keep the energy levels up.

An EKM organization and its services must be properly positioned with other enterprise support services such as learning and performance management. This final integration step is essential to successfully coordinate the efforts of each of these functions, both minimizing turf wars and optimizing enterprise level performance. When an organisation is using Enterprise 2.0 to support knowledge management, these issues remain on the table. The benefits of carefully designed enterprise support remain and should not be overlooked simply because the tools are so easy to implement at the grass roots level (Ives, 2007).