Critical Success Factors in Knowledge Management

Questions: 1. List the knowledge management initiatives adopted by HP? 2. Explain the impact of adopting knowledge management practices on HPs success? 3. The case study indicated that HP has used Lotus notes as a technology vehicle to establish different knowledge bases. Conduct a brief search about Lotus notes and explain how it is useful in establishing a knowledge base. What is the importance of having a knowledge base in knowledge management? 4. Why do you think the Training Review never took off? What could have Karney done in order to make it work? 5. What are the incentives that Karney used to promote the knowledge bases? What was the effect of those incentives? 6. Karney declared that there is a risk with the knowledge base. What was it and how did he propose to overcome it? 7. Why do you think the knowledge management with PPO customers initiative did not succeed? 8. The PPO knowledge management group is currently working on three projects. List these 3 projects, predict some risks that would face the implementation of these projects and how to overcome them from a knowledge management perspective.Guidelines: Answers: 1. Trainers trading post is a community forum based on lotus notes. In this forum, people share their knowledge, ideas, materials, ask queries and seek expert view on their approach and much more (Davenport, 1998). Initially, people were reluctant to share their posts and knowledge on the forum but after a lot of incentives in form of free license for notes, airlines miles, and number of posts as well as participation went up. After sometime, it was find that although people are participating but that permanently requires an evangelist to encourage and motivate them constantly. Connex is a short term defined for connection to experts. It is a detailed directory of HP experts that contains the profiles of the people along with their education information, their expertise detail, their background and achievements (Davenport, 1998). Thus, this forum makes it very easy to find the resource who is expert in a area. HP network news is simply a set of frequently asked questions, most popular products and frequently encountered problems which is available to download on its site for dealers (Davenport, 1998). As company is expanding, its technical support executives are constantly bombarded with increasing calls from dealers about the queries. By taking this initiative, there is a huge drop in the calls from dealer. 2. Knowledge management practices are very important for the success of any organization. It is because as the organization grows and more and more, it continuously needs more people with good skills and knowledge. Thus, knowledge management initiatives are very important for any organizations that focus on sharing the knowledge within the enterprise and preparation the future leaders. At HP, initiatives like Connex help people to connect with each other during challenges and get expert opinions in it. HP network news is a huge success as it has drastically reduced the calls received by technical support department by dealers. It makes dealers experts themselves by sharing knowledge with them (Lai, Chu, 2002). There are community forums where people can share knowledge, materials, and methods and thus it reduces the time to solve the problems. Also, HP is a decentralized company and all the business units have adopted knowledge management practices within their group however relucta nt to share their knowledge across group. All these knowledge management initiatives has made HP a very successful company today. 3. Lotus notes is an application suite designed by the IBM. Under this suite, there are many applications like email, calendar, database, web server, and programming. Most people think lotus notes as an email system but it is much more than that. It also has suite of products similar to what Microsoft offers i.e. outlook, access, SharePoint (Kamunya, Waweru, 2013). As the internet is evolving few years back and there is a growing need to exchange information, codes, procedures, reusable designs, best practices, manuals which created a new jargon Web content management (Barros, Ramos, Perez, 2015). During the same time, IBM lotus notes further popularize the term knowledge management which is sharing of knowledge by storing it in a base where anyone can access it whenever they need it. Lotus notes is very helpful in establishing a knowledge base as it provides all the tools that are required for a knowledge base. It also provides sample templates to configure and running up the knowledge base completely (Song, 2016). It comes with easy set of instructions that helps to configure the product, assigning responsibilities to different people based on their roles and get started for everyone. 4. Training review was one of the knowledge bases out of three started by Karney. It was a failure from the beginning and eventually has to merge with Training library which was another base started by Karney. The main reason for the failure was that people were not comfortable to share their opinion online about the content of the course, usefulness of the course, knowledge of the instructor, ability of the instructor to explain etc . And anything that does not collect and inculcate the honest feedback from the users will be doomed to failure and same happened with the training review (Fernandez, Stevenson, Martin, 2001). Karney could have given the incentives for participating and sharing the opinion about the course and instructor. This could have encouraged people to share their opinion online. Other thing Karney could have done is that he should allow the people to share their opinions anonymously. With this approach, he would have access to honest feedback from the people and can directly work with the educators and instructors to improve the content of the course. Keeping their identity secret in the training review program will also give people the confidence to share their opinion honestly. 5. Karney has adopted innovative ways to encourage people to participate in the knowledge bases by reading posts, submitting posts and comments. He had given the free notes license to promising users. He also gives the 3,000 airline miles free for the initial 50 readers and then another 500-airline mile for those who submits a post. Thus, by early 1996, statistics were very impressive showing that decent number of identified educators have read at least one post as well as submitted a post and comments. Karney has thought that incentives will help the people to get started on the forum and once they start, they will automatically be interested to participate and continue of their own. However, that did not happen. As the incentives are reducing, fresh contributions also start declining. Karney was continuously working to keep people motivated. Incentives helps to keep the people motivated only for a brief period. Once incentives are gone, people interest to participate was also going down. Karney realized the importance of Evangelist continuously to keep the people motivated continuously to make fresh contributions on the form (Bouthillier, Shearer, 2002). 6. Having a knowledge base is very important in knowledge management otherwise different people will ask same questions and thus multiple thread on same question/issue will only create a confusion. Thus, it is always advisable to have a knowledge base that will have frequently asked questions, common queries. People can search the knowledge base and if they are not able to find anything, they can post their query on the forum. Poor participation of the people in accessing the content as well as in submitting the new post and comments was the biggest risk with the knowledge base. Karney has given the incentives initially to get people started and picks up the momentum. However, as soon as the incentives were reducing, statistics shows that people participations also reduced. Fresh contributions are still coming but not at a speed at which they were coming during incentives. Karney proposes to have a permanent evangelist who can keep continuously engaged the people and keep them motivated to access the content and submit new posts. 7. HPs PPO group is a very big group that includes functions such as Procurement, Quality, Safety and environmental, organizational change, product marketing. Due to so much diversity, PPO customers are also quite diverse and their knowledge and learning needs are quite different from each other. Thus, PPO group lacks focus and difference in requirements of various groups. This is one of the most important reason for the failure of knowledge management initiatives with PPO customers (Holsapple, 2013). This knowledge management project with PPO customers has not clearly defined the scope (Akhavan, Zahedi, 2014) and thus, the task of summarizing knowledge of experts by means on interviews looks highly ambitious and the information system was also never built. One of the other reason could be HP calls its a failure very soon. Probably, if they would have spent more time in analyzing and implementing the system, it would have been successful (Hasan, Zhou, 2015). Thus, Company must ensure that such knowledge will be captured in the knowledge management and if new people, they can easily be brought up to the speed with the help of knowledge base (Beaven, 2015). 8. The PPO management group at HP is working currently on the 3 projects which are as follows: Obtaining competitor information for HPs component group: This group is about obtaining the information about the competitors, their key strengths and weaknesses. The most important risk here is that some people have in depth knowledge about competitors and in case, they quit the company, it poses a risk for HP as the knowledge will be lost along with the resource. Web based interface for research: This project will capture the primary and secondary research information and makes them available for the people in web pages. The risk could be that people who are involve in the research would feel reluctant to share their insights and thus the results of the primary research. In order to motivate them, appropriate incentives should be given. International marketing intelligence: It is a widespread fact in HP that its knowledge about the markets, customers and its product is the biggest competitive advantage. And thus, it is very much important that this information should be shared in a structured way and this is the goal of this project because no organizations wants that their key competencies are highly dependent on people. References Akhavan, P., Zahedi, M. R. (2014). Critical success factors in knowledge management among project-based organizations: A multi-case analysis. IUP Journal of Knowledge Management, 12(1), 20. Barros, V. F. D. A., Ramos, I., Perez, G. (2015). Information systems and organizational memory: a literature review. JISTEM-Journal of Information Systems and Technology Management, 12(1), 45-63. Beaven, D. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 9,202,202. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 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