The Midas Touch in Knowledge Management Projects — Beware, Your Wish Could Come True

Authors

  • Alf Westelius
  • Pär Mårtensson

Keywords:

knowledge management practices, IS success, electronic communities, knowledge management, knowledge documentation, case study, ba

Abstract

Like king Midas, the champion of a Knowledge Management (KM) initiative might find herself in an awkward situation because the wish came true. Successful KM initiatives can lead to problems. The case study presented in this article details how a consulting company attempted to support its dispersed staff of consultants through the introduction of a web‑based KM portal. The application became popular — too popular in the sense that it led to a deterioration of certain types of knowledge exchange. It achieved the intended goals, but created unforeseen problems. In the article we explore KM practices and explore the role of contexts for IT‑mediated KM. It is suggested that the need to view IT‑mediated KM in various wider contexts is even more important than in many other forms of IS implementation. The KM activities are not only related to identifiable tasks and work processes, but also to social interaction, learning and other dynamic processes in the organisation.

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Published

1 Apr 2004

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2004)

Section

Articles

License

Open Access Publishing

The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Maangement operates an Open Access Policy. This means that users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is that authors control  the integrity of their work, which should be properly acknowledged and cited.