TOWARDS A VALUE-ORIENTED KMS RECOMMENDATION

FOR SME

Ulrike Borchardt

University of Rostock, 18051 Rostock, Germany

Keywords:

Knowledge management systems, Small and medium enterprises, Value.

Abstract:

Knowledge management and Knowledge Management Systems have been around for many years. They can

be considered well established in larger enterprises, yet which effect they do have on small and medium enter-

prises is still not fully clariﬁed. By our own research we recognized, that especially with regard to Knowledge

Management Systems a solid foundation for decision making in SME is missing. This stems mostly from the

unclear value such a system can add to the enterprise. To address this this paper is to present our concept for

a value-oriented framework for Knowledge Management Systems in small and medium enterprises to allow

them to choose suiting Knowledge Management Systems according to their business objectives and the busi-

ness value to be expected from the applied solution. The framework to be presented, accordingly consists of

three dimensions: Knowledge services, business value of IT and their interrelations.

1 MOTIVATION

As already shown with our research, presented in

(Borchardt, 2011), knowledge management (KM) is

of interest for small and medium enterprises (SME),

yet the actual value added by the employment of a

KM system (KMS) or KM application remains un-

clear. Individual SME lack the ability to choose an

application suiting their needs, and instead pick one

brought to the SME by single employees. This de-

cision is not profoundly based on the suitability of

the application but on the interest of single employ-

ees or the availability of material on applications.

SME rarely use KMS and are hardly aware what value

can be added by using a KMS/KM application. The

conducted survey revealed the lack in the productive

use of according applications. From our viewpoint

a general value-driven recommendation on which ap-

plication to choose for KM under different circum-

stances (provided by the business strategy) is miss-

ing. Though individual work on aspects concerning

IT value of KMS can be found (Stocker and Tochter-

mann, 2009) a general profound guideline on how

to choose appropriate support for SME could not be

found. Consequently, we want to present the con-

cept of a value-oriented framework for the recom-

mendation of KMS for the use in SME in this paper.

Hence, section 2 provides the terminology and section

3 presents our concept for the value-oriented framew-

ork as well as the work to be accomplished for putting

the framework into existence. Section 4 provides

some details on the prospects and the work ahead.

2 ESSENTIALS

This section provides details on the background for

our framework: KMS and the business value of IT.

2.1 Knowledge Management Systems

There is no standard deﬁnition available, yet one

with an holistic approach addressing the term from

the technical angle being based on ICT (informa-

tion and communication technology) is given by

Maier((Maier, 2007), p.86):

”A knowledge management system is an ICT sys-

tem in the sense of an application system or an ICT

platform that combines and integrates functions for

the contextualized handling of both explicit and tacit

knowledge, throughout the organization or that part

of the organization, that is targeted by a KM initia-

tive. A KMS offers integrated services to deploy KM

instruments for networks of participants, i.e. active

knowledge workers, in knowledge-intensive business

processes along the entire knowledge life cycle. Ulti-

mate aim of KMS is to support the dynamics of orga-

nizational learning and organizational effectiveness.”

347

Borchardt U..

TOWARDS A VALUE-ORIENTED KMS RECOMMENDATION FOR SME.

DOI: 10.5220/0003660803470350

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2011), pages 347-350

ISBN: 978-989-8425-81-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

According to this deﬁnition Maier suggested an

ideal architecture of such a KMS ((Maier, 2007),

p.319). This architecture though well planned, was

not found in the range of SME we questioned (Bor-

chardt, 2011), leaving us with the impression, that

a KMS in practice is interpreted as any software ap-

plication supporting the process of capturing, storing

and distributing knowledge (Jennex, 2008). Yet, Jen-

nex argues that mostly structured knowledge is cap-

tured by such systems, an impression that was not

conﬁrmed by our surveys, where it was more like any

kind of knowledge was gathered, often even the dif-

ference between knowledge and information was not

clariﬁed. Moreover, the question when to talk of a

KMS and when of a KM application does not seem

to be fully answered. This was also indicated by the

SME, as they name various applications, not forming

them into an integrated system (Borchardt, 2011).

However, Maier’s architecture describes the services

offered by a full KMS which can be projected on sin-

gle applications. Hence, it provides a number of ser-

vices to be taken into consideration, when evaluating

whether KMS/KM applications supporting these ser-

vices are adding to the business value.

2.2 Business Value of IT

For evaluating the value a certain application, in our

case a KMS/KM application, can add to an SME, a

concept of the value to be added has to be clariﬁed

ﬁrst.

In the 1990’s a similar problem occurred for the gen-

eral use of IT systems and was manifold addressed

by research resulting in the term of BVIT (business

value of IT). This concludes all approaches whose ob-

jective is to evaluate the impacts of changes in IT for

the business in the concerned organization. Perfor-

mance, competitiveness, innovation as well as eco-

nomic growth over longer periods of time were of spe-

cial interest in this ﬁeld. It is possible to categorize the

approaches as follows (Sandkuhl et al., 2008):

• Process-oriented approaches.

• Project-focused approaches.

• Scorecard approaches.

• Perceived value approaches.

Based on these concepts a measurement of the value

of KMS is part of our value-oriented framework, as

these systems with their performance also inﬂuence

competitiveness, innovation and growth of the re-

garded SME and consequently are supposed to pos-

itively inﬂuence the business value. The adaptation to

KMS and integration in our framework is described

in section 3.

3 VALUE-ORIENTED

FRAMEWORK FOR KMS IN

SME

Looking at the deﬁnition provided by Maier it can be

argued, that KMS mostly can be considered ICT sys-

tems. Consequently, the business value of IT holds for

them and there has to be an interrelation for them. For

our framework we assume the value of KM can hardly

be estimated by monetary means only. This is ﬁrstly

due to the character of knowledge itself which hardly

can be properly evaluated in monetary terms. Sec-

ondly, even for IT in general several business value

concepts exist (see 2.2), which supports the thesis that

a merely monetary based evaluation would not hold as

well for this part. Based on these facts we planned a

framework holding 3 dimensions which are described

in the following paragraphs.

3.1 Intention

The main intention of the framework sketched here

is to allow for an easy derivation of suggestions on

which KMS or KM application would be of use for a

certain SME, given its business objectives are known.

The suggestions are not to be made barely on the fact

that an application is suitable for a certain objective

but also provide information which application deliv-

ers the best value and which further applications al-

low for maximization of the value when employing a

chosen application.

3.2 Dimension 1: Business Value of IT

The ﬁrst dimension of our framework is to address

the business value of KMS in the SME. As KMS are

closely related to IT (see 2.1), the approaches of the

business value of IT as introduced in section 2.2 are

suitable to evaluate their success. However, when it

comes to narrowing down the approaches to one spe-

ciﬁc, perceived value approaches as for example in-

troduced by (Delone and McLean, 2003) are most

promising. They concentrate on the business value

to be experienced by the users, whereas other ap-

proaches introduced in section 2.2 address projects

(but KM and KMS are supposed to be permanent

tasks in the SME), processes (which may be are not

known completely to the SME and we do not want to

make process modeling a prerequisite for our frame-

work) or mostly monetary, as e.g. scorecards.

Accordingly more research on the ﬁeld has already

been done and adaptations of IS success to KMS

success are available. Two of those are the ones

by Jennex-Olfman (Jennex, 2008) and Maier (Maier,

KMIS 2011 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

348

2007). Both transfer the information based IS success

in the environment of knowledge and KM.

Below the adoption of Jennex-Olfman is provided.

This one provides a description of the performed indi-

vidual breakdown of the single parts from IS success

to KM. For example, the information quality part is

extended to information and knowledge quality, indi-

cating further that this part is depending on the knowl-

edge strategy of the enterprise, which itself results

into different level in richness and linkage of the avail-

able knowledge. For our framework these individual

System Quality

Technological

Resources

Form of KMS

Level of KMS

Service Quality

Management

Support

User KM Service

Quality

IS KM Service

Quality

Knowledge/ Information Quality

Knowledge

Strategy/ Process

Linkages

Richness

Intended Use/

Perceived Benefit

Intended Use/

Perceived Benefit

Use/User

Satisfaction

Net Benefits

Figure 1: KMS success model of Jennex and Olfman (Jen-

nex, 2008).

parts of the KMS success are to provide the attributes

and interrelations within the ﬁrst dimension, as this

is solely dedicated to measuring the success of one

KMS and the approaches itself are already proved to

be working. The parts System Quality, Knowledge/

Information Quality, Service Quality, Perceived Ben-

eﬁt, User Satisfaction, Net Beneﬁt are our attributes.

3.3 Dimension 2: KMS Architecture

This second dimension covers the technical aspect of

the framework. Based on the architecture of Maier we

aim at identifying individual components of a KMS,

namely KM application, that may be of use in the

SME. With this dimension we orientate at the knowl-

edge services as suggested by Maier in layer III, being

the ﬁrst point of decision making when choosing KM

applications. Subsequently, in this dimension it has to

be decided which of the services from e.g. layer III:

publication, discovery, cooperation and learning is to

be addressed. However, this is not done to disregard

that the architecture holds more than these core KM

aspects ((Maier, 2007), p.321) but emphasizes the

overall holistic intention, yet the contact to SME has

shown that they are stronger focused on the according

services though aware that integration is needed.

Consequently, these services serve as attributes in the

dimension. In addition, the layers below and above

might be taken into consideration as attributes. For in-

stance enterprise portals as unique but individualized

point of access in the personalization service might

be of interest. Some examples of what can be ex-

pected within the services is shown in ﬁgure 2. The

III knowledge services

II personalization services

personal workspaces, notifications, access privileges

publication

versioning,

collaborative

document

review,

CMS, wiki

learning

management

colla-

boration

bulletin board,

Skype,

communities

of practise

discovery

full text

search,

Yellow pages,

semantic

Figure 2: KMS architecture partly, from (Maier, 2007).

services being the attributes of our framework, the in-

dividual applications are supposed to be the values

of the according attributes. Which attribute values

will be included in the ﬁnal framework can be ad-

dressed from two angles. First, would be asking the

SME themselves which applications they use for their

KM, we discovered by survey (Borchardt, 2011) that

most SME use all kinds of applications, consequently

the second possibility is deriving the applications by

literature research from publications and market re-

views, as well as by the look at larger enterprises us-

ing means of comparison.

3.4 Dimension 3: Interrelations

Considering the ﬁrst two dimensions this one aims

at bringing them together. Whilst the ﬁrst dimension

and its interrelations are well investigated, the second

dimension merely collects applications and function-

alities to group them to the according services. The

third one is to map the contained services of a ideal

KMS with their applications onto the KMS success.

Subsequently, it is necessary to evaluate the individ-

ual applications with regard to the KMS success, e.g.

wikis, CMS, groupware and more, to be map them to

the ﬁrst dimension. For a wiki e.g. as an application

for publication mostly, it has to be identiﬁed which

business value precisely can be expected from its use.

In addition different combinations are to be explored

as for instance a wiki with extended search possibil-

ities. The question here is: does the extended effort

pay off by the gained value or is the the difference in

TOWARDS A VALUE-ORIENTED KMS RECOMMENDATION FOR SME

349

value not signiﬁcant.

It is not only of interest to match dimensions one and

two on each other but relate them to the objectives of

the concerned SME. Already Saloj

arvi et. al. (Sa-

loj

arvi et al., 2005) found that certain types of SME

are more inclined to the positive aspects of KM than

others. For instance they found that rather young en-

terprises, especially in IT and consulting beneﬁt from

the early use of a KMS or KM application. The same

is to be expected within this dimension. Knowledge-

intensive enterprises might proﬁt more from KMS

than traditional well settled craftsmen. The interrela-

tions between the dimensions one and two and conse-

quently with the business strategy are to be explored.

4 PROSPECTS

This paper presented our concept of a framework fa-

cilitating value-driven recommendations of KMS/KM

applications for SME according to their business

strategy and objectives in KM. Though all KM ac-

tivities including the choice and implementation of a

technological support are supposed to be oriented to-

wards the business strategy as indicated we discov-

ered by our survey that more concrete work in this

ﬁeld is still needed.

It is to be populated by proceeding our research as

begun with the empirical study introduced in (Bor-

chardt, 2011). With this study the general groups

of SME applying KM and/or KMS were gathered.

It showed that only minor parts of the SME in Ger-

many already apply KM knowingly though the study

focused on mostly knowledge-intensive SME. While

proceeding we now conduct an additional survey to

gather further information on SME just beginning to

implement KMS to capture their true initial objec-

tives. Moreover, we are reﬁning the method to gen-

erally determine the impact of single applications like

a wiki. This partly has been done before, see (Stocker

and Tochtermann, 2009) yet we are not aiming at cap-

turing single case studies but go for a broader ap-

proach allowing us to question more SME. Once this

is settled to work for wikis, the transfer to other ap-

plications has to be done and proofed. The work on

single application is primarily adapting the concept of

KMS Success of Jennex-Olfman to these applications

and provide them with a method of study. We de-

cided for a half standardized interview holding several

blocks of questions concerning the individual parts of

the KMS Success model. This interview is conducted

with several SME already applying a wiki collecting

their perceived use correlated to their business strat-

egy. In a second step this is to be used on further wiki

implementations. It should allow us to draw conclu-

sions on the business value to be expected by building

groups or clusters of SME showing similar behavior.

A justiﬁcation of the results to be retained from the

framework has to be accomplished. To achieve this

two general approaches are possible: ﬁrstly by repeat-

ing the initial empirical studies in different environ-

ments, e.g. different countries, since we are by now

working with SME from Germany only or even spe-

cial groups among SME. Secondly, there is the matter

of comparison, e.g. to compare enterprises with and

without recommended KMS. The evaluation of the

framework is of high importance for our research as

the already questioned SME indicated that they tend

to rely more on proofed work, as KM and KMS were

seen as a supporting technology and usually not part

of the main objective of the SME. Consequently, the

reliability of the results has to be secured to ensure the

framework to be accepted and to show that KM and

KMS can be a part of the SME’s success.

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