Abstract

In recent years the discipline of Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged as a supposedly useful approach to leveraging organisational assets in order to obtain a variety of business benefits. However, this is easier said than done. For KM to be effective organisations must reflect on three key issues - infrastructure, culture and technology. While some may chose to emphasise the socio-cultural issues over the technology issues, more recent research (Gallagher & Hazlett, 2000) has pursued a path of normalization in relation to these three key aspects. Regardless of where KM has originated from it is clear that Information Systems (IS) and associated Information Technology (IT) can and will play an important role, if only as an enabler. This paper concentrates on the difficulties associated with implementing and evaluating KM in practice. It explicitly advocates the use of IS/IT and associated models as a response to the problems faced. The results of an exploratory interview study indicate that (a) many firms are relying heavily on IS/IT to support their KM strategies and (b) IS techniques offer a useful response to some of the problems encountered.

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