Knowledge Management Systems Defining Three Components of Knowledge Management Systems

The many disruptive innovations that are continually changing the nature of enterprise software are having a significant impact on each component of knowledge management systems. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the three components of knowledge management systems including communication, collaboration and storage/retrieval. The rapid evolution of these systems between the late 1990s and today further illustrates just how disruptive the innovations discussed in this analysis are from an information technologies (IT) perspective.

Analysis of Knowledge Management Systems Disruptive Innovations

During the late 1990s, the predominant IT infrastructure was client/server, knowledge management systems were often highly balkanized and isolated in terms of integration all of which made the difficult to use for strategic-level tasks (Edwards, Shaw, Collier, 2005). Often communication, collaboration and storage/retrieval tasks were batch-oriented, slow and would need significant IT reprogramming to just work together. The use of IT to streamline the communication component...

There was also a focus on making all knowledge as structured and easily indexed as possible, owing to the underlying highly static data structures at the time (Turban, Volonino, 2010). Collaboration components of these systems were also often designed for highly structured, easily defined workflows that left little in the way of variation in process workflows. It would take months to change a given communication workflow for example through the use of IT programming tools and techniques. Finally the storage/retrieval component of the knowledge management systems from that time period were exponentially slow than they are today, much more difficult-to-index and create quick updates with, and the most costly part of the system from a pricing and cost of ownership standpoint. All of these factors made knowledge management systems much more adept at managing structured queries and not nearly as agile and quickly modifiable as they are today (Edwards, Shaw, Collier, 2005).
Contrasting the late 1990s to today illustrates how disruptive the Internet, advances in analytics…