Knowledge management systems: communication, collaboration, and storage retrieval components

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 of knowledge management systems then was also disjointed and only captured tacit, not implicit, knowledge. 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 and constraint-based engines have been, and the ability to capture and use tacit knowledge have all been on these three components of knowledge management systems (Edwards, Shaw, Collier, 2005). Beginning with communications functionality and modules in knowledge management systems, this has become more of a Web Service today, uniting the many diverse areas of a knowledge management systems in the process (Edwards, Shaw, Collier, 2005). Communications is now the backbone of many knowledge management systems as a result. Next, collaboration is now more comparable to Facebook or Twitter in user interface and interaction than the green-screen, command-line driven interfaces of chat sessions from the 1990s. Social networks have been a strong disruptive influence on the design and operation of collaborative knowledge management systems and will continue to accelerate their use within companies. The development of greater agility at the collaboration level of knowledge management systems is driving up their adoption rates globally today (Edwards, Shaw, Collier, 2005). Collaboration is also now proven to be a critical catalyst of corporate-wide productivity and performance as well (Turban, Volonino, 2010). The final knowledge management component included in this analysis, storage and retrieval, continues to go through a metamorphosis driven the very rapid cost reductions in the core technologies in this area from a hardware standpoint, in addition to the rapid advances in system programming and virtualization (Turban, Volonino, 2010). Where storage and retrieval at once point was the bottleneck of system performance, today through virtualization technologies pioneered by VMWare, Microsoft sand others, it has become the foundation for cloud computing platforms going forward. In this transformation of storage and retrieval systems in knowledge management platforms, capacities have also exponentially grown in addition to the depth of analysis these systems can manage.