The company, says Prusak, wasted tens of millions of dollars trying to build a system that would store the expert knowledge of its most valuable employees. Not surprisingly, KM has gained a dubious reputation among many business executives, industry analysts and even KM industry insiders. Well, the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. The key is how individual companies approach KM and many simply have the approach wrong. The big mistake is falling prey to vendors' claims that if you just buy the right search engine, portal or intranet, voil , you'll have knowledge management.
Technology is only a small part of what's overwhelmingly a cultural endeavor, experts say.
Before you even touch issues of technology, you need to figure out what types of knowledge your employees need to share and how to coax them into sharing. But this doesn't mean KM is a worthless concept. There are real business reasons like increased productivity, worker collaboration and shorter product development cycles to keep track of who knows what. As long as the process lives on, it's really a victory for KM's legitimacy. Although TQM isn't mentioned much these days, it has become incorporated into the way we think about business, he says.