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Future Challenges for KM 427

ducted a study and found that NONE of the search engines individually indexed more
than 16 percent of the total indexable content of the web. Taken together, they index
about 42 percent of the available content. Search engines are only partially effective
at fi nding things; a great deal of the web remains hidden. This is not, however, simply
due to technological constraints as is popularly believed. The politics of information
seeking must be taken into account with organizational knowledge management
systems in order to ensure that the best possible (i.e., the most relevant, valid, and
up-to-date) content is found, retrieved, and made available to the organization ’ s
knowledge workers.

The Politics of Organizational Context and Culture

KM must address not only the information itself, but also the business practices and
processes that generate the information. This means that the politics of organizational
context and culture must also be taken into consideration. For example, at Dow
Chemical, managers believe there should be a common set of fi nancial processes
around the world to create common measures of fi nancial performance whereas at
IBM, they rely on more traditional measures such as customer satisfaction, time to
market, cost evaluation, and so on. The organizational context will thus affect KM
implementation, and the evaluation of how successful this implementation was.
Five models of information politics can be used to characterize the politics of the
organizational context and culture ( Klein 1999 ; Davenport, Eccles, and Prusak 1992 ).
They are:
• Technocratic utopianism
• Anarchy
• Feudalism
• Monarchy
• Federalism
In technocratic utopianism, a heavily technical approach is taken to information
and knowledge management, stressing categorization and the modeling of an
organization ’ s full information assets (often in the form of an exhaustive inventory).
There is heavy reliance on emerging technologies and content tends to be driven by
information systems.. The focus is in detailed corporate data rather than knowledge.
The underlying assumption is that technology will resolve all problems with the
consequence that little attention paid to content and its use. Data are perceived
as a corporate asset.