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152 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

widely available. Indeed, ‘Knowledge Management’ is frequently reduced to
the implementation of ICTs for knowledge transfer (Jennex and Olfman, 2003;
Scarbrough and Swan, 2001). Thus, surveys of firms introducing what they
describe as ‘Knowledge Management initiatives’ show that these are dominated
by ICT implementations. For example, Ruggles (1998) reports on a survey
of 431 organizations and describes what firms are actually doing to ‘manage
knowledge’. The four initiatives that were the most popular were all related to
ICT developments – creating an intranet, data warehousing, decision-support
tools and groupware. Similar findings were reported by Alavi and Leidner (1999).
A more recent survey in Australia (Xu and Quaddus, 2005) found that nearly
70 per cent of the 1500 participants indicated that they had some type of KMS.
The range of what is defined as KMS has been expanded over time, but the same
technologies still dominate. Thus, Xu and Quaddus identified the following as
examples of KMS (with the % in brackets indicating their popularity):

E-mail (92%) Video conferencing Electronic bulletin Best practice Extranet (17%)
(43%) boards (29%) database (22%)
Internet (90%) Online discussion Electronic meeting Corporate yellow Issue management
systems (40%) systems (26%) pages (22%) systems (16%)
Databases Workfl ow systems Learning tools Online analytical Knowledge
(86%) (39%) (25%) processing directories (15%)
systems (21%)
Intranet (80%) Data warehousing/ People information Knowledge Expert systems
mining (37%) archive (23%) repositories (8%)
(21%)
Document Search and retrieval Decision support Knowledge Artifi cial
management tools (36%) systems (23%) portals (19%) intelligence (5%)
systems (60%)
Customer Executive information Groupware (22%) Lessons-learnt
management systems (34%) databases (18%)
systems (48%)

Alavi and Tiwana (2003) categorize these different KMS in terms of the
knowledge processes that they aim to enhance (knowledge creation, storage,
transfer and application), as depicted below:

Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge
process creation storage transfer application
KMS – E-learning – Knowledge – Communication – Expert systems
systems repositories (data- support systems – Decision
– Collaboration warehousing and (e-mail) support systems
support data-mining) – Enterprise
systems information portals
(intranets/internets)

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