Preface for the Third Edition - Read

492 C. State of Practice
Groupware and KMS, were seen as organization-wide platforms for the quick and
easy exchange of knowledge whereas in industry organizations these platforms
remained reserved for a much smaller portion of the employees.
13.1.2 Structural organization
The design of the structural organization of KM efforts varies greatly in practice.
Indicators are the organizational positioning of the KM effort (level of reporting of
the head of KM), the organizational design of the KM initiative or of a separate
KM unit as well as the overall size of the effort in terms of the number of employees
and the budget allocated for KM 37 .
The design alternatives range from an informal initiative with no separate organizational
unit or project over a temporary installation of KM as a project to a
fixed, formal installation in the organizational hierarchy either as a service unit or
as a functional unit. Thus, an ordinal variable has been defined that describes a
range of design alternatives for the structural organization of the KM function
which ranges from a formal, lasting approach to an informal, temporary approach:
1. separate organizational unit (formal, lasting),
2. project (formal, temporary),
3. no separate organizational unit (informal).
In the case of “no separate organizational unit”, KM initiatives were performed
either by committees with a budget coming from each member of the committee
and senior management support, or by entirely informal initiatives not supported
by formal authorities.
Figure C-7 shows what kind of organizational design the organizations applied
for their KM initiatives.
as functional unit
as service unit
as project
no separate organizational unit
do not know
FIGURE C-7. Organizational design of the KM function 38
Almost three quarters of the organizations (70.4%) had established the KM
function either as a project (12 out of 26 organizations responding to this question,
46.2%) or informally with no separate organizational unit (7 organizations,
37. See section 15.1 - “Funding” on page 564.
38. n=26.