Preface for the Third Edition - Read

552 C. State of Practice
sponding KM projects still have to overcome basic technical and organizational
difficulties before the systems can be used easily.
One knowledge manager of a big German industry organization said that the
technical infrastructure (the LANs and the Internet connections) simply could not
cope with the high loads resulting from a heavy use of their networks for the transfer
of documents and multimedia elements. The network capacity in some regions
of the world has been too low to transport multimedia data on top of the enterpriseresource
planning data and computer-aided design data that is already exchanged
on a large scale. Thus, this organization does not propagate the heavy use of KMS
functions yet. For example in the case of interactive functions, the participants
must not use desktop videoconferencing tools and Web-based training files yet.
Knowledge acquisition, publication and organization. Most organizations used
functions for publication, indexing and linking of knowledge elements and for the
manual import of external knowledge elements. The function publication of not
pre-structured contents was less frequently used than the publication of pre-structured
contents although not significantly (difference between means: 0.42, t-value:
1.479, significance: 0.153, n=24). Both questions required that participants could
publish knowledge elements autonomously. This explains why the values were
lower than those of indexing, linking and the manual import of external knowledge
elements. These results differ from the findings of the Fraunhofer Stuttgart study.
Respondents of that study stated to use non-standardized documentation substantially
more frequently than standardized documentation for the systematic identification
and preparation of expert knowledge (Bullinger et al. 1997, 36). One might
assume that the longer an organization uses an Intranet, Groupware or KMS solution,
the more it standardizes or structures its contents as organization and structuring
might ease the interpretation of the knowledge presented.
With the exception of automatic indexing of full texts which was used by quite a
lot of organizations, functions automatizing the import of external knowledge elements
or the classification/linking of knowledge elements as well as functions
automatically analyzing knowledge elements (statistical data analysis, semantic
analysis of knowledge elements) were used a lot less frequently. This result is consistent
with a share of only 26% of respondents surveyed in the Delphi study who
felt that “smart” tools which aid decision-making were a valuable feature of KMS
(Delphi 1997, 15).
Computer-based training. 84.2% of the organizations had computer based training
software in place which was used strongly (= always or often) by only about a
quarter of the organizations (26.3%).
Administration. Exactly half of the organizations had functions for the generation
of reports concerning knowledge elements (e.g., the number of accesses to a
knowledge element). 14.8% of the organizations frequently used reports (always or
often) about knowledge elements.