Knowledge Management System: Some Methodological Remarks

The design of a Knowledge Management System (KMS) must take into account the congruence between the human and the technological dimensions. We propose a methodology to diagnose the failures of the organizational design of a KMS due to the absence of an equilibrium between these different dimensions. We argue that the disequilibrium comes from the existence of weak Relations linking the agents of an organization. The Organizational Relation can be described through the following four attributes, which constitute the dimensions of the Organizational Relation: Organizational Goals (OG), Cultural Background (CB) of the agents, Organizational Rules (OR), Tools (T) (technological and organizational). For this reason we investigate the minimal set of conditions necessary for the existence of strong organizational relations, that is for the existence of a Knowledge Organization. A high performance of a KMS resulted when the design of human organizational relations is congruent with the design of the ICT System. The proposed methodology has been applied to two real cases (two research centers) for an organizational diagnosis.