Everyone wants to do the strategy!!

Well why not! Who doesn't want to work on building a successful Knowledge Management strategy for their organization? The emphasis here is on the word 'successful'. No strategy can be called successful unless it gives the right results. In most of the organizations it is always easier to get senior management involvement in chalking out a strategy and creating plans and not on actually leading the implementation of these plans. When it finally comes to implementing this great strategy or plan, there is a dilution as far as involvement from the top management is concerned. Therefore one major reason that knowledge management hasn't been implemented properly in many organizations is because of lack of top management involvement in actual implementation of a KM strategy. KM strategy roll-out in an organization has to rolled out as any project with detail project plan. Many a times this roll out only happens for the technology part of the entire exercise and the change management and process part are conveniently avoided. Why does this happen? Is it because it is tough to justify the effort that would go in or that results beyond a point are not quantifiable in an KM initiative in an organization?

Knowledge Management in organizations - Expectation too high!

Well most of the organizations have some kind of knowledge management system in place. It extends from a simple portal based to system to very complex content management system with web 2.0 extensions. We also have industry accepted knowledge management awards like MAKE which provides us with a list of companies who they consider as KM Leaders. Many of these companies have been accepted as success stories as far as knowledge management is concerned. I have interacted with employees in these MAKE award winner organizations and have found that employees generally are not happy with knowledge management systems and processes in a organizations. Of course everyone does point out to some shinning jewels in their organizations but if asked to rate their experience with KM systems in their organizations on the whole; it really doesn't exactly rock them all the way. Almost every time I hear the answer 'KM in my organization is good but many a times I still don't find what I am looking'. That brings us to the question, are the expectations from employees on what knowledge management systems in an organization should do really too high or are Knowledge managers really not listening to their employees to the extent required? Is there an expectation mismatch? Or will a crystal ball do instead? Hmmm....