Know-CoM 207Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenare the number of stations, die dimensions, bandwidth, band pitch, number of columns,
type of sliding, number of pieces per year, and number of pieces per stroke.
However, there are a number of challenges for the implementation of the solution
since there are possibly significant barriers in DMCs that prevent the effective use of the
KM solution. In the following, some of these barriers are outlined.
SMEs are characterized by the scarcity of resources. Particularly, limited human
resources make it hard for SMEs to assign employees who are dedicated to the KM
implementation or perform tasks that are related to the KM initiative (Wong & Aspinwall,
2004, p. 56).
The protection of intellectual capital is an important issue for SMEs since the
unintended loss of knowledge to partners can erode competitive advantages of the
company. In particular, compared to larger organizations, SMEs that are less diversified
and more dependent on the knowledge of key employees fear losing competencies or
employees to cooperation partners. These fears create significant barriers concerning
interorganizational collaboration and knowledge exchange and it remains unclear if a
secure environment for knowledge sharing is sufficient.
Compared to larger organizations the processes and procedures of SMEs are less
formalized and standardized, which increase the probability that employees resist the
introduction of the KM solution (Wong & Aspinwall, 2004, p. 52) or resist to perform
tasks associated with it.
Capturing and applying experiences can also be prevented by individual barriers
such as lack of skills to explicate knowledge or low reliability of the knowledge providers
as well as by limited absorptive, processing, or learning capacities of the knowledge
seekers. Furthermore, on the organizational level, factors like lack of management
support or lack of time can prevent the success of the solution as well as interorganizational
factors such as groupthink or an exaggerated unified organization culture that particu-
larly affect the external relationships. Individual, organizational, as well as
interorganizational barriers can affect the implementation and the use of the solution as
well as knowledge sharing across organizational boundaries negatively (Maier, 2004, p.
130).
Finally, building and management of trust will be a crucial factor that influences the
use of the protected knowledge spaces significantly. Due to the shared context sup-
ported by the knowledge structure, the cooperative shared-knowledge server and the
joint KM principles underlying the solution, a community of Know-CoM users might be
fostered that ensures trust.
Epilogue
It seems that centralized KMS offered on the market increasingly live up to the
expectations of large organizations ready to apply ICT to support a KM initiative. These
solutions are too complex, time-, and resource-consuming for SMEs. Peer-to-peer KMS
promise to resolve some of the shortcomings of centralized KMS, especially concerning
the time-consuming effort to build and maintain a central knowledge repository. How-
ever, major challenges still lie ahead until decentralized systems can truly be called KMS
and used to support the still-growing share of users involved in knowledge work.
Examples for technical challenges that have to be overcome in decentralized KM concern
connectivity, security, privacy, fault tolerance, availability, scalability, and