KM and People Behaviour - 2

The interpretations of literature on Knowledge Management Systems' indicates that most KMS:
- are based upon some combination of information enabled communication, coordination, and collaboration capabilities;
- provide the critical link between the information and technology resource inputs and organisational performance;
- are critically dependent upon active participation and involvement of knowledge workers to transform the above inputs into organisational performance.

Despite the availability of the best technology or access to the info-rich repositories, KMers motivation and commitment often determine the success or failure of KMS.

Motivation and commitment of KMers are being increasingly realised as critical success factors for implementation of enterprise knowledge management systems. KMers motivation and commitment play a critical role in enabling sharing of tacit and explicit knowledge.

It has been observed that unsuccessful KM projects had 'struggled to get organisation members to contribute to repositories' and 'the motivation to create, share, and use knowledge is an intangible critical success factor for virtually all KM projects.

It has been observed that while senior management drive development of KMS, they often fail to motivate the rest of the organisation to adopt these systems, but when implementation is driven from top acceptance is more. Some workers wish to please their managers; some conform to demands imposed by there key result area; and some conform to peer pressures.

There is a need for better understanding of how to account for motivation, commitment, meaning, and sense making in comparing human performance to machine performance.