The challenges of knowledge management portals application and implementation: An Iranian organizations case study

This article aims to review, identify and prioritize challenge factors of the implementation of knowledge management portals for Iranian organizations. The study determines several important weakness factors affecting the implications of the knowledge management such as the weakness in organizational strategy, information overcrowd, content management, portals project management, and etc. The study also indicates that the factors have different priorities where managerial factors are in the highest priority and financial factors are in the lowest priority. We also perform factor analysis to summarize seventeen factors into six issues: Financial and information security, Technology and management, Senior management support and strategy, Acceptance, User's motivation and culture, Project management, Change management and training. Knowledge management portal is a brand new concept for Iranian organizations and it is hard to gather information from limited number of organizations or companies for applied knowledge management portals. The results of this study could be useful for knowledge management planners and managers in organizations and clear the prospects to deal with the challenges.


Introduction:
During the past few years, knowledge management (KM) has become an important subject of study (Akhavan et al., 2006) among practitioners in the field of management, industrial engineering, and information technology.KM fundamentally gains insight into the topic of intellectual capital management (Jafari et al., 2009) to create a company with competitive advantage.Although KM requires information technology but it cannot be simply acquired through a complete software package.Successful implementation of KM needs long-term commitment from senior managers who are dedicated to train employees and managers (Bergeron, 2003).Nevertheless, Information technology (IT) tools play an important role in developing KM for many Iranian industries.Among various types of IT tools, portals are the most effective ways of sharing knowledge and information in organizations.They act as nervous systems for a company which could support the business processes and the flow of information (Kim, 2003).However, it is clear that every plan is not risk-free and there are challenges especially at the beginning stages of its development (Akhavan et al., 2006).In fact, any 1 Corresponding author Fax:+982177240482.Email: akhavan@iust.ac.ir (P.Akhavan) implementation of KM portal could fail if all risk factors are not carefully determined.The primary objective of this research is to identify potential challenges of the implementation of KM portals.We also study different challenging factors of the implementation of KM Iranian industries and determine the most important ones based on some statistical tests.

Knowledge management and its process
Knowledge Management is the strategic efforts of organizations (Jafari et al., 2007) to gain a competitive advantage and using intellectual assets and resources which exist in employees and clients (Encyclopedia of Management, 1999).Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) developed knowledge conversion model which helps to understand how the processes of transferring and creating knowledge are intimately connected.They believe the best way of knowledge creation in organizations is a simple process to amplify the creation of knowledge with individuals and adds its results to the knowledge network of the organization.In their model, the basis of knowledge creation in organizations is successive interaction (transfer) among individuals, and successive conversion from tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (and vice-versa) by individuals.The model recognizes four modes of knowledge conversion: Socialization; is the exchange of tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge through the intermediate shares of the experiences inside the organization.Externalization; is the process of articulating tacit knowledge and transforming it into explicit knowledge as models, concepts, analogies, stories and metaphors.Externalization is considered as a key phase in the knowledge creation and is induced by dialog, collective reflection, writing.Writing the knowledge is an example of the effort normally required by externalization projects.Combination; is the process of combining bodies of explicit knowledge in order to create new explicit knowledge which is the most common process in formal education systems.In many organizations, it is created by the conversion of explicit knowledge among members, as in formal reunions.Internalization; is the process of adding explicit knowledge to new tacit knowledge in the forms of sensations, memories and images through experimenting different methods, as through real life experience, simulation of limit situations through the usage of software.The knowledge conversion process has been represented by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995).Davenport et al. (1998) Considered basic components of knowledge management which include culture, process operation, policies and technology.There are normally two dimensions associated with any KM.The first dimension includes technologies and communication technologies and information, and the other one includes social systems and human resource of organizations.In fact, KM gets benefit from an interaction between communication and information technologies using social systems.The role of IT in KM is a vital aspect for any organization which intends to use the technologies for managing their knowledge.IT can provide knowledge from the mass of information stored in all parts of the organizations.In fact, conversion process of information and knowledge happens through IT which represents the external power of understanding, learning and gathering the necessary information.IT has made it easier to acquire, store, or disseminate knowledge than ever before and many organizations are employing IT to facilitate sharing and integration of knowledge.If properly used, IT can also accelerate knowledge-sharing capabilities in both time and space dimensions.Locality, timing, and relevancy factors determine the expediency and the strength of IT's role in KM initiatives.On the other hand, due to the difficulty of incorporating most of human behavior aspects in technology, IT cannot fully put into operation many of KM's humanistic features.Therefore, IT cannot be considered the magic bullet which makes a KM initiative a complete success.Hence, IT has to be part of a balanced and integrated set of components.Too much emphasis on technology without incorporating the other critical elements could easily result in a failure of a system.Furthermore, codifying knowledge with the power of the existing IT and without the support from socio-cultural inputs will result in decontextualization, i.e. ''knowledge dilution''.IT must be accompanied by social networks such as communities of practice and other human interventions to create the requisite synergistic effects.In summary, technology is a necessity tool for handling KM (Jafari and Akhavan, 2007).IT tools are used to capture, codify, store and distribute knowledge throughout the organization.IT tools such as Internet, Intranet, Extranet, Email, Electronic Data Management Systems (EDMS), Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems, Groupware, Wikis, Weblogs, and other shared networked and net-based technologies are used to leverage KM processes in the organization.IT provides to the members in an organization, the platform to communicate and to get access to the right information at the right time for the right purpose.Therefore, there must be a balance between knowledge management initiatives and engagement of IT tools and infrastructure in order to exploit the benefits of KM to the fullest.By focusing on IT as the most integral component of KM, may jeopardize the potential benefit from KM activities and may lead to failure in KM implementation.Vaccaro et al. (2009) identifies all the ICT tools which are useful in knowledge management and categorize them by their applications in knowledge management processes.Carvalho and Ferreira (2001) As we can observe from Table 2, Knowledge portals are important tools for the many knowledge transfer processes.In addition to IT development, portals can also include other IT tools such as Email, Electronic Data Management Systems (EDMS), Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems, Groupware, Wikis, Weblogs, and other shared networked and net-based technologies which are used to leverage KM processes through the organizations.

Knowledge management portals
In an effort to make departmental portals more strong and stable, they are enhanced with more capabilities such as departmental intranet and extranet internet sources.Nowadays, portals are known as the most effective ways for sharing information and knowledge in organizations.They act as nervous system for companies and support business processes and information flow (Kim 2003).Blackmore (1997) describes portals as an instrument to benefit from internet technologies in an organizational computerized environment.Portals are web based and they provide access to the information and applications through web pages.In other words, portals are web pages which do not provide any kind of services by themselves and they only guide the users simply to the sites and information they need.Firestone (2003) classifies portals in three sets, • "Business portals, • Corporate portals-collaborative portals tying together peers, collaborative portals tying together skills and information needs, • Enterprise information portals-decision processing portals, collaborative portals, and knowledge portals."Knowledge portals are tools to extract classified analysis for both unstructured and structured information and these portals clarify the relation among content, human, subjects and users activations.They can also provide variety of services such as chat room, email, research motors, customized news, RSS feedback, and external links (Jain 2009).Mphidi and Snyman (2004) study the portals and report different benefits such as compatibility, interaction, easy updated and low cost, user friendly interaction, focus, etc. Jennex (2007) studied different critical success factors in KM and reported that portals are an important component of a knowledge management system.Ackerman (1994) developed a system called "Answer Garden (AG)" which is a system designed to grow organizational memory in the context of help-desk situations.The AG was implemented on six organizations and the results indicated that only one organization could successfully use it mainly because the expectations of the capabilities of the system exceeded the actual capabilities.Ackerman and Mandel (1996) reported that a smaller task-based system was more effective on the sub-organization level because of its narrower expectations.Mandviwalla, et al. (1998) in their research described several strategy issues affecting the design process of a KM system (KMS).These issues include the focus of the KMS on the users, and the amount of knowledge to be captured and in what formats; who must filters what should be captured, and what reliance and/or limitations should be placed on the use of individual memories.Additional technical issues affecting KMS design process include knowledge storage/repository considerations, how information and knowledge should be organized so that it can be searched and linked to appropriate events and use, and processes for integrating the various repositories and for re-integrating information and knowledge extracted from specific events.Some management issues include how long the knowledge is useful for KMS, access locations as users rarely access the KMS from a single location, and the work activities and processes that utilize the KMS .Davenport, et al. (1998) studied in 24 companies and their 31 projects.Eighteen projects were determined to be successful, five were determined as failures, and eight were new started to be rated.They found eight factors as the important issues in the success of KM projects as follows,

Challenges of knowledge management portals
• Senior management support  Alavi and Leidner (1999) investigated executive participants in an executive development program with respect to what was needed for a successful KMS.They found organizational and cultural issues associated with user motivation to share to be the most significant.They also found it important to measure the benefits of the KMS and to have an integrated and integrative technology architecture which supports database, communication, and search and retrieval functions .Cross and Baird (2000) in their investigation reported that KM would not improve business performance simply by using technology to capture and share the lessons of experience.In their survey, they claimed that the creation of organizational memory could improve the business performance and indicated some of the most important parameters on the success of KM as follows, • Supporting personal relationships between experts and knowledge users • Providing incentives to motivate users to learn from experience and to use the KMS • Providing distributed databases to store knowledge and pointers to knowledge • Providing work processes for users to convert personal experience into organizational learning • Providing direction to what knowledge the organization needs to capture and learn from .Holsapple and Joshi (2000) investigated factors that influenced the management of knowledge in organizations through the use of a Delphi panel consisting of 31 recognized KM researchers and practitioners.They found leadership and top management commitment/support to be crucial.Resource influences such as having sufficient financial support, skill level of employees, and identified knowledge sources are also important .Koskinen (2001) investigated tacit knowledge as a promoter of success in technology firms by studying ten small technology firms.Key to the success of a KMS was the ability to identify, capture, and transfer critical tacit knowledge.A significant finding was that new members take a long time to learn critical tacit knowledge and a good KMS facilitates the transference of this tacit knowledge to new members.Jennex and Olfman (2000) studied three KM projects to identify design recommendations for building a successful KMS.These recommendations include : • Develop a good technical infrastructure by using a common network structure, adding KM skills to the technology support skill set, using high end PCs; integrated databases; and standardizing hardware and software across the organization • Incorporate the KMS into everyday processes and information system by automating knowledge capture • Have a wide enterprise knowledge structure • Have Senior Management support • Allocate maintenance resources for OMS • Train users on use and content of the OMS • Create and implement a KM Strategy/Process for identifying/maintaining the knowledge base • Expand system models/life cycles to include the KMS and assess system/process changes for impact on the KMS • Design security into the KMS • Build motivation and commitment by incorporating KMS usage into personnel evaluation processes; implementing KMS use/satisfaction metrics; and identifying organizational culture concerns that could inhibit KMS usage.Jennex and Olfman (2002) performed a longitudinal study of KM on one of these organizations and found that new members of an organization do not use the computerized KMS due to a lack of context for understanding the knowledge and the KMS.They found that these users needed pointers to knowledge more than codified knowledge.Jennex et al. (2003) investigated the requirements for having an organizational KM strategy to ensure that knowledge benefits gained from projects which are captured to use in the organization by surveying Year 2000 project leaders.They found that benefits from year 2000 projects were not being captured because the parent organizations did not have a KM strategy/process.Their conclusion was that KM in projects can exist and can assist projects in utilizing knowledge during the project.Malhotra and Galletta (2003) identified the critical importance of user commitment and motivation through a survey study of users about KMS being implemented in a health care organization.They found that using incentives did not guarantee a successful KMS.They created an instrument for measuring user commitment and motivation that is similar to Thompson et al. (1991) Perceived Benefit model but based on self-determination theory that uses the Perceived Locus of Causality.Barna (2003) studied six KM projects with various levels of success where three were successful, two failed, and one was an initial failure turned into a success and identified two groups of factors important to a successful KMS.The main managerial success factor is creating and promoting a culture of knowledge sharing within the organization by articulating a corporate KM vision, rewarding employees for knowledge sharing, creating communities of practice, and creating of a "best practices" repository.Other managerial success factors include obtaining senior management support, creating a learning organization, providing KMS training, and precisely defining KMS project objectives.Design/construction success factors include approaching the problem as an organizational problem and not a technical one, creating a standard knowledge submission process, methodologies and processes for the codification, documentation, and storage of knowledge, processes for capturing and converting individual tacit knowledge into organizational knowledge.Also create relevant and easily accessible knowledge-sharing databases and knowledge maps.In Brian Bergeron's (2003) opinion the most important challenges in effective use of knowledge management technology is the consistency and integrity.For example, decision support tools must be identified and clarified within the work process in order to improve the work process.A successful Knowledge Management System (KMS) should perform the functions of knowledge creation, storage/retrieval, transfer, and application very well.However, some other factors can affect KMS success as well.Yu, et al. (2004) explored the linkage of organizational culture to knowledge management success.They found that KM drivers such as a learning culture, knowledge sharing intention, KMS quality, rewards, and KM team activity significantly affected KM performance.These conclusions were reached through a survey of 66 Korean firms.Uden and Naaranoja (2007) identified organizational barriers to knowledge management portals as follows: • Senior management culture and support: Where is the return on investment?
• Identifying the knowledge base: Who really knows about this?
• Buy in from knowledge workers and employees: What's in it for me?
• Management and distribution of relevant and accurate content: Does this really work?
Okujava and Remus (2007) in their research determined six risk factors as the most important issues which could affect the success of KMS which are summarized in Table 3.

Risks Examples
General  Landqvist and Stenmark (2007) detected that the portal itself would be the most important challenge from an information management prospective and classified three set of challenges for portals.First, without actual users it is difficult for developers to correctly identify how knowledge is being utilized across the organization.Second, portals span the entire organization and must be based on the input from all stakeholders.Third, a portal changes the routines of the organization.To ensure the buy-in from as many users as possible, they need to be involved earlier in the development process.In Ulrich Remus (2007) view, portals critical success factors are classified in two groups which are organizational and Technological described as follows, Organizational: Top management support, Dedicated resources, Organizational culture, Team competencies and skills, Business process reengineering, Change management, User acceptance, Clear goals and objectives, Flexible project structure, Project management, Project monitoring and controlling, Strong communication inwards & outwards, User training and education Technological: Defining the portal architecture, Requirements analysis, Process and application integration, Prototyping, Portal design, Selection of the appropriate portal package, Portal strategy Portal engineering roadmap Hahn and Wang (2009) identified four group challenges of complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and equivocality on knowledge processes.A comprehensive survey of all existing issues affecting KM is summarized in Table 4.

Table4
The challenges of knowledge management portals

Research Methodology
In order to determine the most important affecting issues on the implementation of KM in Iranian industries, a questionnaire was designed and distributed among two hundred related experts and then statistically analyzed.The sample targets were chosen from experts of Corporate Portal companies which most of their customers were involved with problems of knowledge management portals.In this survey 15.5 percent of respondents had PhD degree, 48.3 percent had postgraduate master degree and 36.2 percent had a bachelor degree.In our survey, 25.9 percent were staff employee, 27.6 percent were junior manager and 46.6 percent were director status.From the gender point of view, 32.8 percent were female and 67.8 percent of people were male.We used Likert Scale ordering numbers from 1 to 5 where 1 was representative for the lowest rate of importance and 5 was the greatest rate of importance.To determine the reliability of questionnaires, Cronbach's alpha method was used which was equal to 79.21 percent.We have also used Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to examine whether the data are normally distributed.This test helped us understand which parametric or nonparametric tests must be performed.The results of the test showed that we should apply non-parametric tests methods.

Friedman test
The Friedman test in our survey is used to measure the priority index K of our KM affecting issues and the results have been summarized in Table 5.The third and forth columns of the As we can observe, the first item, weakness in knowledge sharing culture, rated as the highest factor and the last item, weaknesses in economic efficiency, has the lowest score in our survey.

Correlation
We have implemented the Spearman correlation coefficients test to verify the relationship among all parameters and the results have been shown in Table 7.The results show that gender and the acceptance factor are negatively correlated.This means that women select the acceptance factor as a challenging factor in this survey.In addition, gender and the complexity factor are also negatively correlated which means that women distinguish complexity factor as a challenging factor more than men do.
On the other hand, gender and portal infrastructure show the same result which means that women also choose portal infrastructure factor as a challenging factor.
From the age point of view, the results show that age is correlated with knowledge sharing culture and portal infrastructure factors.It shows that older people consider them as the more challenging ones.
The results showed that Content Management factor is highly correlated with education which means that people with higher educational level choose content management factor as a more challenging factor.Similar results were hold for cohesion, capital, complexity and portal infrastructure.
In addition, job title and the knowledge sharing culture factor are correlated which means that higher ranks people choose this factor as a challenging one.On the other hand, the results show negative correlation of this variable with information security, which means that higher ranks don't consider this factor as a challenging one.Nevertheless, the analysis show that less experienced employees believe that budgeting is a challenge factor, while they don't consider the knowledge sharing culture factor as a challenge.

Factor analysis
Factor analysis discovers the latent variables of the research though it can be applied for data reduction as well.
Table 8 shows the results for KMO and Bartlett tests as the preliminary phase of factor analysis.The results of these tests show that data are suitable for factor analysis.Table 9 shows that the variables can be interpreted within six main factors with the coverage of about 67 percent.The results then were rotated with Varimax method and Table 10 summarizes the results of categorized seventeen items into six classified items.

Discussion
As we can observe from Table 5, some of the factors such as organizational strategy weakness, lack of senior manager's commitment and support are located on top of the raking.These items are mostly management related items.On the other hand, there are other financial items such as weaknesses in economic efficiency are listed on the bottom of our ranking system.Therefore, we can conclude that management plays a key role on knowledge management for Iranian firms.The other observation from the ranking system is that the average scores for all seventeen items are higher than the average ranking for all items together.This means that all these items are relatively important challenging factors regardless of their ranking.The correlation test results given in Table 7 indicates that the weak acceptance of portal, high technical complexity of portals and weakness of portal technology infrastructure are considered as the most challenging factors in women's opinion.The results of the factor analysis have also shown that we could categorize all items into six groups: Financial and information security, Technology and management, Senior management support and strategy, Acceptance, User's motivation and culture, Project management, Change management and training.
In our survey, it seems that older people with more experience believe that weakness of portal technology infrastructure and weakness in knowledge sharing culture would be most challenging issues.However, people with more educational background seem to address other issues as challenging factors such as information overcrowd and content management weakness, lack of cohesion between portal and organization structure, high technical complexity of portals, and weakness of portal technology infrastructure.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have performed an empirical analysis to determine the most important challenging factors for the implementation of knowledge management for Iranian industries.The results of this survey have shown that seventeen factors play key role on the success of any knowledge management project.These factors have been categorized into six groups and they are ranked using factor analysis.The survey has also emphasized that people with more experience and higher authorities believe that weakness in knowledge sharing culture could be one of the most important challenging factors while financial issues are less challenging factors.We hope the results of this study could be used for other developing countries who intend to adopt knowledge management for their corporations.

. Types of knowledge management technologies
Infrastructure for capturing, searching, retrieving, and displaying knowledge • An understood enterprise knowledge structure • Clear goals for the KMS • Measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of the KMS Ginsberg and Kambil (1999) investigated different issues in designing and implementing of an efficient KMS by building a KMS based on various issues identified in the literature.They found knowledge storage, representation, retrieval, search, visualization, and quality control as the most important technical issues of KMS.
• Modeling processes to identify the knowledge needs and the sources • KMS strategy for the identification of knowledge to capture and use • Providing incentives and motivation to use the KMS • Table indicate the mean rank and mean score of each item, respectively.
Table 6 contains the main results of the test.As we can see, the Pearson Chi-square value with 16 degrees of freedom is zero and the significance test (P-Value) has zero value, which indicates that the zero assumption of the test is rejected.

Table 7
Correlation analysis result * Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

Table 9
Total Variance Explained Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

Table 11
Final test results from factor analysisWeakness in security and protection of information and knowledge, Financial and budget problems, Weakness of portal technology infrastructure, Weaknesses in economic efficiency.High technical complexity of portals, Lack of cohesion between portal and organization structure, Mass information and portal content, management Weaknesses.Lack of systems to measure the effectiveness of Knowledge portal, Lack of senior manager's commitment and support, Organizational strategy weakness.