Success or failure in knowledge management systems: a universal issue

This paper takes a sociotechnical viewpoint of knowledge management system (KMS) implementation in organizations considering issues such as stakeholder disenfranchisement, lack of communication, and the low involvement of key personnel in system design asking whether KMS designers could learn from applying sociotechnical principles to their systems. The paper discusses design elements drawn from the sociotechnical principles essential for the success of IS and makes recommendations to increase the success of KMS in organizations. It also provides guidelines derived from Clegg’s Principles (2000) for KMS designers to enhance their designs. Our data comes from the application of a plurality of analysis methods on a large comprehensive global survey conducted from 2007 to 2011 of 1034 participants from 76 countries. The survey covers a variety of organizations of all types and sizes from a comprehensive selection of economic sectors and industries. Our results showed that users were not satisfied with the information and knowledge systems that they were being offered. In addition to multiple technology and usability issues, there were human and organisational barriers that prevented the systems from being used to their full potential. We recommend that users of KMS are integrated into the design team so that these usability and other barriers can be addressed during the feasibility stage as well as the actual design and implementation phases

MIX STAR-AUTONOMOUS QUANTALES AND THE CONTINUOUS WEAK ORDER

International audienceThe set of permutations on a finite set can be given a lattice structure (known as the weak Bruhat order). The lattice structure is generalized to the set of words on a fixed alphabet Σ = { x, y, z,. .. }, where each letter has a fixed number of occurrences (these lattices are known as multinomial lattices and, in dimension 2, as lattices of lattice paths). By interpreting the letters x, y, z,. .. as axes, these words can be interpreted as discrete increasing paths on a grid of a d-dimensional cube, where d = card(Σ). We show in this paper how to extend this order to images of continuous monotone paths from the unit interval to a d-dimensional cube. The key tool used to realize this construction is the quantale L ∨ (I) of join-continuous functions from the unit interval to itself; the construction relies on a few algebraic properties of this quantale: it is-autonomous and it satisfies the mix rule. We begin developing a structural theory of these lattices by characterizing join-irreducible elements, and by proving these lattices are generated from their join-irreducible elements under infinite joins