Article accepted for PICMET ’10

EducationPublished marts 19, 2010 at 21:44 No Comments

Dur­ing fall 2009 Hen­rik, Mads and I wrote an aca­d­e­mic paper as part of our course “Man­age­ment of Tech­nol­ogy”. I was impor­tant to us that we chose a topic that we all could relate to. We chose Knowl­edge Man­age­ment and Shar­ing in enter­prises. We tried to adapt it to cross-functional projects and processes, but we recog­nised imme­di­ately the lack of employed knowl­edge sys­tems in the enter­prises — the small ones espe­cially. We chose to dig into the area and we recog­nised a pat­tern of small and medium sized enter­prises post­pon­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tems.  We wrote the arti­cle, handed it in and we pre­sented it before­hand of our indi­vid­ual exams. After our exam we were graded indi­vid­u­ally, all with an A. It was even bet­ter when our pro­fes­sor sug­gested and encour­aged us to sub­mit it to a conference…after some smaller adjust­ments, we sub­mit­ted it!

The fol­low­ing abstract was accepted after a cou­ple of weeks of vot­ing (End of Jan­u­ary 2010):

Why early imple­men­ta­tion of a knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tem can sup­port the growth of R&D-driven SMEs

Michael Aagaard Nørkjær*; Hen­rik Scheel; Mads Ambro­sius Schjærff Sørensen. Uni­ver­sity of Aarhus, Insti­tute of Busi­ness and Tech­nol­ogy, Birk Cen­ter­park 15, 7400 Hern­ing, Denmark.

E-mail cor­re­spond­ing author Michael Aa. Nørkjær

Abstract: In order to secure future growth, any R&D and technology-driven com­pany has to man­age its inter­nal knowl­edge effec­tively. When com­pa­nies grow the need for a Knowl­edge Man­age­ment Sys­tem (KMS) increases. It is widely rec­og­nized that one of the major chal­lenges when imple­ment­ing a KMS is how to cre­ate a cul­ture that sup­port the use of the sys­tem. Most com­pa­nies strug­gle to make these cul­tural changes, which pro­longs the imple­men­ta­tion period, increases the costs and reduces the ben­e­fit of the sys­tem. This paper focuses on cul­tural devel­op­ment in Small and Medium-sized Enter­prises (SMEs) and exam­ines the inter­re­lat­ed­ness of the phases for orga­ni­za­tional growth and the tim­ing of imple­ment­ing a KMS.

The research was car­ried out with an abduc­tive approach using semi-structured inter­views to study three SMEs with the con­tem­po­rary KMS prob­lems as well as two large enter­prises with pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences on imple­men­ta­tion of KMSs.

Our find­ings indi­cate that SMEs focus on the costs of the KMS, and indeed over­look the nec­es­sary cul­tural changes. The orga­ni­za­tion of a SME is organic which eases the cre­ation of the new cul­ture and thereby reduces the costs of imple­ment­ing the KMS. It is there­fore rec­om­mended that com­pa­nies ini­ti­ate the imple­men­ta­tion of a KMS at an early stage instead of post­pon­ing the process till the need become urgent.

Key­words: SME; small and medium size enter­prises; KMS; knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tem; R&D; orga­ni­za­tional cul­ture; growth.

Final Review Results

A quiet Sun­day. Just before dinner.

The fol­low­ing three lines appeared on my iPhone; “Dear author, Con­grat­u­la­tions!  I am pleased to inform you that your paper has been accepted for pre­sen­ta­tion at PICMET ’10.  If you have co-authors whose…”

I was so glad, partly because our efforts made finally paid off but also because one of my biggets expe­ri­ences are about to hap­pen. In the next cou­ple of month we will search for fund­ing in order to cover the expenses for all of us. We do all believe that this is “once in a life time”, and there­fore we will all atend the conference.

If you are inter­ested in the arti­cle or the con­fer­ence, do not hes­i­tate to can­tact me.

Tags: article, Bangkok, business development, conference, engineer, forretningsudvikling, konference, PICMET, publicere