Implementing knowledge management in organisations: challenges

Hi there. My name is Eric Tsui. I'm from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I'm doing two talks, Part 1 and Part 2, and they're both on implementing knowledge management in organisations, lessons learned from many of the projects that we have implemented primarily in Hong Kong and in the southern part of China.

Part 1 of this talk will cover, obviously, background of the projects. I'll give you more information about the range of projects and the organisations and industries that are taking on these knowledge management projects. The primary focus of Part 1 is on the challenges that we have faced, different types of challenges, challenges in kick-starting KM projects and also challenges in implementing KM projects. Then, in Part 2, I'll continue to talk about the gap between textbook knowledge and practice knowledge, knowledge management already practiced in the field. It is important to point out the gaps between the theory and practice. I'm an academic, so I will finish off Part 2 with the tactics that I have implemented in order to reduce that theory and practice gap. I'll do a summary of the two talks at the end, as well.

Now, regarding the background of the projects.

At our university, it is a mandatory requirement that all students have to complete, before their undergraduate degrees are in completion, a final year project that actually goes for about 11 months full time. You can take advantage of the summer period as well, but at the very least it's about nine months. Many of these knowledge management projects are based on the final year projects which I and some of my colleagues have supervised, and they, together, constitute about 80% of the close to 200 projects that we have executed. The second type or second source of projects that we include in this talk are the consultancy projects that we have taken on in our center, and that's about 15% as well. These projects range anything between, I suppose, four months to 1.5 years. The third type of project is research projects Quite often, I would say, students will approach organisations and try to implement or test validate their models and techniques and theories in selected parts of various organisations. These projects also make up about 5%. All in all, close to 200 projects have been executed in a period of about eight to nine years, and we have gained a lot of lessons and observations from this project. As I said before, a large number of these projects are based in Hong Kong, Hong Kong-registered organisations, and also a considerable number are being executed in the southern part of Mainland China, and even in Southeast Asia as well. It's inappropriate and not enough time