KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR ENTERPRISE

SYSTEMS : OBSERVATIONS FROM SMALL,

MEDIUM &LARGE

Submitted By :
Priyanka Pandey
Abhay Singh
Richa Sharma

12/07/2021 Management Information & Control Science

 Objective
2

The paper explores the alleged differences in the knowledge

management practices across small, medium and large
organizations that had implemented a market-leading ES.

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Observation from Small, Medium & Large organization
 Introduction
3

 Enterprise Systems (ES) have emerged as the most important and

challenging development in the corporate use of information
technology.

 Organizations have invested heavily in these large, integrated

application software suites expecting improvements in –
 Business processes

 Management of expenditure

 Customer Service

 Competitiveness

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Observation from Small, Medium & Large organization
 Introduction (Contd.)
4

 Initially some researcher and practitioners claim

that ES are best suited for large corporations
because :
 Substantial resource requirements in ES

implementation
 lifecycle wide management

 Recent changes - ES vendors to focus on Small and

Small & Medium organizations (commonly referred to as
SMEs)
Medium
Organization
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Observation from Small, Medium & Large organization
 Introduction (contd.)
5

 This research DOES NOT focus on the SMEs that have implemented a
scaled-down ES that is designed specifically for the SMEs

 What does this research paper include?

 Different types of issues faced by large & SMEs
and purportedly receive different benefits and
impacts from ES compared to their smaller
counterparts.
 The impact of organizational size in relation to
the antecedents of Information Systems success.
 Attempts to minimize this gap by focusing on a
lifecycle-wide knowledge management in small,
medium and large organizations

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organization 5
 Literature Review: Information System &
Organization Size
6

Tool for classification: Number of Employee

Small Organization
Country Number of Employee
Belgium 90
USA 100
Germany 250

Knowledge management for enterprise system: 6

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Observation from small, medium and large organization
 Literature Review: Information System &
Organization Size (contd.)
7

 European Union guidelines:

Organization Size Number of Employee
Small < 50
Medium 50 > but <= 500

 Context Of Enterprise System:

o Classification is unclear
o However, some vendor providing SME solutions to organization
below 200 employee

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Observation from small, medium and large organization
 Literature Review: Information System &
Organization Size (contd.)
8

 Whisler (1970) - Firm size was directly related to performance of

Information System .

 Cheney (1983) investigated various factors affecting small businesses

in using information systems and found that small business are
prone to:
o Software,

o Hardware

o Implementation problems in Information Systems.

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Observation from small, medium and large organization
 Literature Review: Information System &
Organization Size (contd.)
9

 DeLone (1981) studied the relationship between the size of

manufacturing firms and Information System usage

 He concluded that firm size is:

o Directly related to the age of the firm’s computer operations,

o Inversely related to the amount of external programming that are

being used,
o Directly related to the portion of revenues allocated to Electronic

Data Processing (EDP)

o Inversely related to the percentage of EDP costs that are used

for purchasing computer hardware.

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Observation from small, medium and large organization
 Some More Findings
10

Relation Remarks
Application Types 1. Small to mid-sized organizations place a greater
emphasis on accounting and inventory control
1. SMEs require assistance from external sources in IS
adoption and management.(Turnor)
IS acquisition in
medium and large 2. SMEs are better placed for developing, implementing &
organizations administering their own applications in-house, compared
to their larger counterparts.(Raymond)

Consultant Resource constraints faced by SMEs hinder their

engagement in IS & ability to maintain technology up to date.
organization size

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 Literature Review on Knowledge
Management
11

 It tells about the four phases in the process of knowledge

management

Applic-
1 Creation 2 Retention 3 Transfer 4
-ation

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 Phases of Knowledge Management
12

Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge

Creation Retention Transfer Application
• Developing • Involves • Providing • Making
new content storage of training employee
• Done by informatio • Small know of the
external n organization imp. of the
player who – informally interpretation
bring new • Large of the
knowledge organization database
on the – proper used for
software training future
decision
making

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organization
 How it can be used?
13

 Knowledge Creation- Knowledge of activities of suppliers and

subcontractors and who to contact when there is a problem.

 Knowledge Retention- Recording the valuable experience in electronic

form lets says storing the emails. Emphasis should be on converting the
tacit knowledge in to explicit knowledge.

 Knowledge Transfer- A formal training program should be conducted

only to let the people in the know of how interested or reluctant a
supplier is in serving the company. How has his record been in the past.

 Knowledge Application- Now while considering different suppliers,

the attitude of the suppliers and their past experience with the company
can be a great help while selecting or rejecting one.

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Observation from Small, Medium & Large organization
 The Study Context
14

 The study gathered data from 27 organizations running a market

leading Enterprise System for last one decade.
 It was a financial Management Software.
 All the 27 states belonged to the State Government in Australia.
 Broad Objectives of the Enterprise System were-
 Financial Management improvement activities.

 Best Resource Management.

 Consolidation of State Government financial information.

 Meet the business needs of agencies.

 Meet economies of scale.

 All organizations had same version of ES software.

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Observation from Small,Medium & Large organisation
 How effective was this ES?
15
The so
uniqu ftware crea
e
enviro homogeno ted a
As the members of the increa nment whi us
ch
organizations were comp sed the
a
reported as saying— data rability of t
he

So if the Software was this much a convenience, organizations would

have wanted to work with it for good.
Well, this was not the case. The organizations went for changing the
Enterprise Software.
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Observation from Small, Medium & Large organization
 Why was this SO SUCCESSFUL ER was a flop for
these organizations?
16

 In the words of top management in these organizations-

“ The software is just perfect for larger organizations but for smaller
organizations like us it is too complex and too expensive.”

 The Interpretation was that different ES systems are needed for

different sized organizations. Those ERs which are a hit in Large
organizations may be a fiasco in smaller organizations.

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Observation from Small,Medium & Large organisation
 Results And Analysis
17

 The analysis divides the 27 organization in to 3 parts on the basis of

user license:
Small (User license below 200)

Medium (User license between 200-999)

Large (User license above 1000)

 Analysis objective
 To assess that whether the organization size perceived value in the

4 KM phases.
 To analyze whether the respondents of the three organizational
sizes demonstrate differences in relation to the Knowledge
Management (KM) activities derived through the literature

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 Descriptive Statistics of KM process
18

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 Satisfaction Level of Employees
19

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 Results And Analysis(contd.)
20

 Through descriptive statistics, it is observed that managing knowledge

at the two main stages of the ES lifecycle
 Pre ES implementation stages
 Post ES implementation stages

 It could be somewhat different in the three organizational sizes.

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 Path Model
21

 The path model has been developed

and tested using Partial least Squares

 The three PLS models below

investigate the relationship between
KM at implementation post
implementation KM activities and
their relationship with the overall
goodness of the KM process

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 Results
22

 Results observe the strength of the paths between KM activities

during and post ES-implementation (independent variables) and
the overall goodness of the KM process (the dependent variable).

 It is evident that the r-square of the overall goodness of KM

process, decline with the declining organizational sizes, attributing
to the overall goodness of KM activities in large organizations.
 Observing the path coefficients of the during and post
implementation paths, it is clear that larger organizations tend to
explain the overall goodness using the KM activities post
implementation, compared to the small organizations where the
overall goodness is still relying on the knowledge creation that had
taken place.
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 Conclusion
23

 study results demonstrated that, even with similar knowledge

creation outcomes, small and medium sized organizations
demonstrated lower mean scores in relation to lifecycle wide
knowledge management activities
 It was also observed that respondents from small and medium
organizations reported lower levels of satisfaction towards the overall
goodness of the knowledge management in their organizations

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Observation from Small, Medium & Large organization
 Results
24

 Results observe the strength of the paths between KM activities during

and post ES-implementation (independent variables) and the overall
goodness of the KM process (the dependent variable).

 It is evident that the r-square of the overall goodness of KM process,

decline with the declining organizational sizes, attributing to the
overall goodness of KM activities in large organizations.

 Observing the path coefficients of the during and post implementation

paths, it is clear that larger organizations tend to explain the overall
goodness using the KM activities post implementation, compared to
the small organizations where the overall goodness is still relying on
the knowledge creation that had taken place.

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 Conclusion
25

 The study results demonstrated that, even with similar knowledge

creation outcomes, small and medium sized organizations
demonstrated lower mean scores in relation to lifecycle wide
knowledge management activities

 It was also observed that respondents from small and medium

organizations reported lower levels of satisfaction towards the overall
goodness of the knowledge management in their organizations

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 Conclusion(contd.)
26

 Path model developed, found that compared to large organizations,

small organizations still assess the goodness of knowledge
management process in light of the knowledge created at the time of
the implementation

 These findings highlight the capabilities (or lack of) of small

organizations to maintain a lifecycle wide ES knowledge management
strategy, even with the same levels of knowledge creation at the time
of the ES implementation

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organization
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Knowledge Management for Enterprise System: Observation from

12/07/2021
Small,Medium & Large organisation