Knowledge management practice and the selection of approaches: A Thailand study

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) has increased the importance to be an issue of interests to management of the organization. In Thailand, the rapid grow of KM application results in widely practice of KM in all sizes and types of organizations. However, some of them perceive KM as fad or fashion of management; some only adopt the application and give the label for KM without the understanding of its concept. In contrast, some organizations practice KM tools and those work well even without the KM label. The objectives of this paper could be classified as three issues. The first objective was to critically review the KM basis. The second objective was to discuss the opportunities to apply KM in Thai organization. The culture analysis was an attempt to determine Thai culture whether to support KM practice. This part also discussed the current KM application in Thai organizations. Thirdly, it was to highlight the importance of considering the KM objectives of each organizations, culture and people behavior. There is no complete package of KM that can suit for all type and size of organizations and technology is not the absolute solution for KM. The attempt of this paper was to enable the organization selecting the appropriate approaches for KM. In other words, KM needs to be customized to suit each organizational context. The paper proposed the application of house of quality (HoQ) as the support tool to design KM approaches.