Knowledge management health status assessment: a South African government department case study

Abstract

The South African government faces a situation where a lot of information and knowledge relating to service delivery is continuously being accumulated. The challenge is that there is no systematic way of capturing, organizing, storing, sharing and using this knowledge to enhance innovation and service delivery in some of the government departments. To address this, there are a number of knowledge management (KM) initiatives across all government spheres, namely, national, provincial and local. One such initiative was a KM audit project by Sonjana Business Solutions in one of South African government departments. The department is currently experiencing serious challenges with respect to knowledge management issues. The KM audit was to establish a better picture of KM limitations. This research paper is a result of that KM audit project. The KM audit found that there were challenges and hurdles that would need to be overcome in order to develop an effective KM assimilation and permeation in the department. These hurdles are: Change management, Culture of knowledge sharing, Staff training, IT support, and Stakeholder management. From the KM audit results, recommendations on how to address the identified challenges were provided.