We examine a knowledge management (KM) success model that incorporates the quality of available knowledge and KM systems built to share and reuse knowledge such as determinants of users' perception of usefulness and user satisfaction with an organization's KM practices. Perceived usefulness and user satisfaction, in turn, affect knowledge use, which in our model is a measure of how well knowledge sharing and reuse activities are internalized by an organization. Our model includes organizational support structure as a contributing factor to the success of KM system implementation. Data collected from 150 knowledge workers from a variety of organizations confirmed 10 of 13 hypothesized relationships. Notably, the organizational support factors of leadership commitment, supervisor and coworker support, as well as incentives, directly or indirectly supported shared knowledge quality and knowledge use. In line with the proposed model, the study lends support to the argument that, in addition to KM systems quality, firms must pay careful attention to championing and goal setting as well as designing adequate reward systems for the ultimate success of these efforts. This is one of the first studies that encompasses both the supply (knowledge contribution) and demand (knowledge reuse) sides of KM in the same model. It provides more than anecdotal evidence of factors that determine successful KM system implementations. Unlike earlier studies that only deal with knowledge-sharing incentives or quality of shared knowledge, we present and empirically validate an integrated model that includes knowledge sharing and knowledge quality and their links to the desired outcome--namely, knowledge reuse.
The Internet has become increasingly important to organizations for certain aspects of electronic commerce. Many organizations have set up Web pages to capture the attention of potential buyers and to develop new business relationships. Others have set up indexing services to provide easy search capabilities to prospective buyers. While the unit search and communication costs have been lowered dramatically by the Internet, the cost of evaluating potential suppliers may still be prohibitive, especially for certain types of products and services. Thus, although the Internet makes it possible to locate a large number of new suppliers, an organizational buyer needs to deploy appropriate supplier-selection strategies (such as sequential evaluation with stopping rules versus bidding systems) that consider all cost elements involved in choosing a vendor. We develop an analytical model that allows a buyer to maximize payoff (net of supplier search, communication, and evaluation costs) from the selection process. We analyze how the nature of the product and the buyer's expectations about supplier characteristics determine whether a sequential evaluation or bidding should be used in the selection process. The Internet, when used in conjunction with the proposed strategies, results in a lower total expected cost to the buyer, even though more suppliers are being evaluated, because a better supplier is selected. We describe how intelligent database searching can further increase the efficiency of the proposed selection strategies. We also develop a minimum requirements announcement mechanism, which makes supplier selection through a bidding strategy economically feasible in situations where legal restrictions may bar the use of sequential evaluation.