| dc.description.abstract | Organizations have evolved over time, starting from the data processing era (the 1970's). In this
era, organizations concentrated on the capturing and storage of data, and data processing and
storage was given great prominence. This was followed by the information age (the 1980s), in
which many organizations concentrated on how to transform their data into useful information and
consequently use it to make more informed decision-making activities. We now live in the
Knowledge age. Today, most organizations' operations are centred on the knowledge held within.
All information is processed and reprocessed in an attempt to identify new patterns, hidden
meanings and even to extrapolate that information to predict future trends. This is indeed the
creation and development of new organizational knowledge
Knowledge Management (KM) became very popular in the 1990's, with many organizational
executives touting the idea as great but unfortunately, it quickly ran out of favour, and was
relegated to a very secondary in many organizations. One of the hypotheses that has been put
forward to explain this was that many organizations took to fixing the famous millennium "bug" as
the year 2000 approached. After several years of relative dormancy, interest in KM is gradually
growing again with many organizations look to embracing it.
KM is a fairly old field but most organizations know very little of it, and again, very little or nothing
has been done to capitalize and use it in business. It has become increasingly important for
organizations to define ways through which they manage their intellectual and knowledge assets
and make use of these to grow their market shares in all industries. Whilst many such organizations
have different ways and procedures that govern their business processes, very limited formal
approaches have been taken up and pursued in terms of how those intellectual and knowledge
assets can be created, maintained and utilized.
Many of the United Nations bodies have over the years taken to KM in a bid to streamline their
worldwide operations. By having fully-fledged Knowledge Management systems, the different UN
bodies envisage bringing about uniformity and efficient execution of their operations in many
different parts of the world in which critical operations like procurement of goods and services,
emergency evacuations in case of sudden human and environmental disasters. For instance, the
United Nations Development Program is using different approaches to building organizational
knowledge e.g. story-telling whereby personnel are encGffiaged to document and tell stories of how
they go about solving different problems in their da;to-day activities. These stories are then
codified and captured into their systems as a new knowledqe, The United Nations Development
Program has also published a document under its UNDP-GEF initiative. The material, published as
Knowledge Management in Support of the Global Environment: UNDP-GEF Initiatives (2004)
aims of these materials is to extract lessons from past and on-going projects that can be applied,
and to replicate successes. In practice, this is realized in four ways, through:
• The development of information systems;
• The analysis and codification of lessons learned;
• The dissemination of materials;
• The use and application of knowledge generated.
Using and applying lessons is particularly important to ensure that materials provide practical
information and are improved or updated regularly. UNDP-GEF collaborates closely with other
members of l..J.!'JDP'sEnergy and Environment Practice Group, as well as experts from other UNDP
development practices, in carrying out activities related to the generation of knowledge materials.
UNDP-GEF also participates in various knowledge management activities as part of the GEF
partnership. Each organization puts emphasis upon different areas depending on a number of
factors it deems important. The research framework presented and discussed in this report aims at exploring what different
organizations have in place i.e. Information Systems, documented procedures and processes,
organizational cultures, Human Resource policies etc as a means of measuring how prepared the
organizations are towards embracing Knowledge Management and use it in their favour. The
objective is to establish an index dubbed the Knowledge Management Readiness Score.
The research framework used is hybrid, developed from other frameworks that were studied,
analyzed and contextualized for a developing country. The frameworks studied include the Chen &
Chen framework, the 8C's framework, and the Baldrige Award Framework.
Preliminary testing of the developed framework was done and using it a Knowledge Management
Readiness Score was developed. This Knowledge Management Readiness Score was
operationalised through the use of data tools. It yielded some results, which were both mixed and
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