Knowledge management adoption and assessment for SMEs by a novel MCDM approach

This paper aims to clarify the misunderstanding of high expenditure on knowledge management systems adoption, and provides a novel approach for the most emergent knowledge management components to catch up to the pace of their rivals for the late adopters of knowledge management systems. This paper adopts MCDM (Multiple Criteria Decision Making) approaches to solve this KM adoption problem, and ranks the gaps of the KM aspects in control items to achieve the aspired level of performance. The findings demonstrate that the knowledge management gaps within the service industry are higher than the gaps within the IC (Integrated Circuit) and banking industries. After normalization and computation, the knowledge management gap of the service industry is 0.4399(1), the knowledge management gap of the IC (Integrated Circuit) industry is 0.3651(2), and the knowledge management gap of the banking industry is 0.2820(3). The findings also show that the criteria for weighting in different industry sectors are quite different; and the adoption strategies for different industry sectors should be considered separately according to the SME industry sectors. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V.