Am I being too critical?
A quick dissertation study update.? I’m in the midst of refining the last two chapters, reviewing everything and in general, just seeing if anything new jumps out to me about the results.? The one thing I still can’t get over is how absurdly long the list of CSFs for KM has grown.
My literature review was fairly extensive and the list of CSFs for KM that I proposed had 46 different factors which were, in other studies on CSFs for KM, determined to be critical for the success of KM.? My gut told me, “46?? Really?? They’re all critical?”? So, my thought was that by including them all in my study, the ones that truly were critical would float to the top and there would be a clear mark of demarcation between the critical factors and the nice to have factors.? While this did happen to some extent, it wasn’t quite as clear as I had hoped.
On top of this all, I also asked participants to identify any critical factors that were not identified in the study.? In addition to the 46 already identified from the literature, participants suggested an additional 83 factors which they also felt were critical, for a total of 129 CSFs for KM.? Obviously, I think we need to work on clearly defining not just the factors themselves, but what we mean when we say something is critical.? If all 129 factors are critical, then really none of them are.
This may just be an issue with survey research since so much of the context around each of the factors gets lost.? And as has been discussed on the ActKM forum recently, I’m sure that more than a few folks out there may have wanted to respond “it depends” to a lot of the factors presented.? The good news is that this study clearly paves a path for a follow up qualitative study on CSFs for KM - which brings me to some of the original questions I had about the interrelatedness of CSFs for KM.? Also good news (I suppose) is that I’ll have plenty to write about in the limitations section of my study. Hooray!