Cloud-based Knowledge Management in Greek SME’s

Abstract: Nowadays, Cloud Technologies are commonly used for a lot of large organizations to aid knowledge sharing.  This brings some benefits to the organization by reducing the cost of the charges, improve security, enhance content accessibility, improve efficiency etc. On the other hand, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) tend to manage their information in more informal way by not using the specific language or terminology of KM. Moreover, Small and Medium enterprises do not trust the adoption of cloud-based techniques for managing information for many reasons that discussed later. This thesis tries to provide the benefits and drawbacks of cloud-based Knowledge Management techniques in Greek SMEs and also to find how knowledge processes are used in Greek SMEs according to cloud-based Knowledge Management techniques. Also, through this work I will come up with the benefits and drawbacks of applying cloud-based techniques for managing information-knowledge in SMEs. To accomplish this, I derived with a methodology that is based on qualitative approach. More specifically, I provide an exhaustive literature review and then I contacted with five SMEs in Greece to explore, using different techniques, if these SMEs can benefit from the cloud-based Knowledge Management techniques and how indent are for adopting cloud-based Knowledge Management techniques in their organization. I realized that three of the SMEs are using cloud-based techniques for Knowledge Management, where the two of them does not. To be more specific one of these two SMEs does not manage its knowledge at all. However, all of the five organizations showed a great interest to adopt cloud-based and information system technologies for Knowledge Management. At the end, this work comes up with the following important findings and insights, as well: Cloud-based Knowledge Management techniques can bring a lot of benefits in terms of cost savings and performance. However, this suits the right and efficiently use of cloud-based techniques. The lack of using efficiently cloud-based Knowledge Management techniques may lead to some drawbacks, such as reduction on the performance of the organization and reduction on the savings.   This thesis also discusses some points for future direction such as the analysis of a larger space of organizations, the investigation of quantitative analysis and also the combination of both (qualitative and quantitative).