Using Innovative Knowledge Management Tools for Information Technology Development, Acquisition, and Integration in the United States Army

The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether or not the Army is effectively and adequately employing innovative (IP-based) knowledge management (KM) tools to manage the knowledge of information technology (IT) development, acquisition, and integration. A world of unmanaged IT information is available to the military from various commercial and government sources that could improve its IT requirements analysis, efficiency of acquisition, and stewardship of taxpayer dollars in this age of rapidly changing technologies. This important issue is a leadership challenge for all officers to effectively and adequately employ KM to exploit synergies, gain efficiencies, and economies of scale that ultimately save taxpayer dollars and lives. This study is an investigation into the tacit and explicit knowledge of IT that the Army offers for IT development, acquisition, and integration. Case studies of the two current innovative Army KM systems and two potential non-DoD KM models were conducted. These KM systems are: the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS), the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), Amazon.com, and BaseOps.net. In addition to these four formal case, seven more Army and Department of Defense (DoD) IT acquisition and KM organizations are investigated for their role and responsibility in tax stewardship, requirements development, and acquisition efficiencies.