The typical view amongst many culture change consultants is that culture is about people and therefore all change strategies must focus entirely on human structures. A business issue. Behaviours, communications and processes; not technology. The vertical split in function and skills dividing business and technology in most commercial and consulting environments, compounds this division and embeds it into our ways of thinking.
The reason I make this point is that we live in a time where technology and human behaviour are so closely inter-twined, even for those who consider themselves technophobes, that ignoring one or the other just increases the difficulties in changing culture.
Technology by its nature is an enabler, facilitating our ability to do virtually everything, all the way from computing and working to socialising and entertainment. A great example of technology driving culture is the way social utilities like Facebook have single-handedly raised the web literacy of a whole generation.
If leveraged sensibly then, technology can greatly facilitate and speed up culture change around knowledge management by providing a directional platform that removes the barriers to sharing and evolving knowledge, driving new behaviours and ways of thinking that over time become embedded into organisational norms i.e. culture.
The key here is to think of change as a journey, rather than a big bang - if you want it to be painless anyway! People need time to learn and adapt so my suggestion is to approach the development of knowledge sharing in terms of maturity, where technology supported by a change programme evolves the immature information capture state towards more complex social interaction around knowledge and innovation at the end of the journey.
The following is a Knowledge Management Maturity Model I've sketched out to illustrate what I mean:
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