Knowledge management is not a solution in itself, but rather it complements and enhances other organisational initiatives in total quality management and business process re-engineering, in order to make better use of the know how and expertise available within the company.
Its main purpose is a two fold process it focuses to manage the knowledge assets of the organisation. Also to manage the procesess for creating, organising, transferring and sharing knowledge throughout the organisation.
The main principles that should be acknowledged when establishing knowledge management pratices are:
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Knowledge must be valued: seeing knowledge as intellectual capital and recognising its worth
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Exploiting intellectual property: organisations which have a strong research and development base (such as Angostura Ltd.) must look for new and inconventional ways of using their existing knowledge base.
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Caputuring project-based learning: ensuring that knowledge gained from working on one project is capatured and made available for others to use.
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Managing knowledge workers: recognising the needs of knowledge workers and identifying new ways of managing to release creativity and positive outcomes
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Knowledge must be explicit to be useful: All knowledge is tacit. Once we make our individual knowledge explicit, it becomes information. Knowledge can only be shared, stored and distributed in the explicit form.
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Knowledge has value only when it is used: If you learn something but never deliver there is no knowledge exchanged. Knowledge that stagnates declines in relevance and worth. To retain its value knowledge must be 'in circulation.' It needs to be continually negotiated to assess its utility. Most of the value is reached when knowledge is transformed, e.g. moves from tacit to explicit or is changed from analog to digital representations.
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Knowledge Protection: Since knowledge is a valuable resource that makes an organization competitive, it must be protected. To preserve the value of any asset, one needs to conduct routine maintenance activities. Protection and destruction practices safeguard organizational knowledge. Knowledge with strategic importance must be protected from planned and unplanned depletion. Planned depletion includes the loss of knowledge from personnel down-sizing, mergers and acquisitions, and voluntary movement of personnel.
In such cases, an organization must have mechanisms to capture and retain knowledge. One common method is the use of exit interviews that capture individuals' job-performance knowledge before they leave an organization. Another popular defense mechanism is debriefings after missions. Debriefings capture tacit insights gained and make them available to the rest of the organization.
Question # 2
How does organisation culture affect knowledge management?
Organisational Culture can be defined as the collection of traditions, values, policies, beliefs and attutudes that constitute a pervasive context for everything we do and think in an organisation.
The success of implementing an effective knowledge management system would depend on the culture of the organisation and its priority in sharing and learning knowledge. Many of the ideas and concepts now being used in the new term “knowledge management” have their roots in the learning organisation.
The culture in this organisation sounds ideal, it’s the type of company in which we might all like to work for. The picture that is painted of this type of organisation is one that is ultimately highly flexible and open-minded. It is able to continually transform itself and learn from experience and thus always be ready to take advantage of changing external conditions.
In order to promote knowledge management systems an organisation must be able to promote a climate that is conducive to learning. Knowledge of the organisational culture is a critical factor in understanding the extent to which learning is valued.
The ultimate success of knowledge management depends on a supportive culture. If knowledge management is to be an integrated aspect of how work gets done in an enterprise, it must become an integrated aspect of the culture. Culture, which is mainly shaped by people, is a basic building block to knowledge management and is a powerful force. It must be considered when introducing a knowledge management programme because it affects how the enterprise accepts and fosters that programme.
Usually new programmes are overlaid onto the culture, that is, typically introduced and added onto the existing culture, instead of being integrated into it. In other words, the culture is neither examined nor altered as to its 'fit'. The beliefs, values, systems, policies and management styles in place within the culture will work against the knowledge management overlay.
If the culture does not support knowledge management, obstacles continue to appear and eventually derail its success. Employees within the enterprise may continue to attend knowledge management and sharing workshops, only to return to a non-supportive culture. Because of the lack of results, the enterprise rationalizes that 'knowledge management does not work.’
Today, however, enterprises have realized the need to manage knowledge and information as a critical way of accomplishing sustained business advantage. Enterprises are restructuring and continually implementing programmes that will ensure business success. However, the mistake they make is that the changes are just being overlaid onto the culture. Introducing a formalized knowledge management programme within an enterprise, like any other adjustment, requires a culture that supports and nurtures the programme
If enterprises are to be successful in managing their knowledge, there needs to be consistency in support and a reduction of obstacles. This does not imply that the knowledge culture will be the same in all enterprises embarking on knowledge management. There should be an assessment of the existing culture and a need for an enlightened and conscious decision to make the necessary changes to the culture for the knowledge management programme to succeed. People and culture can be viewed as primary enablers to the success of knowledge management. The two are very closely related since people are a critical element in the organizational culture, as culture is about the values, beliefs, norms and behaviours that people have in the enterprise. People play a very crucial role in creating the right culture for knowledge management. They have the knowledge in their heads and should be encouraged to share their knowledge with others by making their knowledge explicit.
Effective knowledge management requires creating a supportive, collaborative culture and eliminating traditional rivalries. An enterprise cannot succeed in the attempt to formalize knowledge management unless it attaches the critical missing link, corporate culture, to the change effort. Therefore, enterprise leaders should not ignore corporate culture. Rather, it should be addressed in the enterprise's mission, vision and goal statements as well as emphasized in enterprise-sponsored training and enterprise communication in order to ensure successful implementation of knowledge management.
Question #3
What are the uses of knowledge management?
An effective knowledge management system may incorporate a variety of technologies, supported by leadership that values learning, an organisational structure that supports communication and information sharing, and processes for managing change. Specific technologies that facilitate knowledge management are data warehousing, data mining, Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), intranets and internet. They all combine related pieces of information to create knowledge.
Data Warehousing and Data Mining: Company’s then would have stored and gathered what data they could, but these data were typically stored in separate systems that were unable to share data and easily produce meaningful reports of useful information. The modern meaning of data warehousing is the use of a huge database that combines all of a company’s data and allows business users to access the data directly, create reports, and obtain answers to what-if questions.
An organisation with a data warehouse may offer managers access to billions or trillion of bytes of data. However, data mining helps filter information that is relevantly pertaining to one’s search. Data mining tools use sophisticated decision-making processes to search raw data for patterns and relationship that might be significant. For example, Human Resource Managers can identify with the help of an HRIS an identifiable headcount of high performing staff. An HRIS is a knowledge management system that plays a vital role in managing organisational effectiveness. Some HRIS’s manage compensation and incentive schemes, such as annual bonuses and merit increases. Many of these incentives, however, do not account for whether an employee has contributed ideas or insights; they measure how well employees perform their jobs rather than how much they contribute to the firm's knowledge. To properly encourage knowledge contributions, organizations must realign incentive schemes to accurately account for these vital contributions.
Organizations constantly change. Employees may seek more lucrative or more secure jobs, while organizations downsize or rightsize to reduce cost and meet numbers. In the middle of all this commotion, employees may decide to withhold their knowledge and take such insights when they leave, at the expense of the organization. The most effective way to thwart this situation is to establish a knowledge market.
An internal knowledge market is a place within an organization where individuals can buy and sell knowledge. It facilitates and motivates employees to share information while contributing to a climate for organizational knowledge exchange. A market mechanism provides various options for pricing knowledge, which can be used to reward high performing employees. Such markets can be deployed over corporate intranet knowledge management portals and linked to an HRIS.
An increasing number of companies are building knowledge management portals on the corporate intranet. A knowledge management portal is a single point of access for employees to multiple sources of information that provide personalised access on the corporae intranet. Intranet can give employees access to explicit knowledge that may be stored in databases, but the greatest value of intranet for knowledge management is increasing the transfer of tacit knowledge. For example, Xerox tried to codify the knowledge of its service technicians and embed it in an expert decision system that was installed in the copiers. The idea was that technicians could be guided by the system and complete repairs more quickly, sometimes even off-site. However, the project failed because it did not take into account the tacit knowledge; the nuances and details, that could be codified. After a study found that service techs shared their knowledge primarily by telling “war stories”, Xerox developed an intranet sytem called Eureka to link 25,000 field service representatives. Eureka, which enables technicians to electronically share war stories and tips for repairs copiers, has cut average repair time by 50 percent.
However, most organisations today typically combine several technologies to facilitate the sharing and transfer of both tacit and explicit knowledge. For example, Fearnley Proctor Trinidad Limited a leading QA/QC company set up a centralized data warehouse containing the financial and operational performance data and standards for each business unit. Managers access the data base to identify performance gaps, use case-based decision tools to analyze various aspects of the business, and make changes as needed. The company also enables tacit knowledge transfer through an intranet based document management system, combined with Web conferencing systems such as Skype, where worldwide experts can exchange ideas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Nonaka,I. (1996)The ‘Knowledge Creating Company’ in Starkey, K. (ed) How Organisations Learn, International Thomson Business Press, pp18-32
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Powers J, Vicki Fourth Quarter (1999) ‘Xerox Create a Knowledge Sharing Culture Through Grass Efforts, http://www.askmecorp.com/pdf/Xerox.pdf
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Wikipedia, Free Encyclopedia, (2007) “Knowledge Management” Available at
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