Managing Knowledge in Organisation - Coursework Example

Knowledge management (KM) is one of the fastest growing areas of corporate spending and has varied definitions as it means differently to different people. According to a Harvard Management Update knowledge management is simply a directed process of figuring out what information a company has that could benefit others in the company and then finding ways to make it easily available to all. IBM and Lotus define it as a ‘discipline that systematically leverages content and expertise to provide innovation, responsiveness, competency and efficiency (Pohs, 2001 cited by Call, 2005) while Peter Drucker concises it saying it is the coordination and exploitation of the organizations knowledge resources, in order to create benefit and competitive advantage. Call contends that no definition of knowledge management can be definite as it keeps changing from company to company and also from initiative to initiative. At the same time, the failure rate of KM is high which makes it essential to understand the concept and theory of KM. This paper will discuss the anomalies found at the Post Office Consulting Group and how KM could be effectively applied in this organization. KM is also known by other terms like organizational learning, organizational memory and expertise management. Thomas, Kellogg and Erickson (2001) fear that the codification of knowledge management is proceeding too rapidly and is too simple. This may make survival in the competitive workplace difficult. Knowledge is primarily a problem of capturing, organizing and retrieving information. Knowledge is passive, analytic and atomistic. Knowledge management is nothing more than getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Codification of knowledge into information implies making knowledge portable, re-usable and transferable within the organization (Hall, 2006). The collective knowledge of employees is a critical resource of knowledge to the organization, which the organization must know how to manage this intellectual capital (Sunassee & Sewry, 2002). It is generally believed that knowledge assets or intellectual capital of their employees separates an organization from its competitors. Managing this capital involves a change in mindset as earlier knowledge sharing was not practiced. The economy and social life today are knowledge-driven and this managerial activity is known as knowledge management. Cervara (2005) contends that knowledge process is a standardized process which depends on the manpower skills, experiences, and knowledge in the management of specific goals. The evolutionary process of variation, selection and retention (VSR) is a mechanism for developing and organizing knowledge within a firm (Madsen, Mosakowaski & Zaheer, 2002). These put together form a machine to produce knowledge. Variation is the creation of knowledge, which brings about changes in the firm’s way of operating. Through dispersion the firm then leverages the new and past knowledge across space and time. The content that is retained represents its existing and past behaviors. A firm that can preserve the past via retention has to dedicate less resource in knowledge creation. The knowledge is stored in retention bins forming the firm’s memory. In this process, the firm’s retained knowledge is combined with new knowledge to generate a novel change. According to Marwick (2001) KM is a set of systematic and disciplined actions that an organization can take to obtain the greatest value from the knowledge available to it. Knowledge as discussed above includes the experience and understanding of the people in the organization. In addition it includes the information artifacts like the documents and reports available within the organization as well in the outside world. Hence effective KM would require the right combination of organizational, social and managerial initiatives along with appropriate technology. Knowledge can be bifurcated into two. Explicit knowledge includes documents and videos created with an intention with communicating with others. Both forms of knowledge are important for organizational effectiveness. This set of knowledge has to be widely utilized for the attainment of goals. This is where a strategic approach to manage knowledge of manpower is needed. The emergence of knowledge management follows two paths. One is the application heavy IT oriented approaches which emphasize the acquisition and storage of knowledge. These include data warehousing, Yellow pages, document management, decision support systems. Apart from there are the management models that have grown out of action research and the knowledge creation school of Nonaka and Takeuchi (Hellstrom, Malmquist & Mikaelssone, n,d,). Hellstrom et al., quote Hedlund who states that the company structure emerge around strategic apexes that shift over time. As such an organization should have combination rather than division of human resources, lateral rather than vertical communication within the company and specifically lower/middle rather than top-down communications. In this way the role of the top manager is more of a catalyst, which means effective leadership. There is also a shift in the organizational strategy from semi-independent diversification to knowledge based competition. Management activity and strategy must be open ended. The lower level managers must learn to facilitate worker’s unique interpretations of their local circumstances and find ways to interrelate this knowledge. In 1998 the UK Post Office Group known as the Post Office Consulting, interested in KM started developing tools, techniques and processes (Hall). The tools that they developed and adopted internally were the after action review techniques, a CV/skills database, and a technique for capturing tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the basis for generation of new knowledge or in words of Nonaka “the key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilization and conversion of tacit knowledge” (cited by Marwick). The Post Office Consulting’s KM process was defined as the continuous need to capture, deploy, use and review knowledge. In 1999 a KM project was funded known as the Argentina Knowledge Capture Project (AKAP). This sought to capture knowledge from the Post Office Consultants who had been working on a consultancy project for the Argentina Post Office following its privatization. To enable people to benefit out it, a nine month project was funded and a team of six people was formed mostly Post Office Consulting’s knowledge management group. The principal tool for knowledge capture used at Post Office Consulting was the knowledge interview technique. A trained knowledge interviewer was required to elicit the knowledge of the Argentina consultant in a recorded interview, transcribed by a trained typist and then writing the case studies by the interviewer around certain aspects of the interview. Instead of focusing on the needs of the specific users, they first concentrated on capturing the knowledge of the consultants. They were unsuccessful in their knowledge capture process. The knowledge captured was placed on a Lotus Notes-based electronic database which was not accessible for general use. Thus the purpose of knowledge capture was not served as it had not been codified properly. Lot of anomalies and difficulties emerged in this knowledge capture and transfer process as the people entrusted with the task did not have sufficient existing knowledge to engage actively in this process. As Hall states it is first essential for the people concerned with the transfer of knowledge to have the required knowledge. Codification of knowledge involves the use of language to articulate, describe and explain (Hall). This helps to make the knowledge explicit and codification emerges from the person who has the knowledge. This also requires defining the codes. This is essential in transferring the knowledge and codes for those who do not know how to interpret or de-codify the code. Thus, the people at Post Office Consulting were ill-equipped themselves which rendered the KM process also futile. These people had to spend considerable amount of time themselves before the knowledge capture process made any sense to them. There were deficiencies in the knowledge of postal operations and this was particularly difficult for those fairly new to the organization. Since explicit knowledge was not available, it became all the more difficult for them to operate properly. Knowledge interview as a knowledge capture tool did not prove successful because outside this group the knowledge interviewers did not share the common language and experience to enable them to interpret and use the tool efficiently. Knowledge portals in the form of internet, intranet or extranets have the most common function in communication forms. Portals help to attain well-versed and speedy transportation of knowledge in any form. This improves interdepartmental communication, gives easy access to information which means informed decisions. Knowledge portals lead to enhanced performance as the knowledge of the personnel who leave the company can be preserved with the company. They help to connect people with the information which is the very essence of KM. it is essential to understand and utilize the knowledge available at the knowledge portals. At the Post Office Consulting, the codification of knowledge was improper due to which whatever knowledge was captured had to be turned off from general use. What is essential is a combination of knowledge portals with an efficient workforce who can put the knowledge to the right use. In the case of Post Office Consulting, brokers were used to transfer the knowledge to those who may require it in the organization. Thus the case studies that were formed partially represented the knowledge of the consultants and partially the knowledge of the brokers who were used to interpret the knowledge. The brokers could not bring the knowledge and the end-users together. On the other hand, they became proxy users. Hence knowledge was not put to any use. Marwick says tacit knowledge has to be captured and made into explicit knowledge for the benefit of all. This is usually done in the form of a report or a presentation. Technology contributes to knowledge capture through the use of word processing which generates electronic documents that are easy to share via the web, email or a document management system. A document management system ensures that valuable explicit knowledge is preserved so that it can be used in the future. Capturing tacit knowledge this way gives it a much wider audience. Document management system supports the full life cycle of document creation and provides mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control and scheduled publishing. It also enables technology that facilitates discovery of intranet, internet and data sources. Nonaka and Takeuchi believe that socialization is a process through which tacit knowledge can be transferred effectively (Hall). The greatest difficulty identified in knowledge management was changing people’s behavior and the biggest impediment to knowledge transfer was culture (Marwick). Overcoming technological limitations was not that important. Knowledge creation results from interaction of persons and tacit and explicit knowledge. Although the employees experience these processes but the real value is tangible when these are combined and new knowledge created. This new knowledge has to be disseminated and internalized by other employees who act on it and form new knowledge. Online discussions databases are potential tools to capture tacit knowledge and apply it to problems. To be effective such discussions should allow formulation of metaphors and analogies which requires an informal and free-wheeling style. This style is possible through chat and other real-time interactions within teams, says Marwick. Newsgroups and forums also help in sharing of knowledge although in this case people understanding and acquiring knowledge may be total strangers. Nevertheless, through newsgroups people do offer advice and assistance. People can be motivated to capture knowledge by rewarding them for doing so. Post Office Consulting should consider along these suggestions to capture and transfer knowledge. At the Post Office Consulting, due to the sensitivity of the information and fear of loss of confidentiality, they had sealed it off from general use, thereby rendering the knowledge capture useless. According to Randeree (2006), knowledge stock is an indication of tacit knowledge within the firm but is an explicit representation of knowledge. Firms that can codify and transfer knowledge are more successful than those that do not. As Post Office was consulting was not able to properly codify knowledge, they were unsuccessful in their attempt to manage knowledge. Codifying tacit knowledge helps to share and leverage these resources within the firm. The tacit knowledge is exclusive to a firm and gives it a competitive edge. It is generally difficult to duplicate tacit knowledge but codification gives other firms an opportunity to imitate. Here the absorptive capacity and the learning capacity of the firm become important to exploit the knowledge resources. At Post Office Consulting, even those who were responsible for capturing and transferring knowledge did not have sufficient knowledge about post office operations. Under the circumstances, it is first essential to make the organization a learning organization and only then they can make the best use of the available resources. Randeree suggests that secure KM requires that knowledge access should not be given to all. It prevents information leakage to competitors but it should be accessible to those who need to use it within the organization. This necessitates proper codification which would allow easy access. Post Office Consulting should employ audit trails for management to determine who reviewed the knowledge. This would facilitate greater access to employees who should be in the loop. Post Office Consulting (POC) used brokers to transfer the knowledge in which process not only some knowledge could be lost but they also allowed third-party access to knowledge. There is an increased mobility of employees between firms and important knowledge can be transferred more so through the brokers. Hence proper codification is essential. POC also should not allow knowledge to remain in one single hand keeping in mind that people retire and also fall ill. Continuity of operations should not be affected. At the same time, care has to be taken that protection of knowledge does not hinder the transfer and sharing process. Capturing knowledge is only part of the process and plenty of technology is available to that extent. The future challenges in KM are to allow sharing of knowledge without compromising on security or allowing filtering of knowledge to competitors. Technology acts as a facilitator and a control mechanism to protect and share knowledge. Dissemination of the right information at the right time to the right people is essential. POC may need to employ motivational techniques to encourage knowledge sharing as people do not have adequate knowledge about post office operations. This becomes even more difficult in the case of new recruits. Knowledge captured can be allowed access through the use of passwords to all concerned. This would ensure security without compromising on sharing of knowledge within the organization. Without this, knowledge remains as an unutilized asset. Group forums are some of the other ways that POC should employ which facilitates group collaboration, creation of communities and best practices. Knowledge portals are equally important tools which carry valuable corporate information. Both customers and employees have easy access to information like reports, forms and documents. This is known to enhance employee performance and productivity. Tools like these support firms in capturing, expressing, sharing, and retaining information and knowledge. Managing knowledge is as difficult as managing change. Hence knowledge needs to be systematically and efficiently managed so that it is easy to find and use in such a way that it is easily available to the right people at the right time for the right purpose. References: Call, D., (2005), Knowledge management – not rocket science, Journal of Knowledge Management, VOL. 9 NO. 2 2005, pp. 19-30 Cervara (2005)...quoted in the article sent by you. Hall, M., (2006), Knowledge management and the limits of knowledge codification, Journal of Knowledge Management, VOL. 10 NO. 3 2006, pp. 117-126, Hellstrom, T. H., Malmquist, U., & Mikaelssone, J., (n,d,), Decentralizing Knowledge: Managing Knowledge Work in a Software Engineering Firm, 16 Feb 2007 Madsen, T. L., Mosakowaski, E., & Zaheer, S., (2002), The Dynamics of knowledge flows: human capital mobility, knowledge retention and change, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 6 No. 2 pp. 164-176 Marwick, A. D., (2001), Knowledge management technology, IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL, VOL 40, NO 4, 2001 Randeree, E., (2006), Knowledge management: securing the future, Journal of Knowledge Management, VOL. 10 NO. 4 2006, pp. 145-156 Sunassee, N. N., & Sewry, D. A., (2002), A Theoretical Framework for Knowledge Management Implementation, Proceedings of SAICSIT 2002, Pages 235 – 245 Thomas, J. C., Kellogg, W. A., & Erickson, T., (2001), The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management, IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL, VOL 40, NO 4, 2001 Read More