Knowledge Management and Measurements - Assignment Example

Name: xxxxxxxxxxxx Tutor: xxxxxxxxxxxx Title: Knowledge management and measurements Institution: xxxxxxxxxxxx Date: xxxxxxxxxxxx Question 1 A summary of the theory relating to communities of practice with a particular emphasis on collaboration and knowledge creation Communities of practice are communities of employees who share resources and knowledge. According to Hildreth et al (2000), a community of practice is a community that has a universal set of interests to do something in common, is self generating, concerned with motivation, is not essentially co-located and has a universal set of interests that is motivated to a model of work that is not directed to it. At Mind Tree, a community was formed by a group of people with a universal passion for knowledge sharing, learning, self development and personal development. The Mind Tree’s manner of thinking is that communities are the self organized groups who take on a certain mission. They do not appear on organizational chart and they also do not report to anyone. However, these communities are driven by their self identified objectives which are focused on short term goals, such as developing a software component or on a wider, long term goals like capability building in a domain (Garvin, & Tahilyani, 2010). The theory behind communities of practice was that it reflected on the socio-technical approach of knowledge management, with an emphasis on social interaction as a way of enhancing knowledge sharing and collaboration. The concept of communities of practice is adopted in Mind Tree because knowledge is a vital asset that needs to be strategically managed. Communities of practice focus on people and on social structures that enhance them to learn from one another. Communities of practice brings together a dissimilar set of individual around the globe to put forth their collective ideas , with simple processes and tools, and a joint understanding of what a particular project entails( Mitchell, 2002). The key to an effective knowledge dissemination strategy is to channel knowledge to communities of practice and offer a means for exchange of information as well as peer to peer collaboration. According to Garvin and Tahilyani, (2010), the role of knowledge management is to assist people do their work better and also to develop themselves. At mind Tree, this implied enhancing knowledge creation, which results to innovation; enhancing the environment, which results to collaboration and knowledge sharing; enhancing systems, practices, and processes, which assists in building of a knowledge culture; and enhancing shifts and change in mind. By encouraging employees to self organize themselves and collaborate via communities of practice, Mind Tree, believed that knowledge management was identical to the computing open source movement, where creation of output is not mandated, employees set their individual goals and individuals are motivated by the creative procedure as well as their interrelations with peers. This in turn ensured a supportive atmosphere for nurturing knowledge management, and enabled employees to engage in organizational building activities that surpassed their job descriptions (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). Question 2 Key elements of Mind Tree’s knowledge management system and how the elements link together and efficiency of the system The key elements of knowledge management system of Mind Tree are knowledge sharing systems, collaborative systems and systems that help with innovation. According to Mitchell, (2002), knowledge management enables individuals and communities of practice within the organization to have a quick access to shared knowledge and become aware of ways of finding essential information. Knowledge management categorizes knowledge and creates awareness on people about important information which is available in the organization. This enables workers to understand which information can assist them and how they can find it. Additionally, it enables employees to have a better understanding of their own responsibilities. Knowledge sharing and collaboration promotes the capability to solve problems quickly and to approach problems with novel ideas as a result of the availability of knowledge and information regarding these problems. Knowledge management enables new employees to be efficient more quickly since there is a clear guide to the knowledge and information they need. At the organizational level, knowledge management leads to heightened output and productivity, improved innovation and implementation of new ideas and improved customer service (Mitchell, 2002). The knowledge management system links knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and collaboration in Mind Tree. The KnowldwgeNet, which is a centralized knowledge repository enable individuals to share knowledge. Connected Minds, which is a collaborative system supports community movement in implicit space and therefore increase face to face community gatherings. It facilitates virtual collaboration via question and answer sessions, document uploads, bookmarking and blog entries. It also offers details of forthcoming community events. The Open Mind, is a collaborative IP creation and reuse platform that is patterned on open source movement that allows individuals to collaboratively work on software development, and creation of tangible outputs Project Space is the company’s system for collaboration of project team and act as a backbone of Kernel initiative on project management. It supports execution of a project across an internationally dispersed team through handling all knowledge needs of a team. (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). Neuron is a collaborative and open system that covers the entire lifecycle of an idea. Any person contributes an option on any topic, comments on, links, rates or adds to every opinion posted on the Neuron. This collaborative system is organized through idea categories, with each being mapped to a business segment. The senior most people in every business segment are allocated an idea nurturer, which evaluates rejection and acceptance of ideas, and nurturing ideas and searching ways of making them feasible (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). Sometimes, the top management guided the idea nurturer by requesting ideas on a certain theme. For instance Mind Tree requested people to give ideas on the way a company could save energy, and people gave suggestions which collectively helped to reduce the energy consumption of the company by over 28 percent in a period of seven months. Social networking schemes such as livestreams, microblogging and tagging is a knowledge sharing system which aims at linking and connecting individuals via dispensed touch points. Garvin and Tahilyani, (2010) notes that one initiative of social networking is the 360 degree user profile that make publicly displays every aspect of an individual’s life at work , entailing ideas that they post on the Neuron, communities to which individuals belong, discussions in which they participate, as well as the training sessions they attend. The K-Map (Knowledge Map) is innovative system that the company use in project management to address challenges faced by teams at the initiation of a delivery project. The K-Map assist teams in identifying project requirements in terms of required areas of expertise and thus compel team members to recognize knowledge sources that they can leverage and any gaps between sources and needs. Teams fill the gaps through charting out time bound action plan, with every map being revised and updated over the Project’s lifecycle. The K-Map assists project managers to tabulate every learning need and set a structure in place. It also enables the manager to regulate the team ramp up and track progress against it, which is vital because the ramp up directly affects the bottom line. A delivery process is successful when more individuals understand the technology utilized in the project, the business sphere that the application serves, and the operational environment of the technology. Projects that adopt knowledge management practices and systems like collaborating on ProjectSpace, reutilizing content and developing knowledge maps perform better (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). Question 3 Role of communities of practice at Mind Tree . Mind Tree’s communities of practice are aimed at knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and collaboration. Community meetings offer people with the opportunity to interact face to face with one another and a venue for problem solving, brainstorming, successes and failures comparison, sharing techniques and keeping abreast of technological and market trends. Mind Tree’s communities covered technical, non-technical, and role based areas which helped in knowledge creation and collaboration. For instance, the automotive community focused upon building of domain knowledge and engaged in activities like panel debates on emission testing as well as demonstrations on the way an automotive engine works to help individuals working in the engine control area. Shorter term communities focused upon building of TechWorks and software coding to assist them in their personal project work (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). Communities of practice are essential to the functioning of any company, but are more vital to organizations which recognize knowledge as the key to asset management. They act as nodes for exchange and interpretation of information since members possess a shared understanding, with knowledge of what is pertinent to communicate and the way to present information in practical ways. As a result, a community of practice is an ideal conduit for transferring information such a feedback or tips, and best practices across organizational boundaries (Wallace, 2002). Through participating in a community, a community champion was able to give the entire community the market’s perspective through sharing with them customer feedback and market research data. Garvin and Tahilyani (2010) argue that the champion also took the perspective of the community on novel technology and novel ideas to customers and prospects to see whether there was an interest from a market perspective. Communities also act as a way of binding employees who were working in different geographical regions, with virtual communities binding employees together, particularly to the parent company in Bangalore. Competency building communities inspired peer to peer interrelations whereby individuals learned from each other in face to face conferences, driven by clearly articulated community objectives. Johnson (2001) argues that community members communicate online or face to face and share resources such as experiences, tools, methodologies, and problems and solutions. This communication leads to improvement of knowledge of every participant in the community and results to knowledge development within the domain. Engaging in communities of practice promotes a learning environment because learning that evolves from these communities is collaborative, and collaborative knowledge is higher than any individual knowledge. Additionally, individual learning is enhanced via engagement with others which promotes the capability of the individual to a new, greater level. Through sharing of knowledge, members of the community establishes a common ground where they feel connected and have valuable insights which enable them to learn from one another. Communities of practice steward competencies to maintain the company at the cutting edge. Community members discuss new ideas, work jointly on business setbacks and keep up with developments outside and inside the organization. When communities commit to being of forefront of a project, members disperse obligation for keeping up with novel developments. These collaborative enquiries make members valuable, since people devote their professional identities through being a portion of a forward looking, dynamic community (Johnson, 2001). Mind Tree’s Capacity building communities focused on the creation of an impact on the organization through dealing with fundamental issues and developing relationships amid communities and other entities in the organization. These communities directly influenced the existing processes, organizational activities and software. For instance, the Java community assisted with the company’s recruitment process through developing a question bank on the J2EE projects. Capacity building communities absorbed knowledge from, and added knowledge to exterior experts through a strong conduit to the external world. These communities focused on innovation, and creation of new capabilities and competencies. The mainframe community worked on mainframe technologies and fostered a spirit of belongingness. It categorized skills by forms of databases and forms of projects and exposed individuals to different areas that other people had worked on. This community also performed research in optimization techniques in database migration in order to discover novel service offerings in mainframe modernization. After identification of new service offerings, the mainframe community shared this knowledge across diverse practices, diverse projects and diverse physical locations. The business planning and control systems community led to new business development because after seeing customer needs at customer’s sites, members developed ideas on how they could prevail over similar problems for future customers and developed prototypes and generic tools to address customer needs (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). Efficiency of mind Tree’s communities of practice Mind Tree’s communities of practice are not effective because members are always caught up in their everyday duties. In order to survive, these communities need considerable, repeated participation from several passionate individuals. They also require commonality of purpose across community members. They are also ineffective because the entire organization don’t have a common agreement on the specific degree to which an effective community required to have a direct placement with the business. For instance, KK observed that there was no organizational success that is anticipated out of communities and that they lacked an organizational drive to gauge their output. Numerous managers believed that communities took a lot of time away from activities that directly contributed to business. Numerous managers asserted several individuals participated in communities mainly because they believed that the company rewarded them for their participation. Other managers claimed that communities influenced only certain spheres of employees and thus other employees didn’t essentially identify important benefits (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). How Mind Tree’s communities can be improved Mind Tree’s communities can be improved through organizational network analysis (ONA) which will help and allow managers to visualize the myriad relationships between the organization and the communities and facilitate community effectiveness. Organizational network analysis will help community leaders (champions) to undertake tasks such as identification of opinion leaders, draw in marginal members, guard against loss of knowledge and ensure connectivity across major network gaps. Through the deployment of ONA, Mind Tree will be able to systematically build communities of practices across a wide range of technical services and business disciplines (Wallace, 2002). ONA will also enable the senior management to define major community objectives such as better knowledge sharing and improve collaboration. Snyder, and McDermott , (2002), notes that Mind Tree’s ONA will help the company and its management to recognize key persons within the numerous nations who are very experienced and knowledgeable but are not actively involved in assisting to solve problems that are outside their operation areas. These individuals will be targeted to become more engaged as a community and their expertise and knowledge will be tapped to help other community members (Roberts, 2006). Question 4 How the 5*50 initiative will alter the roles and responsibilities of the knowledge management function in general and communities of practice in particular The success of Mind Tree’s 5*50 initiatives will to a great degree depend on the knowledge management function of the company. The 5*50 program will require knowledge management to assist in the ideation procedure and will also offer vital information technology systems support through the Neuron. Experts will have to modify the Neuron and make it a tracking and harvesting mechanism for many ideas. Neuron will also be linked to the organization’s new Enterprise Content Management system to enable organizational partners such academic institutions and customers to work together with employees in development of ideas. Enterprise Content management will permit Mind Tree employees to work jointly seamlessly with stakeholders and facilitate sharing, discussion and collaboration (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). The innovative council which was established by the knowledge management function of the company is also anticipated to play a significant role in gathering and assembling idea nurturer from each functional domain to discuss and assist development of top ideas. The knowledge management organization has to offer fundamental content for the mini-MBA program. After the establishment of the five novel businesses, each one of them will need the active, continuous support of knowledge management. Knowledge management will assist in building out every idea, and customize itself to their involvement with an idea. According to Garvin and Tahilyani, (2010), the top employees in knowledge management will have to take on diverse roles and create one on one relationship with the chief executive officers of the novel businesses and their focus will change to business support and strategy development. Therefore, knowledge management will focus on developing a culture of ideation in Mind Tree and improve the delivery process. With the 5*50 initiative, knowledge management will begin facilitating direction and help with business planning, as opposed to the mere qualitative approach that it has taken with Neuron. The contribution of knowledge management will become stringent and qualitative, with some focusing being involved. The 5*50 initiative will require communities of practice to think of a domain that they feel will build into 50 million dollars business and post the ideas, together with reasons why they were the appropriate people to develop it, on the Neuron. Because the company wants an idea to be considered well and thought of well, it will permit a period of about three moths for submission of the idea. After scanning of submission, Mind Tree will choose approximately five to seven ideas along with respective individuals. Majority or all of the ideas will require market studies, which will be initiated by company’s business planning and strategy department internally or via a suitable external agency (Garvin & Tahilyani, 2010). The senior management will then review and assess these proposals and shortlist candidates who will be invited to attend a seven day mini- MBA program which will be taught by founders of Mind Tree and senior employees. Garvin and Tahilyani (2010) notes that after attending this program, which will focus on finance, innovation and strategy, participants will discard their ideas or amend them and write down a supporting business plan of the idea. These persons will then choose a job they aspired in their new businesses. In order to make sure that the company attains the billion dollar goal, and establish the base for future milestones, communities will be required to give new ideas in the present businesses or novel businesses which are driven by information technology. After completion of business plans, they will be screened over again and the consented ideas presented to a panel and if a community member is able to convince this panel on the practicality of the business idea, the individual will be allotted resource to enable him fulfill his dreams. The individual will also be offered assistance in creating the dream team from outside and within Mind Tree. My learnings from Mind Tree’s Knowledge Management assignment I have learned that knowledge management, which are processes, technologies, and activities aimed at attaining, organizing, maintaining, sharing and replenishing both explicit and tactic knowledge have supported and contributed to the Mind Tree’s values and culture which has made the company to attain great business success. The role of knowledge management is to help Mind Tree’s employees perform their work better and develop themselves through enhancing knowledge creation, enabling the environment, enabling practices, systems and processes and enabling shifts and change in mindset. Knowledge management is an integral portion of the original business plan of Mind Tree. Knowledge management enabled the company to do on shoring which required effective transfer of knowledge from the front end to the back end. Communities of practice are a model of the company’s knowledge management. Communities of practice reflect on the organization’s socio-technical approach to knowledge management, with emphasis on social interactions as ways of enhancing sharing of knowledge and collaboration. Communities were formed by a group of individuals sharing a universal knowledge merely coming together for knowledge sharing, learning, self development and business development. Communities had three vital characteristics. Members had a common sphere of interest; members engaged in collective discussions and activities, assisting one another through sharing information and creating relationships that enhanced learning; and members created a common range of resources such as stories, tools and experiences so as to enable their capabilities. Mind Tree’s communities covered a variety of technical, non technical and role based areas to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. Through community meetings, employees had the opportunity to interact face to face and were able to solve problems, share techniques, brainstorm, compare failures and success and keep abreast of technological and market trends. Communities also enabled geographically dispersed employees to stay together and share knowledge. Bibliography Garvin, D, & Tahilyani, R, 2010, Mind Tree: A community of communities, Harvard Business School Press, Boston. Hilderth, P, Wright, P, & Kimble, C, 2000, Communities of practice in the distributed international environment. Journal of knowledge management 4(1): 27-37. Roberts, J. (2006). “Limits to Communities of Practice.” Journal of Management Studies, 43 (3), 623-639. Wallace, D, 2002, Leveraging the communities of practice for strategic advantage, Butterworth -Heinemann, Burlington. Synder, W, & McDermott, W, 2002, Cultivating communities of practice, Harvard Business School Press, Boston. Mitchell, J, 2002, The potential for communities of practice, John Mitchell and Associates, Australia. Johnson, M, 2001, A survey of current research on online communities of practice.The internet and higher education , 4(1), 45-60. Read More