Collaborate and compete

Collaborate and compete are forces operating in opposite directions. However they need to be considered and adopted if you want to succeed. For example many companies collaborate to create common platforms and technologies. They also go and address the same market space in that sense they compete. For example Sony and Philips make TVs. They collaborate to make possible common and non-differentiating parts of the TV system. In the market place they compete by bring in the differences in terms of new features as added value on top of the common part they develop together. In this sense knowledge management happens at two levels on at the technology level which is across the companies that has collaborated and other within the company to make the differentiator. Collaborate and compete is something that when done well can provide the competitive lead to the collaborators from rest of the companies. The underlying philosophy has been why try to do everything on your own.

Drawing knowledge out of people

There have been various approaches to get knowledge out of people like- thinking out of the box, lateral thinking, analytical thinking, and strategic thinking. Toyota pioneered the concept of an idea box on every shop floor, executive office, sales office, and regional office. They wanted to get suggestions from every person in the company and make them feel recognized. Ideas started pouring in and quality ideas are taken. Toyota implements 95% of these ideas! This demonstrates how valuable the employee suggestions are and how it is feasible to draw that knowledge out of them. The key in my opinion is to have mechanism for active listening to what the employees have to say.

Managed knowledge

We may understand technology and have immense knowledge about the subject. But, what matters is that it needs to be properly managed. What I mean by managed is that the knowledge has to be properly packaged, presented, and delivered to each of the stakeholders in a form that makes sense to them. Internally within the organization as well the knowledge should be disseminated uniformly to all the stakeholders. Each and every person in the team should be aware of the progress and development in the organization. The management should make efforts to market the knowledge appropriately to the clients.

When an employee leaves the organization

When an employee leaves an organization what he leaves behind is the knowledge that the person has gained during the time he spent in the organization. There should be mechanisms to capture and utilize this knowledge. If this happens then the organization is on its path to become a learning organization. Employees who had spent years in the organization leave behind a lot of very useful knowledge. Intellectual egos hinder re-usability. This needs to be addressed by the senior management, which in my experience is an area of improvement for many organizations.

CIO and knowledge management

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is in charge of all the information about the company. The CIO bridges the gap between the CEO and the higher level management thus facilitating knowledge management. This structure is vital at the nation level as well. The President of US, has employed a qualified person as the CIO (a person of Indian origin) thus underlining the importance of knowledge management.

What is user friendly Knowledge Management (KM)?

The more people with whom I speak about KM in their company, the responses are that the company KM is not very useful. I tried to understand where this feeling comes from. Is it that the information that the person seeking is not there, is it that it is very difficult to get to the information, is it that it is very difficult to insert the artifacts? It seems all of these are problems in most companies where we did the study. We went about trying to find some solutions to some of these real problems. First thing I noticed that the implementation of KM and the KM strategy were not in sync. There was a huge gap in terms of what the user wanted and senior management expectations of KM.
So, I thought of coming up with what I term user-friendly KM. Arrived at a few things quickly- 1. There is a need to make aware of the KM strategy and what it seeks to achieve to all the stakeholders of the KM system. This has to be done at regular intervals (once a quarter, preferably with tangibles). 2. KM implementations need to remove all the complexity from the end-user, in terms of exposing them to the process of- knowledge generation, storing generated knowledge, and access to that knowledge. 3. Focus on making KM deliver value and not so much on how many people are accessing the data or putting data. 4. Seek to find why KM is not able to deliver on expectations. For the end-users KM should be like going to the restaurant order what they want and get what they had asked 95% of the time in as short time as possible.

Knowledge production and economy

Knowledge is produced at every stage in the development of human race. Knowledge is distinct from intellect; it is acquired, rather than inborn. If one looks at this process it is found that harvested knowledge gradually moves from socio to socio-economic zone. It implies that knowledge plays a crucial role in the development of economy. In the socio-economic perspective, public and private knowledge gets developed based on the individual’s value. Individual’s values bring in another aspect about knowledge, which is also defined as “the sum total of facts, beliefs, and heuristics.”
The advances in information technology have expanded the amount of information available in the world. This has created an explosion of knowledge and brought about further dramatic progress in products and services.