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.

Knowledge acquisition and transfer

Knowledge acquisition involves inputs from human experts, documents, books, reports, computer files, etc. One of the major challenges in the field of managing knowledge is related to the area of knowledge acquisition and transfer within the boundaries of the organization. The ability to acquire knowledge and share it across individuals and teams has been found to be a key success factor to organizational performance. For organization to have control on certainty of its performance, then it needs to know what are the factors related to acquiring and transfer of knowledge.

Knowledge is a mix of …

Knowledge is a fluid mix of experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that allows people to evaluate and incorporate new experiences and information. It is also the sum of all the progress of man and mankind, in all the areas and from all perspective, from the beginning of time. It can be used simultaneously in several different places, without any effect on quality.

Can knowledge management be used for strategic advantage?

Yes. Knowledge management focuses more on the effectiveness more than efficiency. Knowledge management is multidisciplinary and draws on aspects of science, interpersonal communication, organizational learning, cognitive science, motivation, training, and publishing and business process analysis.

Knowledge management is a systematic process of harnessing and leveraging individual and collective knowledge available in the organization by connecting people to people and people to the knowledge and information they need to act effectively and efficiently to create new knowledge. The ability to share knowledge, ideas, perspectives, and solutions among collaborators, represents possibly the greatest strategic advantage any organization can achieve. Organization can move into the future with confidence, and will be mostly ahead of the market as decisions taken are based on a knowledge base.

How to motivate individuals to do knowledge sharing?

To motivate individuals to share their knowledge, we need to influence them positively and this is truly an “art”. We need to master this and apply it in our daily life. The reward effect is a vital and critical element in pure knowledge management. The average organizational reward system causes people not to acknowledge knowledge management initiatives, which, is one of the reasons that a significant proportion of such initiatives fail.
Any thoughts on how to motivate for knowledge sharing?

Knowledge organisations

If knowledge is a resource, then companies must be able to manage it, just as they manage more traditional resource, like capital, supplies, real estate and personnel. The shift in today’s business environment, where the market place is increasingly competitive and the rising rate of innovation, have made enterprises realize that knowledge is their key asset. Innovation occurs at the cross-point of knowledge and people.
Companies are being called ‘knowledge organizations’ as we move from managing information to managing knowledge.

Knowledge management and innovation

Knowledge Management (KM) is the new management concept to view old business realities through a new angle. Its ambiguity causes KM to be dismissed by some and embraced by others as a transforming agent. Despite its vagueness of definition and the healthy skepticism by some, KM is first and foremost a new way of looking at and understanding innovation, stimulated by the significant changes in the organizational environment.

Recognizing pattern for infant mortality of Knowledge Management Systems (KMS)

I have had the privilege of designing and deploying KMS and the opportunity to speak to many KMS Heads in companies (mostly information technology companies in India) on the early phases of KMS in their respective companies. In my experience I see a pattern emerging for infant mortality of KMS in many of these companies. I propose to describe this in 2-phases: 1. The enthusiastic phase and 2. The justification phase. Both these phases happen roughly in about 24 months from the initiation of KMS.
1. The enthusiastic phase- In one of the strategy meeting the CEO and the Management team agree that Knowledge Management (KM) is very important for the success of the company. This idea is checked with the Product Heads and R&D Head for their inputs. As usual the Product Heads and R&D Head tag the lines of the CEO and Management team. After this an expert in KM is identified from inside the company or hired laterally as Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) to setup and drive the KM initiative. The CKO is asked to form the KM team, which he does with lots of enthusiasm. The team comprises of people mostly from within the company who were earlier working in projects and have little idea of KM. The team is enthusiastic and energetic as they get to present to the senior management on the development of KMS like- design of the KM system (mostly it is KM portal), reward mechanism for contributing to knowledge repository, internal branding, etc. The first six months is full of activities for the CKO and the KM team. KM-portal gets developed, posters on KM are put-up, and the CEO and CKO talk on the KM initiative at various forums.
2. The justification phase- Approximately 18 months later. I meet the CKO (that is if he is still there). His enthusiasm of the KMS seems to have evaporated. The KM team is now about one-third. CKO tells me how the projects people did not show interest in using the KM portal as they did not have the time as they had more than enough problems to fix or they had to deliver on immediate business requirements. The CKO is also angry that some of his key team members were moved back to projects. This has de-motivated rest of the KM team and they are contemplating to move back into projects. The CKO feels that the Product Heads could have mandated use of KM portal, by asking their team members to put the artifacts and re-use solutions/artifacts available in the KM repository instead of recreating the solutions/artifacts. Try to speak to the CEO about KM, the personal assistant tells me that he is very busy or is traveling. The impression I get is that the CEO is not very keen to talk on the subject. Speak to a few members of the Management team about the KM initiative they tell me that KM initiative had got their full support, but they did not see anything tangible coming out… Some of them say it may be early to expect tangible results.
In my experience when these kind of pattern emerge it means that KM will not succeed and will see an eventual death. Do you recognize this pattern and do you agree of the consequence?