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.