Build a Knowledge Management System
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
—Steve Jobs
Business Dictionary.com defines knowledge management as strategies and processes designed to identify, capture, structure, value, leverage, and share an organization’s intellectual assets to enhance its performance and competitiveness. John Girard & JoAnn Girard describe knowledge management as the creation, transfer, and exchange of organizational knowledge to achieve a (competitive) advantage.
Knowledge can be articulated explicitly or manifested implicitly. The main difference lies in how knowledge is shared. Explicit knowledge is clear and spoken and it can be summarized. It is therefore easier to communicate and share. Implicit knowledge, on the other hand, is rather intuitive, intangible, tacit, less teachable, less observable, unspoken, and more complex. It is more difficult to detach from the person who created it or the context in which it is embedded, which makes it hard to distinguish. The aim of knowledge management is to maximize organizational and individual knowledge by extracting implicit knowledge and translating it into explicit knowledge, which can then be interpreted, stored, retrieved, shared, and disseminated. Knowledge carried by an individual only realizes its commercial potential when it is replicated by an organization and becomes organizational knowledge.
Many organizations invest in decision support systems, database management systems, groupware, and document management systems to cater to two primary needs: (1) meet mandatory reporting requirement and (2) run day-to-day operations. Very few organizations actually invest in developing systems to leverage knowledge that individuals and teams acquire or create over the period of their work tenure, for future use or for horizontal deployment in similar applications in others areas/sites of the same organization. The result is that when the individual leaves the organization, the information leaves with him/her, leaving the organization high and dry. A recent survey confirmed that the lost knowledge of a departing employee, given the enormous number of baby boomers that will be changing jobs or retiring in the next few years, causes a productivity cost of 85% of their base salary due to their replacement’s mistakes, lost knowledge, and lost skill. The 2017 National Healthcare Retention and RN Staffing Report highlighted that every 1% increase in registered nursing staff turnover costs a hospital an average of $410,500 annually. Under Lean, this is considered a waste of non-utilized talent.
According to Stankosky, knowledge management consists of four elements: organization, leadership, learning, and technology (Figure 21.1).
Organization: Affects the operational parts of the knowledge resources such as organizational structures, traceability, techniques for the transmission of knowledge, and the optimized use of the company’s knowledge resources.
Leadership: Affects the strategic processes such as values, goals, knowledge needs, sources of knowledge, priorities, and allocation of integrated leadership and systems thinking.
Learning: Affects mainly the social dimension of how individuals and communities of practice collaborate and share knowledge. The focus is on finding the attributes that create a learning organization.
Technology: Focuses on groupware, collaboration tools, product mining, and various technical solutions that support knowledge management processes and strategies.
Peter Drucker said that the knowledge worker who worked primarily with his mind and not his hands would become increasingly productive in the modern workforce. He speculated that firms that first discovered how best to utilize this experienced talent in a new type of relationship would acquire a significant competitive advantage.
Martin Skogmalm, in his study on “Knowledge Management in a Lean Organization,” cites that the implementation of knowledge management fails mainly due to two reasons: culture and leadership. He says that in order to stimulate knowledge management and knowledge sharing, an open organizational culture is needed, where the emphasis is on trust and building relationships, and the culture is supported through engaged leadership. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, emphasizes that experienced colleagues and managers have a huge responsibility to create a culture where lessons learned are a natural part of everyday life. His book highlights the five disciplines that distinguish learning organizations from more traditional organizations: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning. In a learning organization, he says, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They build organizations in which people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity and clarify vision and people are responsible for learning.
Figure 21.2 depicts the areas of opportunity during different stages of the knowledge management cycle for building a knowledge repository.
The knowledge gained during any stage of a process improvement project or initiative is a good candidate for becoming part of a central repository. For example, data collected through patient shadowing, time and motion studies, and process observations, or any analysis or simulation conducted using the data, should be retrievable on demand by anyone in the organization who needs it. While many organizations use project management solutions, business intelligence tools, learning management systems, and other technological tools to support their knowledge management, they also encourage paper-based methods such as Lean A3 to make it convenient for people at any level in the organization.
Hospital Heal procured a business intelligence tool to capture most metrics from department performance scorecards and the organizational report card. The hospital had an LMS system to maintain an inventory of training for all employees and project management software to support all continuous improvement and organization-wide projects. Examples of a storyboard template (Figure 21.3) and a completed storyboard report (Figure 21.4) based on Lean A3 thinking, which individuals and teams used at Hospital Heal for building a knowledge repository, are shared here.
Sensei Gyaan: Use technology only after you have tested the process on paper. Remember, “Creativity before Capital.”