Knowledge-Management

Much knowledge in organizations goes unshared and unused. I am sure you have had the experience of working on a project for several months, only to discover that a co-worker down the hall from you completed a similar project last year. Perhaps the new service your company is providing to its customers was tried by a former employee (now with a competitor) who left no record of the development, implementation, and results. Perhaps you were asked to make recommendations regarding a new business process, but you do not know how to find out what has been done before and who is knowledgeable about this type of process.

Knowledge-management is about transferring information and best practices from one part of an organization to another part. O’Dell and Grayson phrased it this way:

Knowledge management is … a conscious strategy of getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and helping people share and put information into action in ways that strive to improve organizational performance.

This means managing both human and technological sources of information, and turning this information into knowledge and getting it to people when and where they need it. The generic steps in the knowledge-management process are: create, identify, collect, organize, share, adapt, and use internal knowledge and best practices. Effort is not wasted on reinventing the wheel and unnecessary errors. When this happens the whole-organization gets smarter.

Two kinds of knowledge exist in organizations, says Ikujiro Nonaka. Tacit knowledge is the informal and uncodified learning that resides primarily in the minds of employees. Explicit knowledge is formal and codified; it resides in paper documents and computer files, and can be accessed by employees, assuming they know where to find this information.

Create opportunities for your employees to share both tacit and explicit knowledge with other employees who can benefit from the information and experience. Encourage the experienced employees to describe their successes and learnings from similar projects. These learnings can take the form of subjective insights, intuition, or hunches. By making all of this information explicit, others can test the validity of the conclusions.

Make information technology part of your knowledge-management system. The computer network and company intranet provide a place to store and retrieve information. Hire a professional librarian to manage the system. They usually have the training to evaluate, store, and retrieve information and knowledge, and to use the latest technology to serve the information needs of your customers. Make sure that this person has a background in library reference and experience helping people use information databases in a corporate setting.

Simply asking people to share information will not be enough. Provide a clear vision for knowledge-management in the organization. Help employees understand how knowledge-management will help them achieve their strategic goals. Create incentives for transferring information across departments. Provide opportunities for employees to meet to share their experiences on similar projects and what they learned from these efforts. Show employees that non-original ideas are valued. Make it easy for employees to enter project information in a database that is accessible to all. Provide resources for gathering and using the organization’s information.

Do not assume that just because you have cross-functional work groups or teams that knowledge and best practices are being shared among departments. Group members have to see knowledge and best-practice sharing as their responsibility and that it is essential to success. Also, you have to create an environment where people feel safe in divulging what they have learned from prior experiences.

Training and knowledge-management should go hand in hand. Training is one way of conveying the organization’s knowledge to large numbers of employees and an important aspect of the knowledge-management system. Ask trainers to design opportunities for participants to share their experience and lessons learned. Whether it is a management-development seminar or a computer software class, participants should be given an opportunity to discuss their experiences related to the topic. For example, in a project-management seminar, participants should share with each other what they have learned about effective and ineffective ways to work with suppliers and other external resources. Not only will this sharing contribute to the transfer of knowledge throughout the organization, but participants will feel better about their involvement in the seminar.

The use of information technology should only become a focus after you are clear about goals, values, and barriers. New computer technology is making knowledge-management cheaper and more efficient all the time. The Internet and company intranets are powerful tools that are revolutionizing the sharing of information. Enterprise-training software is promising to create a single database for all employee learning.

But simply installing this technology is not the complete answer to knowledge-management. Much explicit knowledge can be stored and retrieved through computer systems, but tacit knowledge must be tapped in other ways. Some solutions are based in technology (intranet, online libraries, databases) and some solutions are based in human interaction. Both are important. Explicit knowledge can be posted at a Web site, but tacit knowledge is not present until people meet and start sharing their thoughts and experiences with one another.

Increasing the flow of information is not difficult. The challenge is to increase the flow and use of knowledge.