Knowledge Management
Request Pepper Press’s White Paper on Knowledge Management here:
Knowledge is only power when the right person has it at the right time.
- Many people — especially senior people — leave with lots of knowledge — knowledge which is lost to the organisation when they leave
- Organisations need a way of capturing experiences and the lessons it has learned. A project that goes wrong is very rich with cost savings the next time around. But this knowledge is often lost completley.
- People join companies from other firms or other divisions, and organsations are not good at extracting their knowledge for the good of the firm
- It’s great for new hires to hear the stories of where the company comes from
- Two decades after Peter Senge’s “Learning Organisation,” it is still not a reality in most businesses. Now, more than ever, we need to learn about clients as well as potential clients and industries that haven’t been addressed yet.
How to capture IP is an old problem…
This problem has been around for a long time, and so far the ways to solve it have not been very effective.
Most of the tools we have researched are technology tools to drive people to the intranet, or to manage a corporate knowledgebase better.
These are all excellent tools, but they seem to overlook the fact that the knowledge needs to get into the system somehow.
The main exception is Etienne Wenger’s “Communities of Practice,” which came to prominence around 2004. The professions (engineering, auditing, accounting, legal, medical) as well as trades (journalism, hair-dressing, mechanics) all use this approach.
As Wenger says in a 2004 article in Inside Knowledge magazine: “You would go to conferences in the late 1990s and hear presenters speak about KM and say it was 90 per cent people and ten per cent technology. But they would then spend the whole time talking about technology, because they didn’t have much to say about working with people as ‘knowers’.”
…with a technology and human dimension
What does the organisation know?
- Tacit Knowledge is the vast amount of experience that people in the organisation have — most of which is unavailable to the organisation
- Explicit Knowledge is the stuff you get from books and such. It’s also present in induction programmes. Most of it isn’t inside the organisation, but can be brought in if needed.
- Embedded Knowledge is the combined knowledge of the organisation that is embedded in its systems and processes.
What does it mean to “manage knowledge”?
Management implies
- Quantifying the resource
- Measuring the resource
- Using the resource to increase shareholder value by:
- cutting costs
- improving productivity
- increasing profits
- increasing the intrinsic value of the business
Until now, knowledge inside organisations has been difficult to quantify, measure, and therefore to manage.
Using this approach, we can start quantifying knowledge and then measuring how well we’re using it — a sort of ROK — Return on Knowledge.
