Please select country and language…. Global english. Germany german. France french. Netherlands dutch. Romania romanian. Spain spanish. Most important tags. Search term. Knowledge management — if companies knew what they knew. Knowledge is one of the most important factors in the global digital marketplace. How well a company manages this valuable resource therefore plays a crucial role in determining its future success.
Yet knowledge management is a complex task that cannot be handled using software alone. Stephan Hilbrandt. August 26, Knowledge management — what exactly is it? This definition also states that the knowledge base includes all data, information, knowledge and skills that this corporate structure or person has or should have for completing their varied range of tasks.
The challenge — passing on experience-based knowledge. Knowledge is created through connecting information. Once the information has served its purpose, it loses its value. By contrast, knowledge is created through making connections.
We link different pieces of information using our previously gained and experience-based knowledge, interpret it and make it usable. Knowledge therefore depends on context and experience. It is always bound up with the individual, but is also the only product that increases through sharing. This is relatively easy to share.
For instance, strategically important factual knowledge from individuals can be easily stored, updated and shared in a company wiki, database or knowledge groupware with an intelligent document management system. To enable this know-how to be passed on and used by others, implicit knowledge needs to be converted into explicit knowledge. However, this is only possible under certain circumstances and calls for intensive interpersonal exchanges, for example as part of mentoring or coaching.
Alternatively or additionally, social software that makes personal knowledge available to others through intensive team dialog can also be used for this purpose. The right strategy — defining and developing fields of knowledge. Useful tools help with the transformation. Needs-based knowledge must fit the context. Knowledge management needs a culture that promotes knowledge. In this step of the process, the sources of knowledge are identified, as well as where critical knowledge is kept, what can be learned from this knowledge and if there are areas in which knowledge can be lost during the process.
The discovery process is helped by a solid understanding of the knowledge flow of the organization. Every organization contains a vast amount of knowledge, and it must be stored and organized in a deliberate manner. By creating a system that is mapped and categorized, knowledge is more easily accessed and the organizational structure is increased.
The organization must organize and assess the knowledge to see how best it can be folded into the structure of the organization. This step is when an organization should be establishing and promoting a cultural shift toward knowledge sharing and developing employees to be innovators.
Building a system that works is the first step, but individuals need to understand how to use that system. Implementing training programs can help increase the understanding of knowledge management systems. Once the system is being used, the company benefits from increased efficiency, better decision making, and more innovative employees.
This could be through in-person tutoring, company-wide training sessions, online chats and group discussions - or a mix of those options and others.
For expertise location to be an effective aspect of a knowledge management system, there must be a searchable matrix built that allows for documentation of competencies. With text-based knowledge management, a system to store, categorize and navigate subjects is necessary.
Threads, subforums and groups can be divided by topic, level of expertise or any number of other classifications. Creating an environment where learning is considered an asset will drive employees to continuously educate themselves. Incentivizing them to take advantage of your knowledge management systems will result in upskilled employees who are ready to take on leadership roles in your organization.
For this to happen, there must be structured and accessible learning and development technology in place that employees can use. Looking at the actions taken, the results of those actions and the lessons learned can be extremely valuable and allows for lessons learned to be fully documented and archived.
These online seminars can be very helpful in widely disseminating ideas throughout teams, branches or the entire company. Knowledge management must be prioritized within the company, and an ethos of sharing knowledge must be built into the DNA of the company and incentivized. There needs to be a clear system for all steps of knowledge management, while also leaving room for innovation.
Technology supports knowledge management, allowing knowledge to be searched for, found, and accessed within knowledge management systems. Technology also allows people to communicate better. Without this step, instituting knowledge management systems will be a battle. Organizations that take full advantage of knowledge management are better able to react quickly to changing market conditions, offer better services to their customers and increase their innovation and efficiency. Shared project files - This system allows for greater collaboration and teamwork, especially across distances.
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We collect anonymized statistics only for historical research. A sophisticated knowledge management system lies behind that business model. Dell has invested heavily in an electronic repository that contains a list of available components.
The system drives the operation: customers choose configurations from a menu, suppliers provide components based on their orders, and manufacturing retrieves orders from the system and schedules assembly. Dell does not deliver highly customized orders, and it raises its prices considerably for orders with special components. In , Dell shipped 11 million PCs. Those systems were put together from 40, possible configurations competitors typically offer only about configurations , which means that each configuration was used on average times.
That level of reuse allows Dell to lower its costs and charge less than the competition. Hewlett-Packard, by contrast, uses a personalization approach to support its business strategy, which is to develop innovative products. For that strategy to succeed, technical knowledge must get transferred to product development teams in a timely way.
The company channels such knowledge through person-to-person exchanges. Rather than limiting travel budgets, executives encourage such travel. Every employee has access to the corporate airplanes, which travel daily between HP offices. Remarkably, the company manages effective person-to-person knowledge sharing despite its size—with , employees, HP dwarfs the largest consulting company, Andersen Consulting, which has about 60, people.
Consider this example. An HP team recently developed a very successful electronic oscilloscope with a Windows operating system and interface. Executives wanted to be sure that other divisions understood and applied the interface.
To keep the costs of knowledge transfer low, they considered trying to codify the acquired know-how. They realized, however, that the knowledge they wanted to capture was too rich and subtle to incorporate in a written report. So they took the person-to-person approach and sent engineers from product development teams to meetings at divisions around the world and to a companywide conference. But the investment paid off as the interface gained widespread acceptance throughout the company.
In all the companies and institutions we examined, managers had chosen a distinct knowledge management strategy. Although their approaches differed slightly, there was a common pattern among them. Those that pursued an assemble-to-order product or service strategy emphasized the codification and reuse of knowledge.
Those that pursued highly customized service offerings, or a product innovation strategy, invested mainly in person-to-person knowledge sharing. Executives who try to excel at both strategies risk failing at both. Management consulting firms have run into serious trouble when they failed to stick with one approach. The strategy consulting firms we studied all came to grief with document-driven systems. Consultants were tempted to use the systems to deliver standardized solutions, but their customers were paying for highly customized services.
When the systems were misused, customers became dissatisfied. As the CEO of a major U. One of the main reasons I have used them so regularly is because they have intimate knowledge of my company and our industry. The advice I have gotten from them has been sensitive to our unique needs. Recently, though, I have found that they are trying to push cookie-cutter solutions. Frankly I expect more—and they sure as hell have not reduced their rates. Another consulting firm, Bain, learned a hard lesson about relying on documents.
In the s, before electronic document systems became fashionable, managers at Bain developed a large paper-based document center at its Boston headquarters; it stored slide books containing disguised presentations, analyses, and information on various industries.
People need incentives to participate in the knowledge sharing process. The two knowledge management strategies call for different incentive systems. In the codification model, managers need to develop a system that encourages people to write down what they know and to get those documents into the electronic repository. And real incentives—not small enticements—are required to get people to take those steps.
Incentives to stimulate knowledge sharing should be very different at companies that are following the personalization approach. Managers need to reward people for sharing knowledge directly with other people. At Bain, the partners are evaluated each year on a variety of dimensions, including how much direct help they have given colleagues. The degree of high-quality person-to-person dialogue a partner has had with others can account for as much as one-quarter of his or her annual compensation.
Other strategy consulting companies report different problems with electronic document systems. For example, after subject experts at one firm contributed documents to electronic libraries, they were flooded with callers asking very basic questions.
Two companies that we studied have scrapped their investment in electronic knowledge databases; their existing databases are used simply to connect people. Similarly, firms that rely on codification have run into trouble by overinvesting in person-to-person systems. When they overinvest in this way, they undermine their value proposition—reliable systems at reasonable prices—as well as the economics of reuse.
Unnecessary innovations are expensive: programming and then debugging new software, for instance, eats a lot of resources. And person-to-person knowledge sharing involves expensive travel and meeting time; those costs dilute the advantage that is created when codified knowledge is reused. Companies that straddle the two strategies may also find themselves with an unwieldy mix of people.
Having both inventors and implementers rubbing elbows can be deadly. The downfall of CSC Index, the consulting company that invented the reengineering concept in the early s, underscores how serious this problem can be. The founders of what was originally known simply as Index had strong backgrounds in IT systems. Success with reengineering, however, catapulted the company into the general management arena.
It then tried to leverage its newfound access to the CEO by aggressively hiring senior consultants from established strategy consulting firms. It also started to recruit M. Soon the firm had two populations: an old guard that focused on IT systems and had strong implementation skills, and a new guard that focused on corporate strategy and had strong conceptual skills. As reengineering became a commodity business later in the decade, some of the old guard recognized the need to standardize their methods and create more reusable knowledge.
But members of the new guard had little interest in working on commodity-like reengineering projects. They had joined the firm because they wanted to work on cutting-edge strategy problems. The level of IT support a company needs depends on its choice of knowledge management strategy.
For the codification model, heavy IT support is critical; for the personalization model, it is much less important. Managers who are implementing the former should be prepared to spend a lot on large, sophisticated electronic repository systems.
Andersen Consulting, for example, has developed proprietary search engines. The two knowledge management strategies require different IT infrastructures as well as different levels of support.
In the codification model, managers need to implement a system that is much like a traditional library—it must contain a large cache of documents and include search engines that allow people to find and use the documents they need. The firm was subsequently folded into its parent company. Although it is important to avoid straddling, an exclusive focus on one strategy is also unwise.
Companies pursuing the personalization model should have a modest electronic document system that supports people in two ways: by providing background materials on a topic and by pointing them to experts who can provide further advice. Thus they will have to pay to bring some people within the company together at meetings. They should encourage the heavy use of e-mail and electronic discussion forums. Such person-to-person communication is needed to make sure that documents are not blindly applied to situations for which they are ill suited.
Competitive strategy must drive knowledge management strategy. What value do customers expect from the company? How does knowledge that resides in the company add value for customers? If a company does not have clear answers to those questions, it should not attempt to choose a knowledge management strategy because it could easily make a bad choice. Assuming the competitive strategy is clear, managers will want to consider three further questions that can help them choose a primary knowledge management strategy.
Companies that follow a standardized product strategy sell products that do not vary much, if at all. Even Dell, whose assemble-to-order computers vary more than mass-marketed products, sells products that can be considered standardized.
A knowledge management strategy based on reuse fits companies that are creating standardized products. Because those needs will vary dramatically, codified knowledge is of limited value. Companies that follow a customized product approach should consider the personalization model. A business strategy based on mature products typically benefits most from a reuse model.
The processes for developing and selling such products involve well-understood tasks and knowledge that can be codified.
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