This is the question that is posed as we deal with the topic of knowledge management - just as with a person it is appropriate that the organisation should understand its level of intelligence and the world in which it operates.
What we would like to do is to capture and pool the collective knowledge of the individuals in the organisation.
The Gartner Group says that in the past year the topic of knowledge management has emerged as a major industry trend. It has the potential to generate as much hype, consulting revenue, misunderstanding and genuine business value as other industry juggernauts such as business process reengineering and groupware.
Let`s attempt to understand what it is really all about. I have sifted through the definitions and quite frankly they are just too esoteric. So let`s try some simple concepts.
What we would like to do is to capture and pool the collective knowledge of the individuals in the organisation: to give it context in terms of the organisation, its processes, goals and objectives, and to make this knowledge widely and appropriately available, creating the organisation`s information assets.
Furthermore, it is essential that you are clear about how to apply the organisation`s knowledge to deal with the demands of its business. In simple terms, think about it as turning the company into one big brain, not just accumulating knowledge, but intelligently applying that knowledge to a purpose.
As we become more formal around the topic it becomes clear that the firm`s information assets may include databases, documents, policies and procedures as well as the non-explicit knowledge embedded in the experience of each individual working in the organisation. It is also clear that with this huge volume of potential knowledge it would be easy to err on the side of doing too much! There is a distinct step of evaluation of what to capture and for what purpose.
What are the business drivers?
Firstly, it is the need to retrieve knowledge residing mostly in employees` heads; so establishing a "repository" of knowledge. The focus, however, is mostly on retrieval and the value is fairly narrow since it is used mostly individually.
This becomes even more crucial during periods of organisational change as processes redesign where people are moved, when often the real knowledge moves with the person, leaving a gap and a disconnection in the organisation`s knowledge.
In addition, it drives the requirement for creating connectivity between people as they collaborate in the execution of increasingly more complex knowledge-based processes, where it is necessary to understand not only the knowledge but the relationships between people and their roles.
We are moving to coordination among the players of the enterprise, the objects and processes of the enterprise. This is a stage where the collaboration around knowledge is enterprise-wide and where a fundamental shift in culture has taken place within the enterprise.
In assessing the organisation`s dependency and need for knowledge management, you need to ask a few key questions about your business activities. For example, you could ask how the firm could produce a better proposal for clients, how to close sales faster and how to convey client information.
Other questions concern what best practices to apply to a problem or what particular skill is available at a certain time. When dealing with the knowledge base it is not just about retrieving structured data, but about looking for and retrieving patterns. So for example, this could be useful for helpdesks to provide a question and answer type of case-base based on the questions previously handled and resolved.
In considering knowledge management for the organisation there is and will be increasingly clever technology to support and enable this. These technologies need to be considered and adopted based on the architecture and requirements of the organisation. It can be some fairly small additional pieces of software or development to support particular requirements, or large and sophisticated software to support a major organisational drive.
In either case, in order for this to really serve the organisation, it needs to be understood that success in this area requires more than just smart technology. It requires a culture change. It also needs to be designed and implemented in the context of the other major drives in the organisation, such as process redesign, and it needs to be understood that it implies a commitment in time, money and effort. These programmes are not short-term fixes.
It strikes me that as we move further into the information age - as the skills shortage becomes more pressing, change becomes a way of life, organisations become increasingly more fractal, complex and knowledge-intensive, and as response times continuously shorten - it is crucial that we understand the corporation`s IQ. We should ask the question as to whether our organisation is smart enough. And should our organisation fail that IQ test, what we should do about it.
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