Regardless of how much money, time and resources are thrown at building an ICT infrastructure, if the information needed to support processes, operations and the business strategy is unavailable, little advantage will be gained.
Knowledge is power. In the hands of more than a few, knowledge is exponentially powerful and it unlocks the true potential of business.
Opening the vault to the intellectual assets of a business falls into the domain of knowledge management (KM), a concept that has been around for more than a decade and is now being formalised as part of the business approach of numerous large organisations. In South Africa, KM is especially relevant.
Explains Mohammed Bhyat, project delivery leader at e.com institute, a business solutions provider: "South Africa is in the unenviable position where it has, and still is, losing a large amount of its institutional knowledge. Failing to identify and leverage that knowledge is severely hampering the efficiency and effectiveness of organisations in both the public and private sectors."
South Africa has a number of issues to deal with. It is a developing country and, as such, is experiencing considerable staff turnover. This 'churn' has a number of causes and foremost is the transformation we are currently undergoing. The skewed legacy of the past saw only a privileged few gain access to education and hold top posts in organisations. These people are now at retirement age or have lost their positions as a result of the drive to meet employment equity, affirmative action and broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) requirements. To add to this problem, there are still too few new graduates coming out of the education cycle - and those that do are being lured abroad by higher remuneration and more exciting experiential opportunities, or are being repeatedly headhunted within South Africa.
KM is becoming essential within organisations to deal with this situation. Explains Bhyat: "There are two kinds of knowledge: tacit, which resides in the heads of employees (skills, experience); and explicit, that which is documented. In the past, people remained in the same job or with the same company for years at a time, and institutional knowledge was kept within the organisation through mentorship. Today, those mentors are long gone and with the churn organisations are experiencing there is no time to mentor newcomers. The result: it takes everyone much longer just to figure out what is going on and to get the job done. And when everyone's energy is purely focused on simply getting the task done, there is no time for value-adds like strategic thinking, customer service, excellence and innovation. KM is about preserving knowledge, creating new knowledge and making it available."
He points to local government as an example of what is occurring as the result of failing to document processes and knowledge. "The engineers that created the systems on which our local infrastructure depends (eg, water reticulation, electrical systems and traffic lights) were mostly white males that had been in the public service for 20 or 30 years. When they left, they took the institutional memory with them. The same situation has happened at numerous other institutions, eg Spoornet. The people who maintained the locomotives have just about all left and new graduates and employees have no mentors to lean on.
"It is ironic that in the Information Age we have lost the ability to record and share our knowledge. Instead, organisations often invest enormous amounts of money in 'systems' without an adequate analysis of the linkages between data, information, and knowledge and the underlying business processes that define the business architecture. While various ICT systems assist to distil this data into a format that can assist decision-making, it still lacks the insight that human experience provides - and the time it takes to 'discover' this knowledge hampers advancement and organisational performance. This is why KM has become a formalised discipline - one that companies such as SAB, BP and Kumba Resources are now putting at the centre of their organisations."
The KM approach
A good first step is to document processes and activities and to make explicit the policies and procedures of a business unit department or organisation, etc, to make them more broadly available to all staff.
Explains Bhyat: "One quick win is to map business processes - write them down, put them into a graphical format and post them on the intranet. Also record what motivates the movement from one process to another within the workflow. Another quick win is to create a list of 'experts' within the organisation - people who have very specific skills or experience who can act as mentors or sounding boards for others in the organisation, or who can give input on particular projects.
"Step two is to maintain and grow that knowledge base. A database is only as good as the accuracy and integrity of the information it contains. Without ongoing maintenance it will become useless."
The techniques or methods used to extract knowledge are many and varied. Some of the oldest, like storytelling, are the most effective. However, there are also more formal structures, like creating communities of practice, developing discussion forums or instituting regular reviews. However, none of this is of any use if knowledge is not continually generated and the information received is not filtered and recorded and made easily searchable and accessible to the organisation. Says Bhyat: "In addition to the technologies that can be applied to record and order knowledge - such as data warehouses, business intelligence solutions, portals, workflow and content management solutions - a culture change is critical. Information sharing and collaboration need to become the norm, not the exception.
"Business performance is reliant on the organisation's ability to truly harness the power of information and knowledge in its processes, planning and operations. It not only increases the efficiency of processes and productivity of staff, but can enhance decision-making at all levels. Businesses would do well to consider a KM approach rather than an ICT solution to resolve the 'disjointedness' within their organisations."
Share
Editorial contacts