How to Optimize Knowledge Management in Organisations

Introduction

In the fast-changing business environment, knowledge is the basis of every organization in creating and sustaining competitive differentiation. Many organizations put forth additional efforts to meet or adjust to the pressure of their customers, players, shareholders and supervisory bodies.

Consequently, business executives have embraced knowledge as one of the organization’s most important asset. Its quality and availability can facilitate them to face the pressures, challenges and remain competitive. Therefore, enterprises are mounting knowledge strategies that tackle organizational development, retrenchment, amalgamation, and internal reorganization.

They plan to build up Knowledge Management (KM) capability to the level that they are institutionalized and embedded into their business operations and practices

Knowledge is a blend of experience, insights, expertise, intuition, judgement that exist in the mind of the knower, while Knowledge management is the practice of creating, acquiring, capturing, sharing and using knowledge to enhance learning and performance in an organization.

Institutionalization of knowledge management is about having activities that facilitate the continuous acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge has been considered a fundamental strategic resource for enhancing an organization’s competitiveness since knowledge is precious, rare and complicated to replicate.

Therefore, there is need to have strategies that will ensure employees leaving the organization do not go with rare and difficult –to- imitate knowledge. As a result, business executives should have strategies to prevent loss of vital expertise especially when employees depart or retire. They have to devise strategies that ensure each individual knowledge is converted into organizational asset that is accessible to employees

Organizations are facing ever-increasing challenges, brought on by marketplace pressures or the nature of the workplace. Many organizations are now looking to knowledge management (KM) to address these challenges. Such initiatives are often started with the development of a knowledge management strategy. To be successful, a KM strategy must do more than just outline high-level goals such as ‘become a knowledge-enabled organization’.

Instead, the strategy must identify the key needs and issues within the organization, and provide a framework for addressing these. I want to propose an approach for developing a KM strategy that focuses strongly on an initial needs analysis. Taking this approach ensures that any activities and initiatives are firmly grounded in the real needs and challenges confronting the organization.

Need for knowledge management

There are a number of common situations that are widely recognized as benefiting from knowledge management approaches. While they are not the only issues that can be tackled with KM techniques, it is useful to explore a number of these situations in order to provide a context for the development of a KM strategy.

Beyond these typical situations, each organization will have unique issues and problems to be overcome. A KM strategy must address the real needs and issues. It is imperative that knowledge management interfaces with the following units of organizations;

Call centres

Call centers have increasingly become the main ‘public face’ for many organizations. This role is made more challenging by the expectations of customers that they can get the answers they need within minutes of ringing up. The challenges that confront call centers, include;

• High-pressure, closely-monitored environment
• High staff turnover
• Costly and lengthy training for new staff

In this environment, the need for knowledge management is clear and immediate. Failure to address these issues impacts upon sales, public reputation or legal exposure.

Front-line staff

Beyond the call center, many organizations have a wide range of front-line staff who interact with customers or members of the public. They may operate in the field, such as sales staff or maintenance crews; or be located at branches or behind front-desks. In large organizations, these front-line staff are often very dispersed geographically, with limited communication channels to head office. Typically, there are also few mechanisms for sharing information between staff working in the same business area but different locations. The challenge in the front-line environment is to ensure consistency, accuracy and repeatability.

Business managers

The volume of information available to business management has increased greatly. Known as ‘information overload’ or ‘info-glut’, the challenge is now to filter out the key information needed to support business decisions. The pace of organizational change is also increasing, as are the demands on the ‘people skills’ of management staff. In this environment, there is a need for sound decision making. These decisions are enabled by accurate, complete and relevant information. Knowledge management can play a key role in supporting the information needs of management staff. It can also assist with the mentoring and coaching skills needed by modern managers. The loss of key staff can have a major impact.

Aging workforce

The public sector is particularly confronted by the impacts of an aging workforce. Increasingly, private sector organizations are also recognizing that this issue needs to be addressed if the continuity of business operations is to be maintained. Long-serving staff have a depth of knowledge that is relied upon by other staff, particularly in environments where little effort has been put into capturing or managing knowledge at an organizational level. In this situation, the loss of these key staff can have a major impact upon the level of knowledge within the organization. Knowledge management can assist by putting in place a structured mechanism for capturing or transferring this knowledge when staff retire.

Supporting innovation

Many organizations have now recognized the importance of innovation in ensuring long-term growth (and even survival). This is particularly true in fast-moving industry sectors such as IT, consulting, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals. Most organizations, however, are constructed to ensure consistency, repeatability and efficiency of current processes and products. Innovation does not tend to sit comfortably with this type of focus, and organizations often need to look to unfamiliar techniques to encourage and drive innovation. There has been considerable work in the knowledge management field regarding the process of innovation, and how to nurture it in a business environment.

Organizational environment

Every organization has a unique environment, defined by factors such as:

• Purpose and activities of the organization
• Overall strategic direction
• Organizational culture
• Size of the organization
• Geographic spread
• Staff skills and experience
• Organizational history
• Available resources
• Marketplace factors among others

For this reason, each organization has a unique set of needs and issues to be addressed by knowledge management.

It is easy to jump into ‘solutions mode’, recommending approaches such as communities of practice, storytelling, content management systems, and much more. While these approaches may have widespread success in other organizations, they will only succeed in the current environment if they meet actual staff needs.

In practice, organizations are littered with well-meaning but poorly targeted knowledge management activities. In many cases, these fail because they simply didn’t address a clear, concrete and imperative problem within the organization.

This is now recognized as one of the ‘critical success factors’ for knowledge management: identify the needs within the organization, and then design the activities accordingly.

Developing a Knowledge Management strategy

Effectively implementing a well-designed KM strategy and becoming a knowledge-based company is seen as a mandatory condition of success for corporations as they enter the era of the knowledge economy. The purpose of managing and leveraging a company’s knowledge is to maximize the returns to the organization.

This means being able to measure both the principal investment and the yield from that investment at regular intervals. There are many approaches for developing a knowledge management strategy, each supported by a holistic model of KM processes. These can be classified into two main approaches:

• Top-down. The overall strategic direction of the organization is used to identify the focus of the knowledge management initiative. This is reflected in a series of activities designed to meet this broad goal.
• Bottom-up. Research is conducted into the activities of staff involved in key business processes. The findings of this research highlights key staff needs and issues, which are then tackled through a range of knowledge management initiatives.

Each of these approaches has its strengths, and in practice, a successful KM program must encompass both. We need a model that focuses strongly on the needs analysis activities with staff, to drive a primarily bottom-up strategy, as follows:

1. Identify the key staff groups within the organization. These groups deliver the greatest business value, or are involved in the most important business activities.
2. Conduct comprehensive and holistic needs analysis activities with selected staff groups, to identify key needs and issues.
3. Supplement this research with input from senior management and organizational strategy documents, to determine an overall strategic focus.
4. Based on these findings, develop recommendations for addressing the issues and needs identified.
5. Implement a series of strategic and tactical initiatives, based on the recommendations. These will select suitable knowledge management techniques and approaches.

Benefits of this approach

Historically, many knowledge management strategies have focused solely on the top-down approach, identifying high-level objectives such as ‘become a knowledge-enabled organization’. With little understanding, of the key issues and needs of staff throughout the organization, these initiatives found it difficult to engage staff in the required cultural and process changes.

As a result, many of these initiatives have had little long-term impact on the organization, despite initial efforts. Recognizing these issues, this approach focuses much more strongly on the initial needs analysis activities. The approach to developing a KM strategy outlined in this write up provides a number of major benefits:

All-inclusive

The focus on needs analysis will identify a wide range of issues and requirements. Some will be organization-wide, while others will be specific to individual business units or job roles.

The use of a range of needs analysis techniques will identify:

• Cultural issues
• Key business needs
• Duplication of effort
• Inconsistencies in practices
• Inefficiencies in business processes
• Opportunities for improved policies or procedures
• Major business risks

Solution-independent

The approach used to develop the knowledge management strategy makes no assumptions about the solutions that might be implemented. The approach is independent of any technologies implemented, or knowledge management techniques applied. Instead, the approach is to identify the need, and then determine the solution. Talking with staff is always enlightening

Unpretentious

The use of well-tested needs analysis techniques gives confidence that the true issues in the organization will be identified. In practice, these simply ‘fall out’ of the research activities, with the key strategic and tactical recommendations becoming obvious in most cases. This simplicity makes the process easy to implement, and ensures that the findings and recommendations are well-understood throughout the organization.

Effectual

A modest amount of initial research will be sufficient to identify the most crucial problems within the organization. These can then be tackled with suitable activities and initiatives. Once this first round of project has delivered tangible business benefits, additional targeted research can be used to identify further issues to be addressed. This reduplication approach can then be repeated, ensuring that business improvements are seen even as the next round of research is initiated.

Target critical issues

There are many ‘good ideas’ that can be drawn from the field of knowledge management. The challenge is to identify those approaches that will have the greatest impact upon the organization. By starting with the needs analysis, approaches can be targeted to address the most critical issues, or to deliver the greatest business benefits. Target the critical issues with the KM strategy

Significant staff groups

The first step in the process is to identify the key staff groups in the organization. The key staff are typically those directly involved in the most important business activities. In general, the key staff groups are more likely to be those at the front-line, rather than managers or administrative staff. This will, of course, depend on the nature and structure of the organization.

Common staff groups involve:

• Front-line staff
• Call centre staff
• Field workers
• Researchers
• Production workers
• Administrative and support staff
• Managers (senior, line)
• IT staff

Each of these groups will have specific needs and issues, as well as those in common with the organization as a whole. By targeting the key staff groups, the extent to which the needs vary across the organization can be identified, and the KM strategy developed accordingly. Needs analysis techniques are drawn from many fields

Requirements examination methods

There are a wide range of need analysis techniques, drawn from fields such as knowledge management, user-centered design, ethnography and anthropology.

Techniques include:

• Facilitated discussions
• Focus groups
• Surveys
• Staff interviews
• Workplace observation
• Contextual inquiry
• Task analysis

In practice, more than one technique should be used with a selected group of staff, to ensure that a complete picture is built up. Each of the techniques are briefly described in the sections below.

Enabled deliberations

There are a wide range of facilitated discussion techniques that can be used to explore issues with targeted staff groups. These are most commonly used with management, consultants, and other staff comfortable with these types of meetings.

Techniques such as ‘affinity diagrams’ can be used to provide structure to the discussions, and to capture the issues identified. In many cases, facilitated discussions are used as the primary mechanism for gaining the strategic input required for the development of the KM strategy.

Focus groups

These are a specific, and widely-used, form of facilitated discussions that focus on exploring a topic within a group setting. Often used as a way of gathering input from larger numbers of stakeholders, focus groups must be run carefully if they are to generate meaningful results. Focus groups are best used to explore current issues and problems, rather than to discuss future ‘wish-lists’ of knowledge management approaches. Focus groups should always be used in conjunction with techniques such as staff interviews and contextual inquiry, to ensure that the results are meaningful.

Studies

The use of surveys is widespread, and they are very efficient ways of gaining input from large number of staff throughout an organization. In practice, surveys are best used to gather staff opinions, rather than specific information on which to base decisions.

Care must also be taken when developing the survey questions, and analyzing the results. Survey results must always be supported with the use of other techniques, to provide confidence in the findings. Interviews are very effective at identifying staff needs.

Staff consultations

One-on-one interviews are one of the most effective and often used techniques for identifying staff needs and issues.

Workplace observations

This involves going ‘out into the field’ to observe the activities of staff, and the environment in which they work.

Workplace observation is particularly effective in environments such as call centers, manufacturing areas, field working, or on-the-road staff. It is a very holistic technique that will identify patterns of work and environment issues that are impossible to gather using techniques such as surveys or focus groups.

Contextual inquiry

This is a combination of staff interviews and workplace observation that involves exploring issues with a staff person, while situated within their normal working environment. By conducting the interview ‘in context’, it becomes possible to see the resources used by staff when conducting work activities. The interviewer can also ask the staff person to show them how they complete specific activities, for example, showing how they find a piece of information on the intranet. This technique is very effective at identifying issues with currently-available information sources and tools.

Task analysis

Not all activities within an organization are of equal value. Key business tasks should be identified, and investigated to gain an understanding of the steps involved, and the knowledge required at each step.

The existing sources of the knowledge can then be identified, along with the key issues and roadblocks impacting upon the effectiveness and efficiency of the task. This type of research will identify mechanisms for both improving the task itself, as well as indicating how to improve the provision of knowledge to those involved in completing the task. Supplement the needs analysis with a strategic focus.

Strategic input

While the needs analysis activities focused on the ‘bottom-up’ aspects of the KM project, the overall strategic focus must also be identified. This strategic focus then guides the knowledge management strategy, providing a framework for the selection and prioritization of individual projects and activities. In this way, both the bottom-up and top-down aspects of the knowledge management strategy are addressed.

There are a number of sources of input that can be drawn upon when determining the strategic focus, including:

• Senior management involvement, via interviews, facilitated discussions, or other interactions.
• Organizational strategy documents, such as the corporate plan or annual report.
• Results of other strategic research projects, such as ‘staff satisfaction surveys’.
• External market research.
• Industry ‘best practices’, and other reports drawn from relevant industry or sector bodies.

These inputs can then be synthesized into a strategic focus for the knowledge management initiatives. Use corporate documents as a key strategic input.

Common findings

The needs analysis and strategic input will highlight a broad range of issues and needs throughout the organization.

Sometimes, issues can be identified such as:

• Difficulty in finding key corporate information
• Inconsistent and unstructured approach to information management
• Ineffective dissemination of corporate and regional news
• Reliance on ‘rumor’ and ‘gossip’ as the key sources of organizational news
• Lack of knowledge sharing between related business units
• Difficulties in determining and disseminating ‘best practices’
• Inconsistency in the advice given by call center and front-line staff
• Over-reliance on long-service members of staff as sources of knowledge
• Cultural barriers between head office and regional staff
• Duplication of effort between regions or departments
• Roadblocks between policy development and program implementation

These are just a small sampling of possible findings, to provide an idea of the types of issues that will often drive the implementation of a knowledge management strategy.

Acting on the findings

With an in-depth understanding of the problems, issues and needs within the organization, it is then possible to meaningfully determine appropriate strategies for addressing them. This will undoubtedly include a range of both strategic (long-term) and tactical (short-term) initiatives.

Depending on the issues identified, these might include:

• Improving the corporate intranet
• Formalizing communities of practice
• Implementing coaching and mentoring programs
• Improving document and records management
• Facilitating skills transfer from retiring staff
• Capturing staff knowledge in a documented form
• Improving policies and procedures
• Implementing new learning approaches, including e-learning
• Enhancing the corporate staff directory
• Implementing team collaboration tools and processes
• Establishing after-action review processes
• Formalizing the role of ‘knowledge brokers’ within the organization

These are just a small cross-section of the many possible approaches that can be taken to knowledge management. As highlighted throughout this article, only the needs analysis activities allow a meaningful selection to be made between these different approaches. In practice, each organization will apply a unique mix of short-term ‘quick wins’ and longer-term projects to meet knowledge management needs.

The Road ahead

Development and utilization of knowledge results to increased organizational performance to meet strategic goals. Further, it is for creating, sustaining, sharing and making the best use of available knowledge to enhance organizational performance. For organizations to sustain capability to compete in the market, they should not only embrace, but also recognize, knowledge as a core asset.

There are a number of reasons as to why organizations are embracing knowledge management in their business operations. The major reasons are: growth of business and retention of market share, improving quality in production, create and sustain strategic competitive advantage, nurturing creativity and innovation, key to company’s business strategy, retain and capture employee knowledge, dynamic business environment and markets, knowledge creation and knowledge transfer, helps avoid costly mistakes and ill-informed decisions, in that order. performance improvement, realizing competitive advantage and being innovative.

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Developing a knowledge management strategy provides a unique opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the way the organization operates, and the challenges that confront it. By focusing on identifying staff needs and issues, activities and initiatives can be recommended with the confidence that these will have a clear and measurable impact upon the organization.

Supplementing this ‘bottom-up’ research with a strategic focus then ensures that the KM initiative is aligned with broader organizational directions. Taking this approach to the development of a KM strategy allows limited resources to be targeted to the key needs within the organization, delivering the greatest business benefits while positioning the organization for long-term growth and stability.

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