Knowledge Management - Coursework Example

? Word count (2994 words) Introduction: This paper discusses in detail the importance of knowledge management and how the success of implementing knowledge management hinges on the organizational culture. For some knowledge management is a new concept, although it has been around for years just not yet formalized. Knowledge management helps in securing the most important asset of an organization: the knowledge its human resource possess. The knowledge is stored, used and shared for numerous advantages that last for decades. The organizational culture has to be conducive enough for the implementation to work otherwise it’s just an added cost and proves to be a failure. Body: Knowledge management is highly reliant on people. The staff, the employees all carry knowledge about the company and they are the ones that carry out knowledge management. At the end of the day information technology does play a great part but the human factor is way bigger and way more necessary. Information technology will help in developing a knowledge management system and the success will depend on how well the information is organized and stored. The information however comes from the human beings. It is important for them to be encouraged by the organization. There should be a very caring, social and interactive organizational culture for knowledge management to thrive. Often companies used to restrict access to information; often employees would not bother sharing information with others with regards to their own personal promotion or job safety. But now organizations have modernized, they take concrete steps to make sure that the culture is more open, more relaxed and everyone is more at ease. Knowledge sharing only takes place when the culture is open to it, people are at enough ease to open their minds up and share their knowledge with superiors and inferiors both. Knowledge rather than capital or labour is the only meaningful resource a company has according to Drucker(1993). Capital and labour are actually pretty volatile resources when you think about it. They provide you with stability but there is no guarantee that they won’t leave you. Capital can be lost when faced with a crisis, employees leave and all of them don’t stay for a long time but knowledge is one factor that is constant. It can be stored in repositories for ages; it can be further analyzed and disseminated. Every human process result is a key success factor which should be stored. All the developed economies are now moving from industrial to knowledge based economy as they realize the importance. Defined broadly “KM is the process through which organizations extract value from their intellectual assets” (Kaplan, 2002). Intellectual assets in this case are their employees and managers not the information technology systems that a company has. Employees spend a lot of time in a company; they learn the inputs, processes, outputs. The experience they gain is extremely valuable though intangible. This true information has to be stored somewhere; an employee can leave anytime and can take the expertise to another organization. Knowledge management is made in two dimensions. One is to manage the existing knowledge by creating repositories, knowledge compilation, arrangement and categorization. The second is the activities of knowledge acquisition, creation, distribution and application. (Stenmark, 2001) Knowledge management also consists of administering the knowledge assets of the organization which is the human resource. Knowledge modelling is a process that helps in achieving those goals. Knowledge management includes identifying and mapping knowledge within the organization. The end objective is to generate enough amount of knowledge that the business can gain competitive advantage. Knowledge management also observes the whole lifecycle of an organization, from the beginning to the possible end. It sees how the organization has changed over time, how it has adapted to the external environmental challenges and how it became successful (Mathi, 2004). An example of thorough knowledge management is various public sector agencies throughout the world. To make their operations better, to serve the citizens better they want to make the best use of knowledge management. A regular MIS consists of information technology, hardware, software and they just provide us with the end results. Knowledge management builds upon this but adds a higher level with interaction and collaboration. Networking between employees is another key aspect of this system and knowledge management helps in finding, selecting, organizing and transferring really significant expertise. Communication is the most valuable asset a company can have as this is how knowledge is transferred and spread. How human resource is treated is the major part of knowledge management. Now the example of Siemens is going to be discussed with respect to managing human resource. Siemens soon realized that building the organisational culture is the basic step. To do that several financial and non financial incentive schemes were used to encourage users to participate in using ShareNet. The more one used the more reward was paid. In China employees were greatly reluctant to participate in these incentives scheme because the Chinese traditional culture makes them feel insecure and hesitant to write English language. They were afraid that using wrong English would be an insult to them. Also they would rather have recognition and the feeling of satisfaction rather than financial incentives. The opposite situation was faced in India where they really preferred the financial gifts. For 2008 onwards there was very limited use of financial incentives as Siemens realized what was required in which country. At the end of the day individual derived benefits in form of satisfaction, peer-recognition and social experience. The employees are often labelled as knowledge workers. To promote the KM process they were divided into project teams with different roles. These roles were defined with various practices. All these practices had a practise leader and several review members. Each team was responsible for measuring the business value and figuring out the lifecycle and maturity of knowledge assets. They are responsible for managing quality, consistence and the documentation. These employees support the process and should be interested in learning new processes and want success. Support from the top is extremely crucial. The top management is the opinion leader who set the organization wide values and culture. The top management support also means that the project will be funded by the company. With KM new jobs can be developed, this has to be made clear to the workers. Often some might think that their jobs are being taken away with new processes but in opposite new jobs will be created. The top management should be there to provide them with this confidence. One of the examples can be project management at Siemens; knowledge sharing is used to develop standards and new tools for the company. The KM process should also be aligned correctly and closely with the organizations goals to be successful, if the company wants to be dynamic and great so be it. Siemens ShareNet was independent of time zones and organizational structures. This showed great flexibility on the company’s parts. They realized that somewhere someone in the world will be working and every person’s knowledge holds the same amount of importance to them. Urgent questions and problems are usually answered within hours due to this system. Once the company is able to manage its human resource half the problem goes away. They are the carriers of knowledge and should be treated with the deserved respect. Managing organizational culture also comes from the top. Everyone from the CEO to the lower level employee should know his/her place in the system and know how important knowledge sharing and learning is. The top management should lead by example and implement their own knowledge management systems. The culture should promote sharing and learning of information, this will slowly seep into the very nature of these employees (Corrs,2003) With the help of a good information system repository developed the required knowledge can be stored in the company’s database by the employees making it forever timeless and advantageous. Organizational culture is on what success or failure of knowledge management is based. For a lot of managers and companies it was hard to decide in favour of a Knowledge management system. They regarded it as a bitter pill that just had to be taken once for the eventual good results. This is the starting cause of failure, organizations don’t even know how to truly implement knowledge management and yet they want it. This is how the problem starts and once the initiation of the project is wrong it will never be able to function well or deliver the end results. KM is in many cases just decided to be implemented without properly embedding it in the company’s corporate culture. Or managers just think of it as a fashionable accessory that will just prove to give minimum advantages/ when such measures are undertaken there is of course no success, no innovation and no boost in ideas which is when disappointment sets in. what a company has to realize is that knowledge management will always be a forever ongoing process. It is interactive involving people, technology the organizational structure and an actual specialized manager of KM. the knowledge manager should clearly explain all the expectations from the outset and everyone should know the ground realities. The knowledge is to be stored at first and then it will be gradually increased and enhanced, which makes it quite easy to understand that it is a slow gradual process but the end results are totally worth it. Below some critical success factors are discussed which are necessary otherwise the whole project will be a failure. KM should not start with a solution based model there should be a detailed analysis of the problem that exists and then the solutions for that should be developed through knowledge. There should be clear support given from the management that should also be met by staff approval. Both sides are actively involved and it should be made sure that everyone knows the concept and the objectives. For achieving the perfect KM implementation it’s necessary to first map out the whole knowledge flow in the organization. Knowledge origin should be identified; its flow and end point should all be mapped out. The process owners must also be identified and given the clear roles and responsibilities. Also as with knowledge mapping, processes should be mapped also and clearly defined with their inputs, time periods and outputs. The true objective of knowledge management is not in just storing the information but to make use of it. Actually having information is no longer a factor for success what the company makes out of it is important. It depends on how the knowledge is interpreted and applied and the whole KM process should be implemented from start to finish otherwise it has no effect. The knowledge management process should be clearly integrated with the organizations overall objectives otherwise it will not be a success. This again is highly dependent on the corporation’s culture and how clearly and accurately they see the whole knowledge management process. It is good to build upon the existing information technology and MIS that are already in place within the organization. This way there will be a starting place and the original information will be also integrated in the new system making knowledge transfer seamless. The projects must have clearly defined measurable outputs that can be assessed over a period of time, although it should be understood that the entire process can take up to several years. Change management is a concept that should be applied in an organization that is undertaking knowledge management system implementation. For a lot of employees it will be a hard task to open up and give the knowledge they possess, they have to be handled with care. It is absolutely necessary that all employees have to be on board with the big change that is taking place otherwise the project has a very high probability of failing. It should be made sure that they have clearly defined the objectives of the project and how their jobs will be safeguarded. IN fact it should be told to them that this new process will create more jobs and make them even more valuable as they possess know such important knowledge (Petrides, 2004). Other problems that can arise are: Implementation traps: Change management literature that a company will adhere two defines two kinds of change one is top-down or bottom up. In case of knowledge management the change will be top down as the higher authorities will decide what to do. It is imperative for the organization to hire a change management leader. They will properly handle the organizations situations. They will divide employees into teams and deal with them correctly. The top down mode uses a standardized approach that should technically work in all situations. However as many managers know not everything can be same in all organization, there was a recent case on IT-enabled organisational change at the University of Illinois Medical Centre, for example, the project was met with great resistance because the physicians did not understand why should they sit in front of the compute and enter data when the have more important jobs to do. (Scott et al. 2004, p.38). The change management literature shows that change can only be successful when employees are accepting of it and are provided with great guidance. The culture should be such that middle managers are constantly involved in change as they are the liaison between top and bottom and the biggest assets. They are the ones who communicate the overall changes to the whole hierarchy. The more information is communicated on the change process the better and more transparent it will be. The objective is that change management will empower employees, decentralise decisions and free up the knowledge everyone has. But this is not possible with the help of technology alone it has to be a participative effort. This is why knowledge management in particular has a very huge implementation trap. There is another problem that is faced during implementation, the organization should clearly find out who are the actual members who will be affected by this change. Should all of the employees be trained for change or just the ones who are being directly affected by the knowledge management system? But it is important to intake all of the employees as this will be a major change and in the end it will affect every single person. The change initiative has to be sold to the employees only then it will be successful. It is an inherent quality in all human beings that they r reluctant to change it becomes even more sensitive when change is connected to their means of livelihood. The change has to be sold to them and they have to be comforted that this change will bring good to them. If this is not done the whole organization can topple as no one can function with clearly defined employees. Successful implementation requires changing top management perceptions, interest and pressures. Knowledge management (KM) initiatives won’t work unless they are supported by an organization's culture, so cultural factors must be considered when making KM strategies. Studies nowadays about knowledge management emphasize on the twin relationship between knowledge management and organizational culture (Davenport and Prusak, 2000; Von Krogh, 2000; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). The culture is dependent on social environment, information systems, organization structure, the reward systems in place and leadership (Gupta and Govindarajan, 2000, p. 71). Another factor to consider is that culture is not constant and especially organization culture changes as the business tries to adapt to its external environment. Organizational culture defines the type of people who will be hired and how they will interact with each other within the organization. When an effective culture for sharing is built then only can knowledge management take place. Numerous studies have shown that traditional organizational cultures and systems do include barriers to implementing knowledge management. Six cultural factors were deduced from this analysis and were clearly defined in a study conducted by Gupta and Govindarajan (2000) and supported by others (De Long and Fahey, 2000; Rastogi, 2000; Bock, 1999; Knapp and Yu, 1999). These six cultural factors were: (1) information systems, (2) organizational structure, (3) reward systems, (4) processes, (5) people, and (6) leadership. If these six factors are not met by an organization effectively the knowledge management implementation will fail surely. Other than this the critical success factors were also discussed above in detail are also necessary to be followed. Numerous literatures reveals that the first organizational efforts made to manage knowledge were focused on information technology solutions but although they are important, they are not everything. These solutions often fail to achieve their objectives because they ignore the cultural factors at hand. (De Long, 2000). De Long and Fahey identified four ways in which culture influences knowledge creation. Firstly, the culture shapes assumptions about what knowledge is and which knowledge is important enough to store. Secondly culture defines the relationship between an individual and knowledge. That who is the person responsible enough to store it, use it and share it. Thirdly culture tells how exactly the knowledge has to be shared in a social interaction. Different organizations have different structures some even have informal casual sharing of knowledge which would be preferred. And lastly culture also shapes the processes of how new knowledge is created, recognized and disseminated. Thereby, knowledge management cannot be implemented without addressing the cultural issues first. Conclusion: Knowledge management can provide any organization with a competitive advantage and guaranteed success. More often than not managers take it is a beneficial concept to be implemented and think it can be done easily. However this is not the case, the whole organizations culture has to be conducive enough, there should be a knowledge manager and every employee should be aware of the changes that are being made. It is a long term process that has long term advantages, everyone in the organization has to be patient enough and correctly follow implementation policies. REFERENCES: Antonina Holowetzki, AH, 2002. The relationship between knowledge management and organizational culture: An examination of cultural factors that support the flow and management of knowledge within an organization.. Capstone Report, [Online]. 64, 32. Available at:http://aim.uoregon.edu/research/pdfs/Holowetzki2002.pdf [Accessed 29 November 2011]. KAVINDRA MATHI (2004). Key Success Factors For Knowledge Management. MBA thesis, International Business Management. Michael Gibbert, Gilbert J.B. Probst, Thomas H. Davenport (2008). idestepping implementation traps when implementing knowledge management: lessons learned from Siemens. Behaviour . 00, pp.13. Dirk Ramhorst (2001). A Guided Tour through the Siemens Business Services Knowledge Management Framework. Journal of Universal Computer science. 7, pp.13. Tahir Saeed, Basit Tayyab, M Anis ul haque, Mushtaq H. Ahmed, Anwar Chaudary, AC, 2010. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES: ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE. Proceedings of ASBBS, Volume 17 Number 1, 9. LONG, D. W. D., & FAHEY, L. (2000). Diagnosing Cultural Barriers to Knowledge Management. The Academy of Management Executive (1993-2005). 14, 113-127. Sabine Saphorster. 2004. Pictures of the Future Spring 2004. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/publikationen/publications_pof/pof_spring_2004/knowledge_articles/knowledge_management.htm. [Accessed 29 November 11 Read More