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Knowledge management

8 September, 2015 - 10:52

When experienced people retire or leave an organization, typically their knowledge leaves with them. In addition, many larger organizations (e.g., major information technology consulting firms) have many people who have similar responsibilities (e.g., IT consulting) that could benefit from each others’ experiences, but because of the numbers involved (and geographical separation) personal communications among the employees is not practical. A type of information system that is designed to help address these situations is often referred to as a knowledge management system (KMS).

Knowledge management systems can take many different forms, but the basic objectives are to 1) try and facilitate communications among knowledge workers within an organization, and 2) try to make the expertise of a few available to many. Consider an international consulting firm, for example. The company will employ thousands (or tens of thousands) of consultants across numerous countries. It is quite possible (in fact, quite likely) that one consulting team in, say, Spain is trying to solve a problem for a client that is very similar to a similar situation that a different consulting team in Singapore already solved. Rather than reinventing a solution, it would be much more efficient (and effective) if the team in Spain could use the knowledge gained by the team in Singapore.

One way of addressing this situation is to have case histories for all client engagements posted to a case repository, which employees from all over the world can access (using the Internet) and search (using a search engine). If the case documentation is of good quality (accurate, timely, complete, etc.), then the consultants will be able to share and benefit from each others’ experiences and the knowledge gained. Unfortunately, however, it is often difficult to get employees to contribute in a meaningful way to the knowledge base (since they are probably more concerned about moving forward on their next client engagement, rather than documenting their experiences with the last one). In order for such systems to have any chance of working successfully, management may need to considered changes to reward systems and even to the organizational culture.

A different approach to knowledge management focuses more on identifying (and storing) details about the expertise of employees, and then allowing other employees to locate and contact these internal experts. This approach also has weaknesses, however, since the ‘experts’ may spend so much time responding to requests and educating other employees that they have little time for completing their own work. As a result, employees may hesitate to volunteer information about their expertise.