Knowledge management is not just about IT practices and tools to manage and store knowledge. Except of IT, knowledge management can be backed up by social and cultural measures which are strongly related to a very important aspect of knowledge management, creating an ideal environment for knowledge and promoting the knowledge sharing culture. The following suggestions are based upon solutions that have been successfully implemented into organizations and on ideas that most probably will have a strong contribution in developing a knowledge-sharing and knowledge-friendly environment.
First of all, I believe that it is very important to create an ideal knowledge sharing environment because as Earl (2001) notes down, tacit knowledge usually is passed down from person to person through everyday interaction and conversation. So in order to pass tacit knowledge around the organization, interaction between the people within the organization should be encouraged and this leads to a solution that promotes the knowledge sharing culture. Two examples are Skandia’s future center (Earl and Nahapiet, 1999) and British Airway’s Waterside (CABE, n.d.) offices. Both companies have created their sites having in mind how to ‘enforce’ their employees to interact with each other and increase the possibility of tacit knowledge exchange. For example, a good idea would be the redesign of the office space can be made to rearrange the way employees interact. Cubicles (if any are present) must be abolished and create a feeling that there are no boundaries between each and every employee. Also, offices can be set up so they all face each other to promote the team spirit within the office and pass the message that the employees are not individuals who work at the same room but they are a team working together for common targets and goals.
Another way to promote the knowledge sharing spirit would be a reward system for the employees who are contributing the most to the organizations knowledge management system (KMS). This way those who share the knowledge are rewarded so they know their contribution was not for nothing and also once people start getting rewards for their contribution it is very possible that they will become trendsetters and influence others to start contributing into the KMS as well.
People who put effort in knowledge sharing can be rewarded differently. For example (Velker, 1999) Xerox gives people the opportunity to get recognition when sharing their knowledge with others so the reward for them is being recognized as an expert or a specialist in the field. A different method of rewarding knowledge contributors could be giving bonuses to those who contribute the most. Of course the problem of quality against quantity is rising up here because it is hard to measure when the contribution is made just for the sake of it or if it is a worthwhile contribution. Of course this is up to the organization to decide how the reward scheme will work.
As it was aforementioned, tacit knowledge is usually exchanged by conversation and social interaction so apart from trying to encourage people within an organization to interact more during work, the organization can provide the means for the people to start interacting outside their work space also. One good way to do that would be organizing group activities like activity weekends, secret Santa, inter-organizational parties, etc. The more people come in touch with each other the more tacit knowledge is exchanged between them and for sure having a friendly environment in the organization can help the flow of knowledge as people will be less reluctant to share their knowledge with people they are friends with. This is backed up by Cortada and woods (1999) as they found out that in most successful projects they had studied people were not hold back from sharing their knowledge as oppose to unsuccessful projects in which people were holding the knowledge for themselves. Moreover, some other solutions would be introducing example a common lunch hour can be scheduled so if all the employees go to take their lunch together the sense of team spirit is raised and they have a chance to discuss during their lunch time. Maybe tacit knowledge won’t be exchanged but at the very less if people communicate the organization is building up the friendly environment that is desired. Also, another way to boost communication between employees would be reducing or even keeping the use of e-mails within the organization to minimal levels. If each person meets the person they want to reach in person instead of e-mailing they will have to socialize and discuss and this way the target of exchanging tacit knowledge is enforced as well as the target of creating a friendly-knowledge sharing environment.
References
CABE. n.d. BA Waterside Harmondsworth case study. http://www.cabe.org.uk/default.aspx?contentitemid=240 (accessed February 28, 2009)
Cortada, J.W. and J.A., Woods. 1999. The Knowledge Management Yearbook 1999-2000. Butterworth-Heinemann.
Earl M. (2001). Knowledge Management Strategies: Toward a Taxonomy. Journal of Management Information Systems. 18,(1),p.215-233.
Earl, M.J. and J.E., Nahapiet. 1999. Skandia. Case study LBS-Cs99-015-00. London: London Business School.
Velker, L. 1999. Xerox: from internal solution to KM product . http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Xerox-from-internal-solution-to-KM-product-9059.aspx (accessed March 1, 2009)
These are very good points you have raised in regard to sharing knowledge within organisations. It is also good that you have talked about sharing quality, valuable, and relevant knowledge as opposed to any "knowledge" per see.
ReplyDeleteHowever, consider the following two aspects and try to see the dilema organisations face:
1. When people meet in a social environment, their informal talks easily drift away from important issues to mundane, 'sweet political' talks etc i.e. the minds like easy stuff. So instead of sharing knowledge on how a specialist machine works, the talk easily strays to irrelevant information about credit crunch, mulfunctioning NHS systems etc. Can you see the point I'm making?
2. On another level, the everyday fast-paced working environment makes no time for socialisation as people are so immersed in their daily work attending to continous and ad hoc demands.
hi Richard, thank you for your comment. Both your arguments are valid but maybe it is not clear enough in my post that the aim is not to share knowledge exclusively through social interaction (it is one way of sharing but not the only one). The main issue of this social interaction suggestions is to create a knowledge friendly environment. As Davenport et al point out in their article 'Building successful KM projects' creating a knowledge sharing friendly environment was part of a lot of succesful KM projects. So as a conclusion what I am saying is this social KM solutions can be part of a greater KM plan rather than a stand-alone km solution.
ReplyDeleteAs for your second point, I agree again that during work there is not so much time for socialization thats why I suggest techniques such as having common lunch break times and the promotion of social activities for the employees during weekends or holiday breaks. Also to combine this social KM solutions with my post on the advantages and disadvantages of wikis (Christodoulides 2009), I suggested that a reward scheme can be introduced for workers who contribute to the wikis. One of this rewards could be a common holiday trip for the top 3 contributors. This is just an example but I hope you can see that my point is there are a lot of ways to encourage people to get social without wasting precious working hours
references
Davenpot, H.T., D. W. De Long, M.C. Beers. (1997). Building successful knowledge management projects. Managing the knowledge of the organization.
Christodoulides, C. (2009) Using wikis in knowledge management - Pros, cons and in-between. http://c-chris.blogspot.com/2009/03/using-wikis-in-knowledge-management.html (Accessed March 29, 2009).