How Well Do You Manage Your Knowledge?
I’ve been talking about how to protect information over the
last month. Information is converted by
businesses into knowledge and if your business doesn’t have one yet, it’s time
to think about your Knowledge Management Strategy.
Managing knowledge for me means acquiring, consolidating,
storing, updating and sharing knowledge with those who need it when they need
it to remain competitive and profitable.
To use a simple example, when the price of a product changes, the stock
room, sales staff, cash desk staff, accounts department and customer need to
know. If there’s a change in rules,
everyone may need to know.
A number of businesses thought in the past that knowledge
simply meant storing information and ended up buying expensive software (and
were not actively disabused of this by the software vendors). As a result, they spent large sums of money
on what turned out to be next to useless systems, or systems that didn’t do the
job needed.
A Knowledge Management strategy should be based around two
concepts: serving customers and beating the competition. In Verna Allee’s words, “Knowledge Management
means attending to [the behaviours and] processes for creating, sustaining,
applying, sharing and renewing knowledge to enhance organisational performance
and create value”. Equally, it is about ensuring
that there is an environment where people are encouraged to innovate, share,
learn and use knowledge for the benefit of the business and the people who work
for it (Mathew Parsons). Contrast this
with those who take the view that knowledge is power and hold it to themselves.
The business should ask the following questions:
- How does the business currently define Knowledge Management?
- What knowledge or
information does the business/department/team need to operate effectively?
- How is this information/knowledge gathered or acquired?
- How is this information/knowledge stored?
- How is it shared?
- How easy is it for the people who need it to get it when they need it?
- What can you do to
encourage sharing and collaboration?
- How can you safeguard it?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start
to plan how you carry out a proper Knowledge Management strategy.
When it comes to technology, remember Matthew Parsons’
comments: “Technology has a role to play in terms of connecting people, storing
and providing access to information and knowledge and providing tools for
knowledge workers”. However, on its own,
it is not the solution to the problem. Businesses
leverage knowledge through networks of people who collaborate and cooperate,
not through networks of technology (the latter is just a delivery mechanism for
the human element).
People use knowledge if it helps solve a business problem –
in other words, knowledge is subject to being “pulled” rather than
“pushed”. Simply put, if the knowledge
is needed, it should be supplied. It
should not be supplied with the idea that someone will find a need. When you ask what knowledge your business
needs, the best people to tell you this are those who deal daily with customers,
suppliers, regulators. It should be
clear by now that knowledge management is about human behaviour and
interactions, rather than about storage and IT.
The latter is merely an enabler.
I have spent more than half my life working in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork
posted by William Martin @ 16:27
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