Managing Organizational Knowledge

3rd Generation Knowledge Management and Beyond

Jr., Charles A. Tryon

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781000755732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Organizations of all sizes and types are facing a duel threat and opportunity. At the very moment when global markets are becoming available, these organizations are losing valuable people resources due to "boomer" retirements and downsizing strategies. As the technologies arrive to facilitate knowledge sharing across organizational and people boun

chapter one

Knowledge as an asset—Really?

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

Mark Twain

“Knowledge is our most valuable asset!” You hear that statement from many business leaders. But is it really? If organizational knowledge were such a valuable asset, wouldn’t it be handled with greater care?

Physical assets are treated with great respect. Think about the last time your organization chose to purchase a new vehicle, add new equipment, or make a major computer hardware upgrade. You likely spent days or weeks examining your options before making the “buy” decision. You certified that it was a true need, not just a short-term want. Then you invested carefully, making sure you had sufficient budget to pay for the new asset. If you saw some level of risk associated with your acquisition, you likely purchased insurance or bought a maintenance agreement to protect it. To keep these physical assets in working order, you scheduled regular maintenance and then made sure the work was done properly. And when the day came that the asset was no longer needed, you had a plan for disposal.

To keep track of all this activity, you use asset management processes and technology to coordinate the life of the asset. Why? Because the asset is valuable! So, how about your organizational knowledge? Do you have a knowledge asset management system? Do you even know what organizational knowledge your organization owns? Do you know where it is or who is the current custodian for it? Have you made sure that knowledge is preserved and that other people know how to find and use it? Do you know where you are at serious risk of knowledge loss? Do you have strategies in place to accurately transfer this knowledge from one generation or location of workers to another?

If you can answer “yes” to these questions, you are in rare company. Many leaders proclaim the importance of their organizational knowledge but that seems to be the end of the discussion. They believe that somehow, knowledge assets are doing just fine on their own. They assume good employees will make sure it is cared for and transferred. And many are discovering just how wrong they are.

It is this reality that finally brings knowledge management to the forefront of many senior executives’ minds. First discussed in the late 1990s, KM has matured into a formal discipline that can bring significant value to your organization. So, what exactly is knowledge management? Even surface level research will yield a wide range of definitions. In my work, I define knowledge management as applying formally defined, repeatable processes that facilitate knowledge discovery, capture, organization, use, transfer, and retention to a specific domain of intellectual assets (more in Chapter 3).

As you can see from the title of this book, I am particularly interested in organizational knowledge, the knowledge that makes enterprises such as yours work. I define managing organizational knowledge as a formal integrated application of knowledge beliefs and knowledge processes (KMBPs) to an organization’s data, information, and decision making within a specific subset of an enterprise (much more on this in Chapters 3 through 6). KM is a blending of proven organizational strategies with fresh observations, new processes, and enabling technologies.

One feature that makes this book distinctive is the emphasis on a “project-centric” strategy to feed your knowledge base. Other approaches rely on problems or incidents to trigger the capture of new knowledge. By rigorously tracking and evaluating repeated problems in organizational procedures, practitioners argue that modifications may be made that prevent future errors. Further, this second-generation KM approach provides up-to-date scripts that others may follow when they encounter similar situations. Although this emphasis on correcting recognized problems supports the needs of an end customer or of a product, it also has some limitations.

An incident-centric strategy responds to specific, often isolated problems. When addressing these issues, the true root cause may remain undiscovered. Also, the emphasis on “problems” may cause an organization to miss out on extracting knowledge from major opportunities. That is what attracts me to a project-centric approach.

A project is a planned set of work applied to a specific scope that is intended to produce a desired product or service. Projects may be targeted toward solving a narrow vexing problem, however, they often look at a larger, more complete picture … and they create more comprehensive solutions. Projects are typically done once within a reasonable period of time, becoming what can be classified as single-time efforts. Projects exist naturally in all healthy organizations and you will recognize them in your organization as initiatives, programs, and special assignments.

Since the mid-1980s, I have taught project management and related disciplines to hundreds of organizations and thousands of professionals. What drew me to the KM discussion was recognizing that projects are the most significant source of new knowledge in every organization. This new knowledge is not contrived but is typically the natural byproduct of project activities. Innovative projects are also the most likely users of established knowledge. We use existing knowledge on a project to refine current products and services as well as to create something totally new. Leveraging this knowledge to support a KM initiative simply makes sense.

Unfortunately, once a project is over, the newly created knowledge assets are often unrecognized and left to decay in filing cabinets or on shared drives, and never referenced again. How often have you launched a new project that is very similar to something your firm did just four or five years ago, only to find that most of the important knowledge from the earlier effort is no longer available? Equally vexing is having several people, departments, or divisions of your organization recreating established organizational knowledge instead of sharing what they know. Consider the consequences if one of your competitors finds a way to share significant knowledge, eliminating wasted effort and time when bringing new products to market. How will this affect your ability to compete with them and win?

Although the actual role projects play in KM is addressed in the KIPPAR model (described in Chapter 9), the obvious conclusion is to create a culture that mines knowledge artifacts from all projects conducted within an organization. Knowledge artifacts are any representation of knowledge that may be stored electronically. They may be captured using technologies that include text, graphics, sound, and video. Each artifact should be evaluated to determine its true worth to an organization. If the knowledge artifact is considered vital or significant to future business needs, now is the time to develop a knowledge retention strategy.

This approach is far more likely to succeed over time than trying to do an enterprise-wide, dedicated KM project. A project-centric approach to knowledge management will allow your organization to harvest knowledge from a natural source with minimal additional effort. And it can be done, if necessary, on individual projects, without larger corporate awareness or blessing.

I don’t want to discourage you from launching an organization-wide KM program. In fact, I suggest just that when I explain the role of the knowledge retention policy. This project emphasis is also not designed to devalue studying and resolving the common problems in your organization. But the emphasis on project by-products will provide your organization with an ongoing source of significant knowledge artifacts as long as you are in business. I provide you with specific project-related strategies later in this book.

Before you spend any additional time on this book, I’d like to share with you some core values. Everything in this book is based on them. If you, or your organization, cannot buy into these statements, you won’t realize much value from the balance of this material.

•  The value of organizational knowledge can be measured monetarily. Defining and capturing organizational knowledge requires time and effort, a cost to your organization. Recreating old knowledge represents a cost that could have been avoided if the original knowledge had been captured and updated on a regular basis. Organizational knowledge is a key ingredient for producing new revenue as it enables the creation of new products and services. Without it, organizations quickly lose established capabilities, customers, and cash flow.

•  Employees are the custodians of this valuable asset. Your employees are the only vehicle for creating and using organizational knowledge. They are the means for transforming this knowledge into marketable results. And when employees leave, they take their knowledge with them. When a senior employee, who truly understands the inner workings of your organization leaves, the cost of replacing that knowledge is often grossly underestimated.

•  Knowledge experts within your organization must be recognized and rewarded for sharing their knowledge with others in the organization. Failure to recognize this reality results in knowledge workers hoarding knowledge in an effort to gain job security. Knowledge sharing can only be encouraged, not coerced. In an active economy, knowledge workers may take their talents and skills to a competitor where they believe they are more valued. If your people are truly your most valuable resource, it is vital that this message is reinforced with actions, not just words.

•  Senior management must actively support and encourage knowledge sharing and reuse. A culture of knowledge sharing must be established by senior leadership along with an emphasis on reusing valuable knowledge. Reusing existing knowledge demands an on-going effort to maintain it and make it findable.

This book is based on a blend of academic research, practical application, and real-life examples. Join me in the quest to manage organizational knowledge as a true respected asset. I hope this book gives you a distinct advantage in this endeavor.

chapter two

The new realities of knowledge management

Everything discussed here has already happened, it is only the full impacts that are still to come. But few, I suspect, have asked themselves, “[W]hat do these futures mean for my own work and my organization.”

Peter F. Drucker

The knowledge age has fully arrived! Long predicted by numerous authors, including Peter Drucker, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and Tom Peters, this shift requires fundamental changes in how we think and operate. Market survivability demands that organizations come to terms with a set of new realities.

Part of this shift is an awakening to the significance of organizational knowledge and the role of the knowledge worker. No longer are your employees “cogs” that fit into an industrial engine; they are now the heart and mind of business transformations and operations. They make the daily decisions that determine the success or failure of your business, including if your customers will return.

These factors are forcing modern organizations to find meaningful responses to a series of growing challenges. At the top of the list is the threat of knowledge loss, a loss that has many interrelated sources. When you lose vital knowledge, you inevitably lose established capabilities. It isn’t long before lost capabilities result in lost customers.

Further complicating the matter is that many of the early “solutions” intended to prevent the knowledge drain served only to capture documents and records. For most organizations, purchasing electronic document management systems created a morass of unsearchable content. Professor and friend, Dr. Suliman Hawamdeh, is fond of saying that organizations have turned their wikis, repositories, and intranets into dumping grounds for untrustworthy, unreliable, and unsearchable information. To truly solve the challenge of retaining organizational knowledge, you must start by understanding the risks and opportunities that drive the knowledge management discussion.

The growing knowledge gap

There is a growing gap between what an organization needs to know in order to thrive and what their members actually know. This knowledge gap has many causes including “boomer” retirements, unforced resignations, internal promotions, globalization of markets, technology advances, and general business complexity. The key is determining which of these factors will have the greatest impact on you and how your firm can effectively close the gap.

“Boomer” retirements

The baby boomer generation, those born shortly after the end of World War II, represent the largest influx of workers in the history of business. Complicating this factor is that this legion of employees has stockpiled retirement accounts to fund a comfortable postcareer life. This segment of our working population is about to call it quits, en masse, to enjoy a life of reduced stress and labor. If these employees were simply cogs in the industrial machine, it would be challenging enough to replace so many within a short period of time. But the contributions of these knowledge workers are not based on the labor of their hands and backs, but must be measured by the decisions and actions that result from their educated know-how.

Some organizations are finding a double impact from this reality. Sudden growth periods in a company’s history, often accompanying a new product or service, trigger mass hiring. Human resource departments know to start the turnover clock when such events occur. Twenty to thirty years later, they can anticipate a mass exodus when the same people, who fueled the expansion, are now ready to leave. Regardless of the cause, replacing knowledge workers is a difficult, costly, and time-consuming process. You don’t capture this set of knowledge by simply having these people “write down everything they know” before you host their retirement parties.

When working with a company to understand the significance of this implication, I often ask an assembled group of managers and senior staff how many of them expect to retire within the next five years. Typically hands are raised by half the people in the room. With their hands up, I then instruct the remainder to look around. You see, the problem of the cumulative knowledge loss will belong to those left behind. If you are planning to be with your organization for a while, it will be your challenge to maintain and grow the operation, without the help of the “boomers.”

Some of the anticipated retirements may benefit your organization. Pending retirees may be holding up progress by remaining in a rut of their own making. They may be resisting needed change and their seniority makes it difficult or impossible to work around them. However, before you celebrate their pending departure, you need to make sure you fully understand “what” it is that they know and separate it from the clunky “how” they do their job.

Downsizing

In addition to the implications of baby boomer retirements, challenging economic times are forcing organizations to make difficult staff reductions. Faced with pages of red ink, firms often find it easier to cut senior staff members, with salaries two or three times that of a new employee. What organizations fail to calculate are the implications of the missing knowledge the cheaper replacement employees simply don’t possess.

The full implications of releasing senior staff are usually not seen for months or even years. Then comes the challenge of re-creating this lost knowledge or finding a way to entice former employees to return on a temporary contract basis. So much for cost savings!

Unforced resignations

As the full impact of knowledge loss beco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Knowledge as an asset—Really?
• Chapter 2 The new realities of knowledge management
• Chapter 3 KM beliefs
• Chapter 4 KM processes
• Chapter 5 Defining organizational knowledge
• Chapter 6 Recognizing organizational knowledge
• Chapter 7 The knowledge retention policy—Level one
• Chapter 8 The knowledge retention policy—Level two
• Chapter 9 A model for managing organizational knowledge
• Chapter 10 Implementation strategies
• Chapter 11 Knowledge management solutions
• Conclusion