An Overview of Knowledge Management

Over the years, the significance of knowledge as today’s dominant form of capital, and its key source of competitive advantage, has become clear. ‘Because knowledge has become the single most important factor of production’, as Thomas A Stewart explains, ‘managing intellectual assets has become the single most important task of business.’ [1] The rise to prominence of the task of managing knowledge effectively has been driven by a variety of well-documented factors, including the increasing use of mobile and part time workers, the flattening of organizations and the ongoing specialization of knowledge work. Yet the relatively short history of knowledge management has tended to be marred by the same mistakes. Whilst organizations grasp the urgent nature of the KM task, they go about it in a way that overlooks the particular requirements of knowledge itself. Even the world’s most prominent organizations have been guilty of implementing innovative and apparently comprehensive KM programs, which have subsequently turned out to be a waste of valuable resources. Many commentators and academics have cited an over-reliance on the promises of IT companies, all too willing to sell off-the-shelf KM ‘solutions’, as the primary source of failure. But beneath this over-reliance on pre-designed models and technological systems lies the real reason why companies with the best of intentions often fail: because they don’t understand the nature of knowledge itself.

What Do We Know About Knowledge?

A clear grasp of the nature of knowledge is essential for any organization hoping to grasp the full scope of the knowledge management challenge, and for any employee hoping to make a significant contribution to KM success. The key feature of knowledge that is repeatedly overlooked is that it is subjective. This is what distinguishes it from data or information, in that it is dependent not only on context, but on the experiences, preferences and behaviors of the individuals involved in sharing, gathering and implementing it. This subjective aspect of knowledge makes knowledge management a fundamentally people-centered endeavor, and yet time and again people are extracted from an organization’s knowledge equations.

Many organizations have been guilty of adopting KM systems and practices in an effort to tick the ‘we manage our knowledge’ box on their end-of-year review. Those finding real value added to their efficiency, their culture and their bottom line are those organizations that resist managing knowledge for the sake of knowledge management. One final, and dangerous, hangover from KM’s days as a fad, is the belief that making some attempt to manage knowledge is enough. Instead, the way to leverage organizational knowledge for real results is to:

• address a pressing business issue with KM systems
• meet the knowledge needs of the organization and its employees
• implement solutions that are tailored to both the processes and the culture of the organization
• cultivate a culture of collaboration, where knowledge sharing is not merely encouraged, but demanded and rewarded

All these activities are essential due to the nature of knowledge as a capital form. It can be mobilized to address business needs, and is a great source of change and improvement. It is held by each employee in a unique way, and each employee will have their own need for, and set of habits around, knowledge sharing and gathering. It is tied intrinsically to the culture of the organization, which can be seen as the sum of these unique employee attitudes. These features of the form mean that knowledge gathered through a technologically enabled process and held in a centralized system cannot truly be said to be managed. Unless such knowledge is accessed and put into use successfully, it exists only as information, free from the personal interpretation that makes it so valuable.

Keeping IT in Its Place

This issue is the heart of the IT-focused problem. Whilst technology is undoubtedly a valuable enabler of knowledge gathering and transfer, it can also be the facilitator of dead knowledge, which serves no real purpose for the organization and its ongoing goals. In addition, technological systems can have the most impressive gathering and collating capacities, but if employees are not encouraged to use them, and use them well, then they may as well be the most inefficient systems imaginable. Moving beyond IT to embed positive knowledge gathering and sharing practices in the culture of the organization advances more than just the ‘implement modern knowledge management system’ goal. It moves forward, simultaneously, a number of goals that drive today’s organizations: effective knowledge management, talent retention and process efficiency. KM in this way sits as the key enabler in a matrix of organizational imperatives, in much the same way as IT operates as a facilitator of knowledge management itself.

Knowledge management can only really be used as a value-adding approach for the organization if people are kept at the heart of the endeavor. This people aspect is particularly significant at the application point of a KM process, where knowledge is utilized by an employee to improve their own skills, and create more efficient processes. The IT focus that has beset organizations, particularly in the technology frenzy of the late 1990s, is a result of a misinformed emphasis on the distribution phase of KM. Every organization must today appreciate that employees, the true focus of KM, must be ready and willing as well as able to make use of the knowledge resources at their disposal.

Taking a Strategic Approach

The vital operating principle for today’s knowledge management leaders is that knowledge strategies begin with strategy rather than knowledge. All technological innovations, however efficient, will be wasted if the fundamental intentions and particular value proposition of the organization are not kept center stage. KM will fail to function as any kind of solution for organizations if the problems are not clearly defined in advance of KM implementation. Without a strong and defined awareness of where it intends to go, an organization cannot mobilize its knowledge resources to help it get there. Strategic KM is therefore a useful way of thinking about the contemporary best practice approach to KM. Whilst the ‘strategic’ tag is itself becoming something of a fad, its conjunction with KM is precisely the way in which the knowledge management can avoid the stigma of the ‘fad’ description, and make a significant contribution to organizational success.

Taking a Collaborative Approach

Nurturing people with valuable knowledge is the key to knowledge management. For successful organizations, there is a balance to be found between avoiding the management of knowledge for its own sake, and making sure that calculated efforts to meet business imperatives through managing knowledge do not obscure the human needs at the center of the issue. These human needs bring problems and complexities of their own. KM requires people to do things that at first appear unnatural. It asks them to move beyond the traditional mindset that knowledge is power, and must therefore be hoarded as a potential source of personal competitive advantage. All employees involved in an organization’s KM activities will be required to:

• share their knowledge and ideas freely with other employees
• use knowledge offered by others, therefore acknowledging their need for support from others
• continuously look for ways to gather and improve upon their own knowledge, and that of their team

Knowledge management therefore involves a complex process of cultural change. KM pioneer Bob Buckman has identified four key areas in which change will be demanded of every employee in a knowledge managing organization:

1. perception: seeing teammates as collaborators, rather than those in competition for personal competitive advantage
2. attitude: being supportive of colleagues within a network of trust
3. focus: concentrating on the team and its successes, rather than individual achievement
4. results focus: where achievements for the team will be reached through a collaborative approach that sees knowledge multiplied [2]

These requirements are problematic, and are facilitated only by an organization that backs up such demands with an organization-wide culture that rewards and commends their achievement. An organization that asks its line managers to share knowledge freely, and yet promotes those whose knowledge practices involve the hoarding of personal knowledge will, through its contradiction, destroy its KM culture, and make redundant it KM processes.Today’s organizations are on the threshold of knowledge management success. The key to making the final transition into truly value-adding KM approaches, is an understanding of knowledge as a form. Further, this understanding should clarify a key issue, and historical stumbling block, once and for all: the knowledge economy is a people economy, not an IT economy. People are our greatest organizational assets, and they are so because they are the receptacles, conduits and implementers of organizational knowledge. Sticking doggedly to the receptacle concept, which is one reason behind the IT focus of the previous decade, will not allow knowledge workers to operate as capital. Focusing on knowledge absorption rather than collation and implementation denies an organization’s people the capacity to contribute.

Tying knowledge management purposefully to the building blocks of an organization, its people, will dispel that ‘fad’ label once and for all, and allow KM to come into its own as a concept and an approach that draws out the value of knowledge workers, and of their organizations.