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The
people that knowledge management (KM) is designed to serve may be
the ones sabotaging its effectiveness. These “people problems”are
likely to render KM efforts obsolete in their organisations, warns
Jorina Choy
Knowledge
management (KM) is a great concept with good technologies to support
it. KM has been described as many things, but the most common and
commonsensical definition would be a system that gives workers easy
access to company information, which encourages that information
to be turned into knowledge.
Ironically,
the people that KM is designed to serve may be the ones sabotaging
its effectiveness. Worse, if these “people problems” are
not dealt with appropriately, they are likely to render KM efforts
obsolete in their organisations.
To
have a “complete KM system” in the organisation is difficult,
said Wahab Yusoff, regional director of enterprise content management
software provider Documentum, in South Asia. “The explicit
part of KM is the codifying, and there are many IT vendors playing
in specific aspects in this space,” said Yusoff.
“The
implicit part is capturing best practices, which changes all the
time-processes change, data changes, information changes. The big
global consulting firms are good at doing this,” he added.
Ng
Kim Hung, IT director, Asia Pacific, Exel, a global logistics services
provider, is convinced of the benefits of KM, but is sceptical about
how it can be executed effectively in an organisation. “You
can create the best KM systems but the fact is, the best systems
will fail if users are not disciplined enough to use them,”
said Ng.
He
gave an example: A lot of people like to write e-mails. But when
they are asked to update what they have written in a knowledge repository,
they are likely to shy away from it. “Every company knows it
needs a KM system and it likes one in its organisation,” he
said, adding, “But many users still think of a system as helping
to run operations and get things done, not so much as for capturing
knowledge.”
Cultural
barriers
Another
obstacle to widespread KM adoption, Ng believes, is the differences
in communication methods and languages across different geographies
and cultures. “Is English the best communications medium between
an account manager in China and a sales manager in Thailand?”
asked Ng. “The Chinese account manager really wants to update
information in the KM systems, but he can’t express himself
well enough in English, and may end up not doing it at all.”
Yong
Yun Seong, director, Central Marketing Organisation, Microsoft Singapore,
said that technology can help to tackle problems related to language
and skills disparities with visual support or common tools.
Process
barriers
There
are also process barriers, which must be overcome to facilitate
the sharing of knowledge, added Praba Nair, director of the Institute
for Insights and Innovation, National Computer Systems. This can
be done through the establishment of processes and tools to make
knowledge creation, capturing and sharing simple. And trust plays
a paramount role in the sharing of knowledge.
“People
share knowledge if they believe that others will share their knowledge
with them in return. The more trust that exists, the more people
share,” he said. To deal with the employee lethargy problem,
a “knowledge sharing mentality” has to be built within
the organisation as part of its culture and values.
In
this case, a company’s human resource department plays an important
part to ensure that the necessary leadership, recognition and rewards
are in place, said Yong.
Organisational
barriers
Also
key is the role of the management, which should essentially lead
by example, added Michael Lie, vice president of e-government and
healthcare, CrimsonLogic.
Warwick
Holder, consulting leader for organisational complexity and knowledge,
IBM Global Services ASEAN/South Asia, suggests that companies link
their KM strategy to their organisational goals and IT strategy.
“This will allow the knowledge domain to be incorporated as
a key part of things,” he said.
An
effective KM strategy starts with understanding what knowledge an
organisation has through the use of a knowledge mapping programme.
After that, a strategy can be developed to address all facets, such
as organisational structure, culture, business processes, and technology,
according to Holder.
KM
can then be extended to the organisation’s business partners,
said Lie. For now, Exel is investing in KM in “a small way”,
said Ng. It is running Lotus Notes and has an inhouse database system
called Connexions to capture customer information. How Exel encourages
more employees to use the system is a group-by-group rollout, instead
of a “big bang” rollout all at once, so that the necessary
cultural and process changes are not forced, but eased in.
Investing
in intangible returns
Justifying
the return on investment (ROI) for knowledge management (KM) is
a hard thing to do, especially when it does not directly yield bottomline
contributions within any particular period of time, Warwick Holder
said that businesses, to some extent, need to understand that the
new competitive advantage in the future will come from intangibles,
that is, things that are difficult to value and not usually reflected
in the balance sheet. “Accounting is going to face a major
dilemma in the next few years, as less than a third of the value
of an organisation is recognised via the balance sheet,” he
said. “Intellectual capital, brand equity, and human capital
are new differentiators. An effective KM strategy addresses these
and more.”
Unfortunately,
right now, KM is still measured only in terms of revenue contribution,
said Wahab Yusoff. Yet, if KM results in better collaboration within
and between different company departments, to produce better intellectual
property that will contribute to top-line growth, the case for ROI
could be a strong one—provided the KM system is properly integrated
and the company culture ready to make use of it.
This
article first appeared in Asia Computer Weekly
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