The key to the success of any organization is knowledge that it gains over time and it is like the Holy Grail or immortal resource that would give any organization the Competitive advantage over others. The most common question that is lingering around in the market is can information technology be the solution to knowledge management issues, thought this topic is vague many scholars have tried to address this issue. Evidence in literature shows that all the knowledge management projects in the past were primarily technology driven, (Tsui 2005) and the most common technologies used were search engines, retrieval tools, classification tools, portals and content management systems. Reading from the literature one can come to a conclusion that there is a balance in successful and failed KM projects. In addition to this Eric says that technology can act like a “catalyst” for the KM project but in order to get successful results it has to be well aligned with the organizational strategy.
On the other hand Petruzzelli et al (2007) argue that knowledge can be captured either by external learning process which involves learning my imitation and learning by interaction and internal learning process which involves research & development activities. And these learning process can be addressed by collaborative learning programs which should be interactive and user-centric, (Eales 2004) he also argues that organizations invest heavily in IT to manage knowledge but they neglect about their key resource i.e. their employees who might lack basic IT skills, and it is unreasonable for any organization to expect its employees to develop the required IT skills in isolation and this can be achieved by encouraging communities of practice. Eales describes three steps which would help organizations tap intellectual assets they are; motivating users during end user skill development programs where they would be trained with basic computer skills and these trainings should highlight the way organizations want its employees to share information. Next is the user effort, the organization must understand that users make a lot of effort to learn and develop the basic computer skills so organisations must make sure that user interface for sharing information should be easy to use. And the last one is user sensitivity, users are very sensitive about the way they work or they are shy to ask for help and may also have the fear that the management might be monitoring their work. So care must be taken by organizations to deal with such issues.
To get a better picture about the role of IT in knowledge management one must have a look at the example mentioned by Merali and Davis (2001) about jasper II which is a knowledge sharing environment [KSE]. Jasper II does not store the actual information but stores the relevant meta information which is used as index to these information. It uses the “vector space model” (Merali, Davis 2001) to associate the information to individual users. And it has a share request which will send the shared information to a particular user or to a community of users. It also involves virtual social network and virtual community of practice which facilitates for better knowledge sharing.
In another scenario where the focus is on senior managers or employees who cannot share their knowledge even thought they want to share, the main demotivating factor identified by most senior employees is that the technological tools comes with a predefined data structure which is hard to match with the tacit knowledge . Research made by Liu and Fidel (2007) on a US public sector organization and these senior employees were interviewed, this organization used a backend logistics and asset management system [BES] provided by IBM and the employees working in the field were provided with a Wireless connected mobile MAXIMO. The problem here was these mobile units came with a pre-loaded set of data in the form of drop downs and the worst part was there were no provisions made to add the new problems faced and the solution to the same. So in the process the solutions remained tacit in the mind of employees. So this was the downside of technology in the process of knowledge creation.
So after reviewing the literature and some case studies it is clear that technology is one of the key aspects of managing the knowledge with a caution that the focus of IT tools should be on its key users.
References:
• Antonio M. Petruzzelli, Vito Albino and Nunzia Carbonara., 2007, Technology districts: proximity and knowledge access, Journal of Knowledge management Vol. 11 No. 5, pp. 98-114.
• Eric Tsui, 2005, the role of IT in KM, Journal of Knowledge management, Vol. 9 NO. 1, pp. 3-6.
• Jim R. T. Eales, A Knowledge Management Approach to User Support, 2004, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 53, pp 33-38.
• Shuhua Liu, Raya Fidel., 2007, Managing Aging Workforce: Filling the Gap Between
What We Know and What Is in the System, ICEGOV '07, pp 121-128.
• Yasmin Merali and John Davies., 2001, Knowledge Capture and Utilization in Virtual Communities, International Conference on Knowledge Capture, ACM, pp 92-99.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Intellectual Capital- Is it the Holy Grail to Success
Implementation of Knowledge management in organization
Most scholars and visionaries say that current world is going through an era which is known as the knowledge era. In 1998 Thomas mentioned that we are entering the “information age” from the industrial age, where raw materials, machineries were the key to success of the business. But as technologies change rapidly the market is very volatile and organization has to act according to the market. Thomas also argues that knowledge has always been important to humans and has proven to be the key to success he has mentioned some examples to justify his point and one of them was primitive warriors learned to make weapons out of iron to win over their peers who used stones.(Stewart, 1998) So knowledge has always been important but now it seems to more be important then ever as we are in midst of “economic revolution” and one has to understand the importance of intellectual capital to gain the competitive edge.
On the other hand Sunassee and Sewry redefined the same concept as “Knowledge age” or “Knowledge Economy”. (2003) where it would be very difficult to predict or keep track of changes brought by knowledge and that in turn affect the economy. Economists refer to such knowledge as “Heterogeneous resource” (Stewart 1998). Whenever organizations tried to tap the knowledge they have the dilemma of deciding what the important knowledge that would give them the competitive advantage. The intellectual capital can be categorized into three forms; they are human capital, structural capital and customer capital. (Soliman, Spooner 2000) They also identified the general processes followed by organizations to capitalize on their employee’s collective knowledge to implement knowledge management and they are; Create, capture, organise, access and use knowledge. It appears that this concept was inspired by nonaka’s seci model (1994).
Organizations with desire to manage knowledge or want to safe guard their intellectual capital, they must align knowledge strategy with the organizational strategy and mention explicitly in polices about their expectations from their employees regarding the sharing of knowledge and coming up with innovative ideas that would give their organization the competitive edge in the market. Daniel (1993) argues that in order to make this possible organization should understand the basic difference between individual and organizational learning (Klein 1998) and he did propose a framework in order to link the individual learning to the organizational learning and if their is a clear understanding of this transfer process, then organizations can align this learning process with their mission, vision and goals. Although the proposed framework is considerably good, it would not be fully efficient as we have very little knowledge about the psychology and working of human minds.
In addition to this it is interesting to know that does size of the organization have an adverse effect on Knowledge management. A study was conducted by Sandra and Rodney (2003) to understand if the organizational size has anything to do with knowledge management issues. They made a survey using the knowledge management model developed by Moffett in 2002 known as MeCTIP which are the components of this KM model and the acronym expands to Macro environment, Culture, Technology, Information, People. The result of the survey was small sized organizations had the least loss of knowledge and on the other hand large sized organization had the maximum damage. The reasons for this might be that in small organization each employee gets individual attention and quite the opposite in the large organization.
An example of knowledge sharing can be found in the Italian motorsport industry which is highly fragmented with many motorsport companies and it is well known as ‘Motor Valley’. These companies are in business from over a century and the competency and skills acquired over a period of time and these are the important elements of the economic development of the motor engineering industry. The focus is on Italy-F1 which focused in manufacturing all the parts of the racing vehicle. In order to involve in learning and knowledge management they promoted three processes; culture of ‘working together’, co-location and use of resident engineers and shared education and training. (Mariotti 2007) All the employees of Italy-F1 were treated as family members and Italy-F1 as an organization kept the same type of relationship with their suppliers. They conducted annual meetings to share their experience. The idea to use resident engineers worked very well as all were from the same place they had same culture and were like-minded so it was easy to glue them together. They conducted many shared training programmes which facilitated them to learn new capabilities and techniques.
By examining the above example it is possible to come to a conclusion that implementing knowledge management in an organization is possible but it would depend on the organization, its market and customers it serves.
References
•Fawzy Soliman and Keri Spooner., 2000, Strategies for Implementing knowledge management: role of human resources management, Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 4, pp 337-345
•Thomas A. Stewart., 1998, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth Of Organizations.
•David A. Klein., 1998, The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital.
•Sandra Moffett and Rodney MCAdam., 2006, The Effects of Organizational Size on Knowledge Management Implementation, Total Quality Management Vol. 17, No. 2, pp 221–241.
•Francesca Mariotti, 2007, Learning to Share Knowledge in the Italian Motorsport Industry, Knowledge and Process Management, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp 81–94.
•Nakkiran N. Sunassee AND David A. Sewry., 2002, A Theoretical Framework for Knowledge Management Implementation, Proceedings of SAICSIT 2002, pp 235 – 245.
Most scholars and visionaries say that current world is going through an era which is known as the knowledge era. In 1998 Thomas mentioned that we are entering the “information age” from the industrial age, where raw materials, machineries were the key to success of the business. But as technologies change rapidly the market is very volatile and organization has to act according to the market. Thomas also argues that knowledge has always been important to humans and has proven to be the key to success he has mentioned some examples to justify his point and one of them was primitive warriors learned to make weapons out of iron to win over their peers who used stones.(Stewart, 1998) So knowledge has always been important but now it seems to more be important then ever as we are in midst of “economic revolution” and one has to understand the importance of intellectual capital to gain the competitive edge.
On the other hand Sunassee and Sewry redefined the same concept as “Knowledge age” or “Knowledge Economy”. (2003) where it would be very difficult to predict or keep track of changes brought by knowledge and that in turn affect the economy. Economists refer to such knowledge as “Heterogeneous resource” (Stewart 1998). Whenever organizations tried to tap the knowledge they have the dilemma of deciding what the important knowledge that would give them the competitive advantage. The intellectual capital can be categorized into three forms; they are human capital, structural capital and customer capital. (Soliman, Spooner 2000) They also identified the general processes followed by organizations to capitalize on their employee’s collective knowledge to implement knowledge management and they are; Create, capture, organise, access and use knowledge. It appears that this concept was inspired by nonaka’s seci model (1994).
Organizations with desire to manage knowledge or want to safe guard their intellectual capital, they must align knowledge strategy with the organizational strategy and mention explicitly in polices about their expectations from their employees regarding the sharing of knowledge and coming up with innovative ideas that would give their organization the competitive edge in the market. Daniel (1993) argues that in order to make this possible organization should understand the basic difference between individual and organizational learning (Klein 1998) and he did propose a framework in order to link the individual learning to the organizational learning and if their is a clear understanding of this transfer process, then organizations can align this learning process with their mission, vision and goals. Although the proposed framework is considerably good, it would not be fully efficient as we have very little knowledge about the psychology and working of human minds.
In addition to this it is interesting to know that does size of the organization have an adverse effect on Knowledge management. A study was conducted by Sandra and Rodney (2003) to understand if the organizational size has anything to do with knowledge management issues. They made a survey using the knowledge management model developed by Moffett in 2002 known as MeCTIP which are the components of this KM model and the acronym expands to Macro environment, Culture, Technology, Information, People. The result of the survey was small sized organizations had the least loss of knowledge and on the other hand large sized organization had the maximum damage. The reasons for this might be that in small organization each employee gets individual attention and quite the opposite in the large organization.
An example of knowledge sharing can be found in the Italian motorsport industry which is highly fragmented with many motorsport companies and it is well known as ‘Motor Valley’. These companies are in business from over a century and the competency and skills acquired over a period of time and these are the important elements of the economic development of the motor engineering industry. The focus is on Italy-F1 which focused in manufacturing all the parts of the racing vehicle. In order to involve in learning and knowledge management they promoted three processes; culture of ‘working together’, co-location and use of resident engineers and shared education and training. (Mariotti 2007) All the employees of Italy-F1 were treated as family members and Italy-F1 as an organization kept the same type of relationship with their suppliers. They conducted annual meetings to share their experience. The idea to use resident engineers worked very well as all were from the same place they had same culture and were like-minded so it was easy to glue them together. They conducted many shared training programmes which facilitated them to learn new capabilities and techniques.
By examining the above example it is possible to come to a conclusion that implementing knowledge management in an organization is possible but it would depend on the organization, its market and customers it serves.
References
•Fawzy Soliman and Keri Spooner., 2000, Strategies for Implementing knowledge management: role of human resources management, Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 4, pp 337-345
•Thomas A. Stewart., 1998, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth Of Organizations.
•David A. Klein., 1998, The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital.
•Sandra Moffett and Rodney MCAdam., 2006, The Effects of Organizational Size on Knowledge Management Implementation, Total Quality Management Vol. 17, No. 2, pp 221–241.
•Francesca Mariotti, 2007, Learning to Share Knowledge in the Italian Motorsport Industry, Knowledge and Process Management, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp 81–94.
•Nakkiran N. Sunassee AND David A. Sewry., 2002, A Theoretical Framework for Knowledge Management Implementation, Proceedings of SAICSIT 2002, pp 235 – 245.
Sunday, 29 March 2009
Overview of Web 2.0 technologies
Web 2.0 is the term used in general and considered as a new phase of World Wide Web. It should not be mistaken as a new technology but instead it is a second generation of web development. Web 2.0 is not restricted to blogs, social networks, RSS, tags but also deals with how these next generation websites cater the end users requirements. (Krasne 2005) The word web 2.0 was coined by Dale Dougherty and Craig Cline but got much publicity after the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. On the other hand some consider web 2.0 technologies as being overhyped or just another “meaningless marketing buzzword”. (O’Reilly 2005) Whereas web usability guru Jakob (2007) referred Web 2.0 as a new trend and that the web firms are unnecessarily making effort to personalize the website and neglecting the basic functions. (Nielsen 2007)
A blog or weblog in simple form can be explained as a personal diary with combination of technology, (Efimova 2004) it is similar to updating a web page but the major difference is that blogs uses linear posting (Felix, stolarz 2006) i.e. each new post overlaps the old posts and general public could express their opinion in the form of comments which was not possible in the normal website pages. According to Rebecca (2000) weblog was originally a “link driven websites”. Rebecca blood categorizes weblogs into three basic types they are filters which contains links to external websites, second is the personal journals which contains internal information i.e. blogger’s personal diary and third is the notebook which contains both internal and external contents For e.g.: essays. But Krishnamurthy classifies blogs into four types in two dimensions, personal vs. topical, individual vs. Community. (Herring et al 2004)
Figure 1 Types of blogs (Herring et al 2004)
and Dave winer(1999) adds to that the credit of creating the first weblog goes to Tim Berners-Lee from CERN which was more like a web site and he created a link to all the new websites that came online and this archive is available at world wide web consortium[w3c]
Another popular term which is a part of web 2.0 technology is Real Simple Syndication. (RSS)
Will argues RSS “as a format for aggregating web content in one place”. (Richardson 2005) It
is popularly known as news feeds. The best part of RSS feed is that it is a free to use and on top
of that it acts like a filter by blocking all the unnecessary spam, advertisements and collects all
the new contents from all the subscribed websites. RSS can be a very powerful tool from a
business context. For e.g. a project that involves lot of research, sharing new information
among the members would be very difficult and this can be overcome by automatically sharing
new information or links using RSS feed (Cold 2006)
One of the best uses of web 2.0 technologies can be found in SAP who recently launched SAP Developer Network [SDN] which is a online community that involved all developers, implementers, administrators working with SAP Net Weaver and other composite applications. To everyone’s surprise there was a overwhelming response in positive way. The site had access to all technical articles, sample codes, learning tools, weblogs, discussion forum were experts shared their knowledge by answering the doubts posted by other employees. The website was open to all SAP technologists around the world. Even thought SAP created this platform it was a success because of the users who made the community robust and interesting by sharing. (Sap news desk 2004)
This was a success story of web 2.0 technology, one might argue that the success was obvious as all the users involved were from technical background but the situation would be completely different when non technical users are involved.
References:
• Efimova, Lilia, Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case.
Available: https://doc.telin.nl/dsweb/Get/Version-9466/OKLC_Efimova.pdf [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].
• Richardson, Will. The ABCs of RSS,
Available: http://www.techlearning.com/article/3984 [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].
• Nielsen, Jakob. BBC NEWS technology web 2.0 'neglecting good design'.
Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm [Accessed on: 27/03/2009].
• Winer, Dave. The history of weblogs.
Available: http://oldweblogscomblog.scripting.com/historyOfWeblogs [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].
• Blood, Rebecca. weblogs: A history and perspective.
Available: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].
• SAP News Desk - SAP DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL.
Available: http://sap.sys-con.com/node/44272 [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].
• O’reilly, Tim. what is web 2.0 - O'reilly media.
Available: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].
• Cold, S. Jeff, Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to Enhance Student Research. ACM SIGITE Newsletter 2006
Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1113378.1113379 [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].
• Krasne, Alexandra. What is web 2.0 anyway? 2005
Available:http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/archives/page9344.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=web 2.0 [29/03/2009].
• HERRING, S.C., SCHEIDT, L.A., BONUS, S. and WRIGHT, E. Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of Weblogs, 2004. Available:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1265271&isnumber=28293 [29/03/2009].
A blog or weblog in simple form can be explained as a personal diary with combination of technology, (Efimova 2004) it is similar to updating a web page but the major difference is that blogs uses linear posting (Felix, stolarz 2006) i.e. each new post overlaps the old posts and general public could express their opinion in the form of comments which was not possible in the normal website pages. According to Rebecca (2000) weblog was originally a “link driven websites”. Rebecca blood categorizes weblogs into three basic types they are filters which contains links to external websites, second is the personal journals which contains internal information i.e. blogger’s personal diary and third is the notebook which contains both internal and external contents For e.g.: essays. But Krishnamurthy classifies blogs into four types in two dimensions, personal vs. topical, individual vs. Community. (Herring et al 2004)
Figure 1 Types of blogs (Herring et al 2004)
and Dave winer(1999) adds to that the credit of creating the first weblog goes to Tim Berners-Lee from CERN which was more like a web site and he created a link to all the new websites that came online and this archive is available at world wide web consortium[w3c]
Another popular term which is a part of web 2.0 technology is Real Simple Syndication. (RSS)
Will argues RSS “as a format for aggregating web content in one place”. (Richardson 2005) It
is popularly known as news feeds. The best part of RSS feed is that it is a free to use and on top
of that it acts like a filter by blocking all the unnecessary spam, advertisements and collects all
the new contents from all the subscribed websites. RSS can be a very powerful tool from a
business context. For e.g. a project that involves lot of research, sharing new information
among the members would be very difficult and this can be overcome by automatically sharing
new information or links using RSS feed (Cold 2006)
One of the best uses of web 2.0 technologies can be found in SAP who recently launched SAP Developer Network [SDN] which is a online community that involved all developers, implementers, administrators working with SAP Net Weaver and other composite applications. To everyone’s surprise there was a overwhelming response in positive way. The site had access to all technical articles, sample codes, learning tools, weblogs, discussion forum were experts shared their knowledge by answering the doubts posted by other employees. The website was open to all SAP technologists around the world. Even thought SAP created this platform it was a success because of the users who made the community robust and interesting by sharing. (Sap news desk 2004)
This was a success story of web 2.0 technology, one might argue that the success was obvious as all the users involved were from technical background but the situation would be completely different when non technical users are involved.
References:
• Efimova, Lilia, Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case.
Available: https://doc.telin.nl/dsweb/Get/Version-9466/OKLC_Efimova.pdf [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].
• Richardson, Will. The ABCs of RSS,
Available: http://www.techlearning.com/article/3984 [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].
• Nielsen, Jakob. BBC NEWS technology web 2.0 'neglecting good design'.
Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm [Accessed on: 27/03/2009].
• Winer, Dave. The history of weblogs.
Available: http://oldweblogscomblog.scripting.com/historyOfWeblogs [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].
• Blood, Rebecca. weblogs: A history and perspective.
Available: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].
• SAP News Desk - SAP DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL.
Available: http://sap.sys-con.com/node/44272 [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].
• O’reilly, Tim. what is web 2.0 - O'reilly media.
Available: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].
• Cold, S. Jeff, Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to Enhance Student Research. ACM SIGITE Newsletter 2006
Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1113378.1113379 [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].
• Krasne, Alexandra. What is web 2.0 anyway? 2005
Available:http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/archives/page9344.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=web 2.0 [29/03/2009].
• HERRING, S.C., SCHEIDT, L.A., BONUS, S. and WRIGHT, E. Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of Weblogs, 2004. Available:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1265271&isnumber=28293 [29/03/2009].
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Community of Practice and social networks Article [3]
This concept was first put forth by two anthropologists, namely Barbara Rogoff (1985) and Jean Lave. Later Lave along with Etienne Wenger developed this concept furthermore coined the term Communities of Practice. (Wikipedia 2006) and this is not a new concept, most of us are a part of at least one such community or group knowingly or unknowingly. Communities of Practice are a group of people who share common interests and these people come together to achieve common goals. It also helps people to solve problems in their area of expertise. (Hass, et al 2002) they are not a static group but they evolve and adapt continuously. CoP is a way of sharing knowledge. And now CoPs are adapted by most of the organizations as the means of improving the knowledge. Wenger (1998) also considers community of practice as a combination of identity theory, theories of practice, theories of social structure and situated experience (Rohde., et al 2006)
The intension behind starting or joining a community of practice may vary from person to person. Some people join to share the knowledge they have obtained, some want to gain more knowledge or gain better understanding. Staring a community of practice in an organization is a very difficult task. It requires a great amount of motivation and support from the management. It requires leaders or leadership quality in people who can start a learning culture in an organization and motivate others to join and share the knowledge. But usually CoPs in organizations are not very successful for several reasons, either there is a cultural clash or the groups tend to move away from the actual purpose.
Communication in CoP occurs formal and informal, formal in a sense arrange a meeting or conference where members can meet face to face and discusses and share their ideas and this is the best known method because a sense of trust is built when you meet people face to face but unfortunately organization have reduced such meetings or conferences to reduce their expenses and have switched to virtual conferences and informally means using the current technologies like net meeting, audio visual conferencing these means of communication does help to some extent but does not help to build the level of trust required to share knowledge .
Another reason why formal or face to face communication is better over its counterpart is that because this type of communication is more transparent or visible and humans respond better when things are clear (Ackerman., et al 2003) the author explains it a nice example if there are two doors one made of wood and with a caution sign “open slowly” and other one made of glass with no sign boards, its obvious that the second door will have least accidents compared to the other one as it is clearly visible
Social Networks are also considered as Virtual CoP, it can be found in many literatures that humans perform better when they are in groups or in a network of people. (Chung., et al 2007) A Social network from my understanding is a group of people or organizations that are interconnected and they communicate directly or indirectly to share their interests- it can be anything from personal to professional.
One of the best example I came across is of Chrysler group which is basically a vehicle manufacturing company where CoP is put to best use and they call it as Electronic Book Of Knowledge [EBOK] Here they use the concept of "Lessons Learned" or "Best Practices” which is adapted from the ideas put forth by Wenger and snyder in 2000. And the engineers at Chrysler refer to it as tech clubs where they share the knowledge. Chrysler is also well know for its outstanding success story for reusing the lessons learned and best practices and significantly reducing the cost and process simplification. (Ackerman., et al 2003)
When I was working with my previous employer which was a Microsoft technical support organization and I was in MS outlook support and my job was to solve client’s problem related to outlook, me and my colleagues got all kinds of weird calls with weired problems and we managed to solve them and during the coffee break we gathered around and discuss the weird problems faced by the clients and use to have a good laugh, so next time someone receives a same or similar problem we managed to solve very quickly. What we didn’t realize that, this sharing of knowledge in the form of jokes became a routine. Unfortunately none of these solutions where documented.
References:
1. Wikipedia 2006 Website : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
2. Roland Hass, Wilfried Aulbur and Sunil Thakar and edited by mark Ackerman, Volkmar pipek and Volker Wulf Sharing Expertise - Beyond Knowledge Management 2003
3. Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg Knowledge Communities edited by Mark Ackerman, Volkmar pipek, Volker Wulf Sharing Expertise - Beyond Knowledge Management 2003
4. Kon Shing Kenneth Chung, Liaquat Hossain, Joseph Davis Individual Performance in Knowledge Intensive Work
Website: http://library.mdx.ac.uk:2059/10.1145/1240000/1235036/p159-chung.pdf?key1=1235036&key2=4217164321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=22381609&CFTOKEN=94892644
5. Markus Rohde, Ralf Klamma, Volker Wulf Establishing Communities of Practice among Students and Start-Up Companies
Website: http://library.mdx.ac.uk:2059/10.1145/1150000/1149361/p514-rohde.pdf?key1=1149361&key2=8296164321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=22381609&CFTOKEN=94892644
The intension behind starting or joining a community of practice may vary from person to person. Some people join to share the knowledge they have obtained, some want to gain more knowledge or gain better understanding. Staring a community of practice in an organization is a very difficult task. It requires a great amount of motivation and support from the management. It requires leaders or leadership quality in people who can start a learning culture in an organization and motivate others to join and share the knowledge. But usually CoPs in organizations are not very successful for several reasons, either there is a cultural clash or the groups tend to move away from the actual purpose.
Communication in CoP occurs formal and informal, formal in a sense arrange a meeting or conference where members can meet face to face and discusses and share their ideas and this is the best known method because a sense of trust is built when you meet people face to face but unfortunately organization have reduced such meetings or conferences to reduce their expenses and have switched to virtual conferences and informally means using the current technologies like net meeting, audio visual conferencing these means of communication does help to some extent but does not help to build the level of trust required to share knowledge .
Another reason why formal or face to face communication is better over its counterpart is that because this type of communication is more transparent or visible and humans respond better when things are clear (Ackerman., et al 2003) the author explains it a nice example if there are two doors one made of wood and with a caution sign “open slowly” and other one made of glass with no sign boards, its obvious that the second door will have least accidents compared to the other one as it is clearly visible
Social Networks are also considered as Virtual CoP, it can be found in many literatures that humans perform better when they are in groups or in a network of people. (Chung., et al 2007) A Social network from my understanding is a group of people or organizations that are interconnected and they communicate directly or indirectly to share their interests- it can be anything from personal to professional.
One of the best example I came across is of Chrysler group which is basically a vehicle manufacturing company where CoP is put to best use and they call it as Electronic Book Of Knowledge [EBOK] Here they use the concept of "Lessons Learned" or "Best Practices” which is adapted from the ideas put forth by Wenger and snyder in 2000. And the engineers at Chrysler refer to it as tech clubs where they share the knowledge. Chrysler is also well know for its outstanding success story for reusing the lessons learned and best practices and significantly reducing the cost and process simplification. (Ackerman., et al 2003)
When I was working with my previous employer which was a Microsoft technical support organization and I was in MS outlook support and my job was to solve client’s problem related to outlook, me and my colleagues got all kinds of weird calls with weired problems and we managed to solve them and during the coffee break we gathered around and discuss the weird problems faced by the clients and use to have a good laugh, so next time someone receives a same or similar problem we managed to solve very quickly. What we didn’t realize that, this sharing of knowledge in the form of jokes became a routine. Unfortunately none of these solutions where documented.
References:
1. Wikipedia 2006 Website : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
2. Roland Hass, Wilfried Aulbur and Sunil Thakar and edited by mark Ackerman, Volkmar pipek and Volker Wulf Sharing Expertise - Beyond Knowledge Management 2003
3. Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg Knowledge Communities edited by Mark Ackerman, Volkmar pipek, Volker Wulf Sharing Expertise - Beyond Knowledge Management 2003
4. Kon Shing Kenneth Chung, Liaquat Hossain, Joseph Davis Individual Performance in Knowledge Intensive Work
Website: http://library.mdx.ac.uk:2059/10.1145/1240000/1235036/p159-chung.pdf?key1=1235036&key2=4217164321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=22381609&CFTOKEN=94892644
5. Markus Rohde, Ralf Klamma, Volker Wulf Establishing Communities of Practice among Students and Start-Up Companies
Website: http://library.mdx.ac.uk:2059/10.1145/1150000/1149361/p514-rohde.pdf?key1=1149361&key2=8296164321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=22381609&CFTOKEN=94892644
Friday, 13 February 2009
KM and Strategy Article [2]
Before i explain Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Strategies [KMS] I'll try to explain what is Knowledge..?
Knowledge Management is a very broad topic and their is no widespread agreement about the definition of KM (Haggie., Kingston., 2002)
Knowledge is nothing but collection of useful information
"Information might consist of facts, opinions, ideas, theories, principles, and models" (Barclay.,Murray., 1997)
Knowledge in simple words is nothing but a definition of some information acquired by any means. Knowledge according to me is nothing but experience in life and it is not restricted to work place.
My initial understanding about knowledge was, Knowledge can be acquired by talking to different people about their experiences in life.
If you Understand the information they said, then you have acquired the knowledge... and if you share that knowledge with others and give them the right information at right time which will in turn help them to take right decision now i consider that as knowledge management.. because you could process right information at right time..
And if you can manage to take right decision on the basis of experiences and do the right thing then that i consider as a KM strategy
But one thing is for sure if you want to make a point or suggest something at your workplace you must have formal experience - to be taken seriously, no matter how knowledgeable you are...
Strategy from a organization's point is making major decisions that will affect the company's progress for a long term. "Major Business Decisions are by their very nature Strategic" (Drummond.,Ensor., 1999) and organizations need to anticipate and adapt to environmental changes . Strategy just reflects the intent of a organization to gain competitive advantage over its peers. One must not confuse strategy to strategic plan as strategic plan involves the selection,sequence,timing and specific objectives to achieve the strategy.
According to the authors bob and ron (Wit.,Meyer., 2004) strategy can be classified into four levels and they are
• Functional Level Strategy
• Business Level Strategy
• Corporate Level Strategy
• Network Level Strategy
Apart from these traditional strategies one must adapt the current new forms of strategies i.e promotional strategy (Engel., et al 2000) and strategic advertising (Percy.,Elliott., 2001) which are other types of strategies and which will give organization an edge or to be recognized in the market. Creating promotion or advertising a product that already exists in the market is much easier in comparison to launching a new product or a new brand in the market because one must analyze the market carefully. The strategies must differ for different cultures; organization must change their strategies according to the local culture where they plan to launch the product.
As I mentioned about VOSAPA Inc in my previous article which is the mobile phone retailer in UK and that we do market research or surveys every quarter to know the people’s requirement and as per this survey we mould our business strategy, if suppose there is a new handset that is in great demand even before its launch, we will bid for that phone and make sure that we alone get the rights to sell that phone in UK. We can also keep track of the prices of handsets and if they are competitive in the market. If any of the handsets are not sold then we would use promotional strategy and tie it with some other popular products in the market like Xbox, play station or slash the prices so that we do not have dead stock.
There was a case/ issue in India against the soft drinks giants coke and Pepsi in mid 2006 (Gentleman 2006) that they had excess pesticide contamination in their drinks and both the companies thought that they can handle the situation like they did earlier in 2003 but to their surprise government started to ban the drinks to be sold in schools and public areas. When they had faced the same issue in 2003 they had used the usual strategy used by most companies i.e sign up some big movie/sport star as their brand ambassadors and ask them to recommend it to the public and in turn gain public confidence, and these companies knew they couldn't use the same strategy as the situation was much worse and none of the stars would come forward to recommend their products so they changed their strategy they stopped all the advertisements and instead they had tie ups with all the multiplexes, KFCs, Pizza Hut/Corner and started promoting their drinks with the respective products i.e popcorns / burgers / pizzas. Initially people refused to take but slowly it changed and they are still recovering and still not gained full confidence. Read more about this issue here.
And this is how Strategies are changed according to the market/environment.I personally stopped drinking coke and Pepsi after this incident.
References:
1. Rebecca O.Barclay, Philip C.Murray., Knowledge Praxis
Website: http://www.media-access.com/whatis.html
2. Knox Haggie, John Kingston., Choosing your Knowledge management strategy
Website: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/online/0258.pdf
3. Graeme Drummond and John Ensor., Strategic Marketing planning & Control 1999
4. Bob De Wit, Ron Meyer., Strategy - Process, Content, Context 3rd Edition 2004
5. Engel, Warshaw, Kinnear., Promotional Strategy 2000
6. Larry Percy, Richard Elliott., Strategic Advertising Management Oxford University Press 2001
7. Amelia gentleman IHT.com 2006
Website : http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/22/business/coke.php
Knowledge Management is a very broad topic and their is no widespread agreement about the definition of KM (Haggie., Kingston., 2002)
Knowledge is nothing but collection of useful information
"Information might consist of facts, opinions, ideas, theories, principles, and models" (Barclay.,Murray., 1997)
Knowledge in simple words is nothing but a definition of some information acquired by any means. Knowledge according to me is nothing but experience in life and it is not restricted to work place.
My initial understanding about knowledge was, Knowledge can be acquired by talking to different people about their experiences in life.
If you Understand the information they said, then you have acquired the knowledge... and if you share that knowledge with others and give them the right information at right time which will in turn help them to take right decision now i consider that as knowledge management.. because you could process right information at right time..
And if you can manage to take right decision on the basis of experiences and do the right thing then that i consider as a KM strategy
But one thing is for sure if you want to make a point or suggest something at your workplace you must have formal experience - to be taken seriously, no matter how knowledgeable you are...
Strategy from a organization's point is making major decisions that will affect the company's progress for a long term. "Major Business Decisions are by their very nature Strategic" (Drummond.,Ensor., 1999) and organizations need to anticipate and adapt to environmental changes . Strategy just reflects the intent of a organization to gain competitive advantage over its peers. One must not confuse strategy to strategic plan as strategic plan involves the selection,sequence,timing and specific objectives to achieve the strategy.
According to the authors bob and ron (Wit.,Meyer., 2004) strategy can be classified into four levels and they are
• Functional Level Strategy
• Business Level Strategy
• Corporate Level Strategy
• Network Level Strategy
Apart from these traditional strategies one must adapt the current new forms of strategies i.e promotional strategy (Engel., et al 2000) and strategic advertising (Percy.,Elliott., 2001) which are other types of strategies and which will give organization an edge or to be recognized in the market. Creating promotion or advertising a product that already exists in the market is much easier in comparison to launching a new product or a new brand in the market because one must analyze the market carefully. The strategies must differ for different cultures; organization must change their strategies according to the local culture where they plan to launch the product.
As I mentioned about VOSAPA Inc in my previous article which is the mobile phone retailer in UK and that we do market research or surveys every quarter to know the people’s requirement and as per this survey we mould our business strategy, if suppose there is a new handset that is in great demand even before its launch, we will bid for that phone and make sure that we alone get the rights to sell that phone in UK. We can also keep track of the prices of handsets and if they are competitive in the market. If any of the handsets are not sold then we would use promotional strategy and tie it with some other popular products in the market like Xbox, play station or slash the prices so that we do not have dead stock.
There was a case/ issue in India against the soft drinks giants coke and Pepsi in mid 2006 (Gentleman 2006) that they had excess pesticide contamination in their drinks and both the companies thought that they can handle the situation like they did earlier in 2003 but to their surprise government started to ban the drinks to be sold in schools and public areas. When they had faced the same issue in 2003 they had used the usual strategy used by most companies i.e sign up some big movie/sport star as their brand ambassadors and ask them to recommend it to the public and in turn gain public confidence, and these companies knew they couldn't use the same strategy as the situation was much worse and none of the stars would come forward to recommend their products so they changed their strategy they stopped all the advertisements and instead they had tie ups with all the multiplexes, KFCs, Pizza Hut/Corner and started promoting their drinks with the respective products i.e popcorns / burgers / pizzas. Initially people refused to take but slowly it changed and they are still recovering and still not gained full confidence. Read more about this issue here.
And this is how Strategies are changed according to the market/environment.I personally stopped drinking coke and Pepsi after this incident.
References:
1. Rebecca O.Barclay, Philip C.Murray., Knowledge Praxis
Website: http://www.media-access.com/whatis.html
2. Knox Haggie, John Kingston., Choosing your Knowledge management strategy
Website: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/online/0258.pdf
3. Graeme Drummond and John Ensor., Strategic Marketing planning & Control 1999
4. Bob De Wit, Ron Meyer., Strategy - Process, Content, Context 3rd Edition 2004
5. Engel, Warshaw, Kinnear., Promotional Strategy 2000
6. Larry Percy, Richard Elliott., Strategic Advertising Management Oxford University Press 2001
7. Amelia gentleman IHT.com 2006
Website : http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/22/business/coke.php
KM Definition Article [1]
Knowledge management is a very broad topic and has many views.However statistics shows that 80 percent of KM projects are a failure.This is a interesting pdf about KM Glossary: Click to view
Knowledge is a very important part of every business organization.
To get a good basic understanding about knowledge and managing the knowledge one must read views expressed by Penrose (1959) and Drucker (1993). Penrose considered acquiring knowledge is a "Social Learning Process". Drucker coined the term "Knowledge worker" (Drucker 1959) Knowledge workers are generally people who are involved in planning, acquiring searching, analyizing, organinzing information in an organization.
In an IT field programmers, system analysts, technical writers, academic professionals, researchers are considered as knowledge workers.
Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive(1966) describes each "knowledge worker" as an executive of the organization either by his position or knowledge and that his contribution affects the capacity of the organization to perform and obtain results
The Most commonly accepted view of knowledge Management is the collection of simple facts which is "data" which when processed and structured forms "Information" and this when interpreted in a proper manner becomes "Knowledge", but now KM is also viewed in another dimension i.e reverse knowledge hierarchy (TUOMI, 1999) here the author says information cannot be interpreted without any prior knowledge and data cannot be collected without the knowledge of what information to be collected.
According to Karl Wiig of Knowledge Research Institute says that knowledge management[KM] is a very vast topic of discussion. KM is ability of an organization to make effective use of its human resources, "human capital" or "brainware" (LIEBOWITZ, 1999)
Where as Wilma Abney and Daimler Chrysler of corporate university think KM as "Know what is Known, who knows it, How it has been applied and how it can be further leveraged and shared " and these ideas are reflected in book Sharing Expertise(Ackerman., et al 2003) and I agree with the authors that most organizations never realize the knowledge they have in their organizations so the management should use some technique to tap the potential knowledge and how that knowledge will be benefit to the organization.
"If only HP knew what it knows it would make three times more profit tomorrow"
The above is one of the definitions of knowledge management but has made huge impact around the world. In simple words it describes the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge management, if they had a proper way to handle and manage the knowledge acquired by the employees and the organization, then the knowledge would remain inside the organization.
As mentioned earlier that 80 percent of the KM projects are failure, the possible reason for this may be that the organizations fail in one of the stages of KM i.e either in knowledge conversion or knowledge dissemination or may their may not have a proper method to discard the obsolete knowledge or which would become a mere data..
But
And to me KM is process of learning new things and have the ability to know when, where and in what situation it can/has to be applied, and finally discarding the old knowledge and make room for new knowledge. Managing the knowledge is some things everyone does right from the young age as mentioned by my friend salis in his blog (Read More..) and nobody teaches us how to manage the knowledge acquired. I will try to explain Knowledge management in our organization VOSAPA Inc which is a mobile phone retailer and with a goal to be the top mobile phone retailer in
References:
1. Penrose, E.(1959), The Theory of The Growth of The Firm,
2. Drucker, P.(1959), Landmarks of Tomorrow
3. Drucker, P.(1993), Managing for Results,
4. Jay Liebowitz :knowledge Management Handbook, CRC Press, 1999 Website:Book Preview 22-01-2009
5. Ron Young Knowledge Management Online Website: http://www.knowledge-management-online.com/Definition-of-Knowledge-Management.html
6. Iikka Tuomi : Data is more than knowledge, ISBN: 0-7695-0001-3,Website: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=772795 , 22-01-2009
The above paper also appears in : System Sciences, 1999. HICSS-32. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference
Friday, 6 February 2009
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