Knowledge Management & The Role of Technology
Organizations looking to leverage intellect have to think less when it comes to knowledge and much more about encouraging communication, hence a networked economy. A networked economy co-creates a shared understanding, perspective and language among people from a diversity of disciplines, priorities, growth stages and cultures. This is why the paradigm needs to move towards emphasizing a “communicating”, “connecting” or “networking” rather than a “knowledge” economy.
Technology: Blessing or Curse?
The role of technology in aiding with capturing knowledge increases later on. IT executives and professionals now bring substantial business experience to their jobs. This suggests that chief information officers (CIO’s) may play a larger role in overall business strategies.
However, some experts suggest reliance upon technology obscures the crucial human issues in mastering and teaching. In the early 1990s, executives at London’s water supplier sought to improve efficiency by giving inspectors hand-held computers and eliminating the central dispatching station. However, research revealed the depot have been more than a spot for the inspectors to alter clothes and get their trucks. It had been also where they learned vital tricks of their trade. Dave Snowden, then a knowledge-management consultant for IBM, discovered that need was so great that the inspectors soon began meeting by themselves at a local restaurant and jotting tips in a notebook they stashed behind the counter.
A few years earlier, Julian Orr, an anthropologist then employed by Xerox, heard remarkably similar stories from copier technicians. Xerox supplied manuals, however the employees told Mr. Orr they more often trusted tips gleaned from colleagues. Backed by Mr. Orr’s research, Xerox gave the technicians radios so that they could confer while confronting a malfunctioning machine.
As with the HP-China study–research appear to suggest adding a technology piece–after developing a robust knowledge exchange program.
Don’t Forget a persons Factor
Many leaders fail by putting the lion’s share of the KM investment in technology solutions meant to make it easier to look and find information, capture lessons learned, and share best practices. So, it is more readily found content, but content doesn’t deliver performance–people do. Managers can’t avoid the daunting people aspects of what must be done to transfer and employ knowledge.
Experts agree that it’s of immense importance to understand how to design knowledge management systems so that they mesh with human behavior in the individual and collective levels. By permitting users to see one another and to make inferences about the activities of others, online collaboration platforms may become environments by which new social forms could be invented, adopted, adapted, and propagated, eventually supporting exactly the same kind of social innovation and diversity that may be observed in physically based cultures.
What Information is Important?
Using business intelligence data to judge and ultimately improve corporate performance requires knowing exactly what data ought to be examined and what should be ignored. You only need a certain amount of data to create the best decision. Therefore, specific business needs must be kept in mind when developing business intelligence strategies.
The important thing question, according to Mark Smith, CEO of San Mateo, California–based Ventana Research, is exactly what specific data is necessary to appraise the effectiveness of every department, e.g., what data is needed for finance and what information is required for manufacturing. It’s simpler to determine what data is needed and create the proper metrics and key performance indicators should you break things down in this fashion.
What’s Knowledge?
But this is only the beginning. The majority of the “knowledge” on which the knowledge economy is made is really just information–data, facts and basic business intelligence. Knowledge is more profound. As management guru Tom Davenport once put it, “Knowledge is information coupled with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection.” It is the knowledge based on information that provides you a edge against your competitors.
Political, economic, and social forces along with rapid technological advancements are shaping today’s organizational operating environment. These forces have accelerated the speed and frequency of change. This new reality necessitates the community to be innovative, adaptable, and poised to consider advantage of a fast-changing environment. Along with the increasing insufficient time and attention workers offer to commit to traditional competency-based learning, there’s a deep recognition that learning methods must keep pace with the needs and expectations from the organization’s community. Technology bridges the space. However, technology along canrrrt do the task. Astute, savvy, and intelligent people are needed for an understanding management program to be complete.