Knowledge Management Failure Factors           

 According to the study on ‘A Synthesis of Knowledge Management Failure by Alan Frost (2014), the failure factors can be divided by two categories which is: causal and resultant. Causal factors refer to the organizational issues that are required to implement KM successfully whereas resultant factors is deal with specific problem and can be regarded more like the symptoms rather than the disease.

Figure below show the causal and resultant failure factors:

Reference : A. Frost (2014). Knowledge Management Failure Factors, KMT an Educational KM Site. http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/failure.html.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT VERSUS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Some see Information Management (IM) as a subsection of Knowledge Management (KM). A good IM provides the right information at the right time to the right people. KM creates systems that enable organization to tap into the knowledge, experiences, and creativity of their staff to enhance their achievement.

Knowledge and information are actually quite contrasting, as is tacit and explicit knowledge. So, while information and data management are certainly very functional, especially as information references are growing at exponential rates and with the new focus on big data, it is not synonymous with KM.

So what exactly is the difference?

Information and IM:

• Concentrate on data and information
• Deal with unstructured and structured facts and statistics.
• Advantage greatly from technology, since the information being carried is already organized and in an easily transferrable form.
• Concentrate on arrange, examining, and retrieving - again due to the organized nature of the information.
• About ‘know-what’, for example it offers a fact that you can then use to help create useful knowledge, but in itself that
• Fact does not convey a course of action (such as sales of product x are up 25% last quarter).
• Is easy to copy - due to its organized and easily transferrable nature.

Knowledge and KM:

• Concentrate on knowledge, understanding, and wisdom
• Deal with both organized and unorganized knowledge. Unorganized knowledge - the most valuable type of knowledge - is found in the minds of practitioners and is unarticulated, context-based, and experience-based.
• Technology is useful, but KM's focus is on people and processes. The most valuable knowledge cannot effectively be (directly) transferred with technology, it must be passed on directly from person to person.
• Focus on track down, understanding, allowing, and encouraging - by creating environments, cultures, processes, etc. where knowledge is shared and created.
• About “know-how”, “know-why”, and “know-who”.
• Is hard to copy - at least regarding the tacit elements.

A. Frost(2014). Information Management vs Knowledga Management. KMT, An Eductaional KM Site. http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/IM_vs_KM.html

15 Knowledge Management Benefits

•        Enabling Better and Faster Decision Making

By delivering the relevant information at the time of the needs through the structure, search, subscription, syndication and support the knowledge management environment can provide the basis for making a good decision. The collaboration will bring the power of large numbers, diverse opinion and varied the experience to bear when decision be based on the actual experience, large sample size and practical lesson learned. 

• Making it easy to find the relevant information and resources

     When the organizations faced with the need to respond to the customer, solve a problem, analyse trends, assess markets, benchmark against the peers, understand the competition, create new offerings, plan strategy and to think critically, you typically will look for the information and resources to support these activities.

•      Reusing ideas, documents and expertise

When the members of your organization have figured out how to solve a common problem and know how to deliver a recurring the service or have invented a new product, if the organizations want the same solution, service and the product to be replicated as much as possible.

• Avoiding Redundant Effort

Basically, no one likes to spend doing something over and over again. But they do so all the time for a variety reason which is in avoiding duplication of effort by saves time and money will keep the employees morale up and streamlines work. By not spending time reinventing the wheel, the organizations can have more time to invent something new.

•   Avoiding Making the Same Mistakes Twice

KM allows us to share the lesson learned and not only about the success but also the failures. In order to do that, the organizations must have the cultures of trusts openness and reward for willingness to talk about right and wrong.

•  Taking Advantage of Existing Expertise and Experience

Teams benefit from the individual skills and knowledge of each member. The more of complementary with the expertise of the team members, it will be the greater the power of the team. In large organizations, there are people with widely-varying capabilities and backgrounds, and there should be a benefit from this. But as the number of people increases, it becomes more difficult for each individual to know about everyone else. So even though there are people with knowledge who could help other people, they don't know about each other.

•  Communicating Important Information Widely and Quickly

Almost everyone today is an information worker, either completely or partially. Knowledge management helps address this problem through personalized portals, targeted subscriptions, RSS feeds, tagging, and specialized search engines.

•   Promoting Standard, Repeatable Process and Procedures

If standard processes and procedures have been defined, they should always be followed. This allows employees to learn how things are done, leads to predictable and high-quality results, and enables large organizations to be consistent in how work is performed. By providing a process for creating, storing, communicating, and using standard processes and procedures, employees will be able to use them routinely.

• Providing Methods, Tools, Templates, Techniques and Example

Methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples are the building blocks supporting repeatable processes and procedures. Using these consistently streamlines work, improves quality, and ensures compatibility across the organization.

•      Making Scarce Expertise Widely Available

If there is a resource who is in great demand due to having a skill which is in short supply, knowledge management can help make that resource available to the entire organization. Ways of doing so include community discussion forums, training events; ask the expert systems, recorded presentations, white papers, podcasts, and blogs.

•            Showing Customers How Knowledge is Used for Their Benefit

In competitive situations, it is important to be able to differentiate yourself from other firms. Demonstrating to potential and current customers that you have widespread expertise and have ways of bringing it to bear for their benefit can help convince them to start or continue doing business with you. Conversely, failure to do so could leave you vulnerable to competitors who can demonstrate their knowledge management capabilities and benefits.

• Accelerating Delivery to Customers

Speed of execution is another important differentiator among competitors. All other things being equal, the company which can deliver sooner will win. Knowledge sharing, reuse and innovation can significantly reduce time to deliver a proposal, product, or service to a customer. And that translates into increased win rates, add-on business, and new customers.

•     Enabling The Organization to Leverage its Size

As an organization grows, the increasing size is only a benefit if it can use the knowledge of all of its employees. Through the use of tools such as communities, expertise locators, and repositories, the full power of a large enterprise can be exploited.

•         Making the Organization Best Problem-Solving Experiences Reusable

Consistently applying proven practices, also known as best practices or good practices, can significantly improve the results of any firm. For example, if a manufacturing plant in one part of the world has figured out how to prevent the need for product rework, and all other plants around the world adopt this practice, savings will flow directly to the bottom line. By establishing a process for defining, communicating, and replicating proven practices, an enterprise takes advantage of what it learns about solving problems.

•  Stimulating Innovation and Growth

Most businesses want to increase their revenues, but it becomes increasingly difficult as industries mature and competition increases. Creating new knowledge through effective knowledge sharing, collaboration, and information delivery can stimulate innovation.

If the organization can achieve all this benefits of KM, the organizations should be achieve to growth in the market.


Source from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140811204044-2500783-15-knowledge-management-benefits 

LEADERSHIP AND ROLE MANAGEMENT

Definition

A system that will ensures the continuity of leadership by identifying and addressing the potential gaps in effective leadership and implements and maintains the program that captures the organizational knowledge and promotes learning.

The Relationship between Leadership Roles and Knowledge Management

The leaders and managers effectively managing the people, ensures continuity and sustain a learning environment that drives continuous improvement in performance and provide a means to share the critical knowledge across the organization. KM must be supported by an appropriates investment in training and technology.

Critical Success Factors

The leadership and Knowledge Management system is comprised of the 5 critical success factors:

Leadership Succession Management

Change Management

Integrity and Inspiring Employee Commitment

Continuous Learning

Knowledge Management

The key elements that indicate the effectiveness:

A constant flow of the leaders who can properly direct and agency’s to achieve the results

A workforce with the competencies required to achieve the agency’s mission

The workforce is motivated to use the competencies in service of the agency’s mission

Source from: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/human-capital-management/leadership-knowledge-management/ 

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SOURCE

DEFINITION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SOURCES

A knowledge management system comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enables of the adoption to insight and experience. With the insights and experiences comprise knowledge, whether the embodied in the individual or embedded in organizational processes and practice.

PURPOSE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SOURCES

Improved Performance

Competitive Advantage

Innovation

Sharing of Knowledge

Integration

Continuous Improvement by:

•   Driving the Strategy
•   Starting New Lines of Business
•   Solving Problems Faster
•   Developing Professional Skills
•   Recruit and Retain Talent

ACTIVITIES IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

• Start with the business problem and the business value to be delivered first.
• Identify what kind of strategy to pursue to deliver this value and address the KM problem.
• Think about the system required from a people and process point of view.
• Finally, think about what kind of technical infrastructure are required to support the people and processes.
• Implement system and processes with appropriate change management and iterative staged release.

LEVEL OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Source from: http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/knowledge-management-systems.html

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Basically, different position in KM department need a different skill such as leadership skill, managing skill and technical skill.

According to Mohanta (2010), she identifies six essential quality that all knowledge workers need to some extent;
Possessing factual and theoretical knowledge
Finding and accessing information
Ability to apply information
Communication skills
Motivation
Intellectual capabilities.

KM Directors should have as many of the required skills below as possible. The five core scope of required skills should include:

1. Knowledge Management Experience

-        Have a clear and deep understanding of KM principles.

-        Understand in how to form a KM strategy.

-        Being exposed with KM best practices.

2. Learning Industry Experience

-        Involve with continuous learning solutions.

-        Understand on how KM and learning associate.

3. Technology Project Management

-        Skilled in technology work management

-        Managing indirectly with shared technology resources.

4. Matrix Management Skills

-        Skill on enabling cross-functional teams.

-        Comfortable in a matrix reporting environment

5. Industry Subject Matter Expertise

-      Knowledge of the core business KM is supporting

-      Clear and wide range of knowledge of existing business, process and     challenges that may happen.

-      Being exposed with organization competition, stakeholders and market chance.

Knowledge Managers.

According to McKeen & Staples (2002), they conducted a survey of 41 knowledge managers and from it they created a tentative portrait of the knowledge manager:
Highly educated
Already a seasoned organizational performer. Chosen for KM based on proven         performance.
Seeks new knowledge
Likes "being at the forefront of something new and exciting"
Derives more motivation from a challenge than from formal power
Receives intrinsic rewards from helping others
A risk-taker
Sees KM as a way to "make a mark within the organization".

A. Frost (2010, Knowledge Management Skills. KMT, An Educational KM Site.

http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/skills.html

Innovation & Personalization Strategies. What is that?

Firms need to step up their game by reconsidering position and move more towards personalization and innovation strategies when there is is rapid market changes.  at times, the traditional methods can no longer be relevant in the situation.  as for example, the efficiency-related strategies.

Technically, ideas only are not enough.  It needs to be nurtured and being implemented in the organizational context.  Ideas come from the people and they need champions to take them forward.  accordingly, people carry, develop and marshal their ideas in a socio-political process of dialogue and discussions with other people before they gain legitimacy and currency.

According to Van de Van in 1986, there are a number of stages that ideas may go through over time.  The stages namely appreciation, articulation, adoption, institutionalisation and decay.

On the other hand, according to Wolfe in 1994, there are ten (10) common stages in the innovation cycle.  The ten common stages are: idea conception, awareness, matching, appraisal, persuasion, adoption decision, implementation, confirmation, routinisation and infusion.

The political dynamics, interest and power bases can influence the innovation.  however, on certain times, innovation may seem irrational, unpredictable and uncertain and fail to follow rationalized management process.  This may lead to frustrations among managers to manage innovation.

:) 

Reference: Jashapara, A. (2011). Chapter 4: Innovation and personalisation strategies. Knowledge Management: An Integrated Approach. Second Edition. Pearson Education Limited. England.

CHALLENGES AND CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS OF KM

  

Knowledge exists in two forms: 

explicit and tacit 

Explicit knowledge is easily codified and conveyed to others

Tacit knowledge is more experiential, subjective and personal, and substantially more difficult to convey

Although it is more difficult to manage, tacit knowledge is the primary target of many KM efforts, because it is the repository of the organization’s most strategically valuable knowledge

This is one of many challenges a company faces when it decides to implement KM.

Companies are most likely to have success with KM if they have:

• A clear idea of the features and functionality of KM products.
• An awareness of the business goals and the critical success factors to implement and roll out a KM program
• A thorough understanding of the role of technology in the implementation of a KM program.

 Successful KM

• Identify the purpose of the KM program (internal vs. external focus and which type of internal focus)
• Have top management support — when the project has the blessing of the CEO and CIO, the roll out of the program is insured.
• Be at the core of medium to long term business goals. KM investments are not short-term financial investments.
• Break the cycle of information hoarding (intentional and non intentional). Information hoarding is sometimes the result of lack of tools to share the information, or of the non-realization that the information could actually be important to someone in another part of the organization. On the other hand, in a world where knowledge is power, it is difficult to convince some of the employees to let go of "proprietary" information, without proper incentives. In this case, the organization needs to prove to "knowledge holders" that they will benefit themselves from sharing information.
• Insure growth and flexibility — by providing the ability to customize and adjust the product over time.
• Manage the user base, by taking into consideration both heavy and light users. The solution should be able to organize the knowledge so it is most useful to the specific knowledge seeker. For example, I want it to give me knowledge relevant to my current knowledge level, so it is easier for me to understand. In addition, some of the users will be those that KM is their work, while others will be simply users of the information.

Source : Retrive from

http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www/Project98/G4/Sections/section1d.html

Managing Knowledge Processes for Value Creation by Giovanni Schiuma, Daniela Carlucci and Antonio Lerro (2012)

This discussion paper is mainly focusing on the crucial need of good management of knowledge processes in order to gain excellence in business as well as managing the uncertainties, turbulence and change in the current socio-economic scenario.

According to the discussions, for both public and private organization to get gains, they must conquer the ability to turn their knowledge domain into profitable services and/or artefacts and efficiently and effectively renew the organization’s capabilities.  Continuously acquiring, organizing, sharing and applying the knowledge resources they had are the things that need to be done by the organization in order to fit the purpose.

Like any other things that are in contact with the business/organizational management, there are always challenges. In relative to knowledge resources, the challenges would be the process of extracting the ultimate value from the available resources.  It is only when these resources are being managed effectively and efficiently as well as through proper knowledge processes that the complete potential of knowledge resources is being acknowledge.

Besides that, the effectiveness of this knowledge management processes efforts generally depends on the alignment of the organization’s process and infrastructure with the processes such as creating, disseminating, and applying and using the knowledge in a way that upholds the organization’s goals’ achievements and value proposition.

On top of that, in the process of becoming a successful knowledge resources management which includes the support system, teams, collaboration, structures, ICT tools and proper supportive culture, several factors that derived from the technology, individual and organization may intervene.  The debate on the knowledge management processes, however, is still on.

Reference: Schiuma, G. Carluccci, D. and Lerro, A. (2012). Managing knowledge processes for value creation. VINE. Vol.2. Iss 1. 4-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03055721211207815

THE FUNCTION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

We can divide all the functions performed by KM in five main categories:

1.    Intermediation: Intermediation refers to the brokering or knowledge transfer between an appropriate knowledge provider and knowledge seeker. Its role is to "match" a knowledge seeker with the optimal source of knowledge for that seeker. By doing so, intermediation ensures a much more efficient transfer of knowledge.

2.    Externalization: Externalization refers to the transfer of knowledge from the minds of its holders into an external repository, in the most efficient way possible. The function of externalization is to provide the sharing of knowledge. This is where Competitive Intelligence/Business Intelligence comes in. Through KM tools it is possible to track the vast quantity of data about competitors — from news stories to price changes.

3.    Internalization: Internalization is the extraction of knowledge from the external repository, and the filtering of this knowledge to provide greater relevance to the knowledge seeker. Knowledge should be presented to the user in the form most suitable to its comprehension. This, this function may include interpretation and/or reformatting of the presentation of the knowledge. To implement this function, companies can build yellow pages thus mapping and categorizing the skills and work experience of the organization. Another aspect of internalization would be the documentation of best practices.

4.    Cognition: Cognition is the function of systems to make decisions based on available knowledge. Cognition is the application of knowledge which has been exchanged through the preceding three functions.

5.    Measurement: Measurement refers to all KM activities that measure, map and quantify corporate knowledge and the performance of KM solutions. This function acts to support the other four functions, rather than to actually manage the knowledge itself.

These macro KM functions are combinations of many atomic functions, namely those of: 

·         finding, mapping, gathering, and filtering information

·         developing new knowledge (identifying relations among items and sharing information)

·         converting personal knowledge into shared knowledge resources

·         understanding and learning

·         adding value to information to create knowledge

·         enabling action through knowledge (performance and management)

·         processing shared knowledge resources

·         delivering (transferring) explicit knowledge

·         Building adequate technical infrastructures.

Source : Retrieve from http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www/Project98/G4/Sections/section1c.html