Knowledge Management primer

Part 1 - why?

Is there a need to 'manage' knowledge?

Everyone in business intuitively appreciates the value of knowledge. People need access to knowledge in order to work, and as they work, they learn, or generate new knowledge.

To get their job done well, individuals need to know what to do and how to do it.

To make good decisions, they need to know what the true situation is in terms of relevant data or information, and be able to draw on past experiences or analyses or records to judge the implications of alternative courses of action.

As work is done, people learn. This happens naturally to a greater or lesser degree depending on individual personality and intelligence, and on the degree to which the corporate environment encourages independent action and experimentation.

It is also typical of businesses that, in various ways, they explicitly set about the task of learning. They do this by conducting Research and Development and by systematically collecting and analysing data about their operations, customers, and markets.

If all this happens now, why is there a need to 'manage' knowledge? The answer lies in three relatively recent major developments in corporate environments:

• The explosion of communications technology
• The advent of the 'knowledge worker'
• The widespread adoption of 'Learning Organisation' tools and techniques, otherwise known as process-oriented management

Explosion of communications technology

Before the proliferation of corporate networks and application software to support general communication, access to knowledge was limited to personal contact and paper-based reports and manuals. However, production time and cost, and the slow speed of paper-based communication, place severe limits on its practical value.

The advent of the World Wide Web changed this dramatically. Electronic communication became fast, cheap and flexible. However, when organisations came to utilize this new communication channel they often found their existing paper-based knowledge in poor condition. Their desire to use the new communication channels cast a bright light into some dark corners. They found that existing documented knowledge was often:

• badly written and not 'voiced' for its intended audiences
• disorganised, ill-structured, inconsistent, out-of-date, and of questionable authority
• not supported by existing management structures and responsibilities

In short, the quality and quantity of readily communicable knowledge was low. This is an issue that needs to be managed.

Advent of the 'knowledge worker'

Another by-product of rapid technological development has been the changing nature of the workplace and the demands placed on employees. As lower-level and repetitive tasks are increasingly automated, two mutually reinforcing trends take place:

• To do the remaining more complex work, employees have to apply greater knowledge and adapt quickly through learning - hence they must become 'knowledge workers'
• Improvements in production capability and flexibility enable new products and services to be brought to the market more quickly and cheaply; this rapidly increases the level of competition and the rate of market change, and the need for employees to learn and adapt quickly

Supporting knowledge workers' enhanced needs for access to knowledge, and for capturing, cycling and leveraging the knowledge they generate, are issues that need to be managed.

'Learning Organisation' tools and techniques

Under the banners of 'Continuous Improvement', 'Total Quality Management', 'Total Quality Control', 'Quality Assurance', or simply 'Quality Management', organisations have adopted and benefited from the concepts of process-oriented management.

Collectively these concepts represent the notion of the 'learning organisation'; an organisation that is constantly re-making itself by staying close to its customers and suppliers, and changing and adapting its processes, products and services to better meet customer needs and improve operating efficiency. Managers in learning organisations consciously encourage and support constant investigation and innovation by staff to improve the way their organisation functions.

Even those organisations that have not explicitly implemented the above programmes have commonly adopted many of the management tools and techniques associated with them. Tools and techniques such as:

• customer-focused data collection and analysis
• customer-focused accountability
• employee empowerment
• statistical process control
• quality assurance systems based on international standards
• team-based problem solving and process improvement
• benchmarking and 'best practice' implementation
• business process re-engineering

Although the names of the original programmes are now much less commonly used, the concepts embodied in them have wrought a fundamental and permanent change in the way businesses are managed. The individual tools and techniques involved have become an integral part of accepted management practices.

Process-oriented management is 'knowledge work' at the corporate level. It systematically generates new and better knowledge about how best to tackle the thousands of interdependent tasks that an organisation relies on in order to be effective and to improve. But a major problem for process-oriented management is getting it to 'stick'. Like an open fire, much of the heat is going up the chimney. This is because:

• the techniques used rely on close contact between individuals, so the benefits of the knowledge generated have tended to be local rather than necessarily organisation-wide
• relatively little emphasis has been placed on documenting processes for audiences wider than immediate team members, thus limiting the ability to leverage the new knowledge generated
• beyond the 'workplace team' level, management and communication structures generally do not exist to support process improvement on division-wide and company-wide levels
• initiatives that share process-oriented approaches are often kept separate with their own implementation teams; for example 'Quality Assurance' is seen as different to 'Continuous Improvement', and in turn 'Best Practice' is often made distinct from 'Business Process Re-engineering.

These are problems of knowledge that need to be managed if the organisation is to get maximum benefit from its process-orientation.

What next?

In summary, the three major developments in corporate environments:

• explosion of communications technology
• advent of the 'knowledge worker'
• widespread adoption of 'Learning Organisation' tools and techniques

... have created both an overwhelming need and a golden opportunity to overtly manage knowledge for the betterment of an enterprise. The next question is – how? It seems to be a matter of exploiting communications technology, feeding knowledge workers, and leveraging process-orientation, but we will examine this issue in detail in Part 2 of the primer. 

This article may be reproduced only with the permission of HCi (email HCi ). Copyright HCi, 2001.