...In many situations we act without even knowing why we act the way we do...This is no longer desirable when your organization is changing too often...Knowledge Management is (amongst other aspects) about making the private knowledge publicly available...So that you can bridge the Knowledge Gap...But your organization was not used to this. Different teams applied different principles...And now what? How to address this new set of principles so that knowledge management is adopted in the primary process? When existing employees and management get new tasks and when the environment is changed, you cannot longer rely on old knowledge patterns. How was it, that we did this before? And why doesnt this work no longer? Everybody knows how the previous organization of knowledge was arranged. In the former setting it was not about people, it was about names: rather than addressing product specialist X, service desk operator Y or Sales agent Z, it was about John (knows al about product A), Debby (knows how to handle difficult clients, pass it thru her), and Ben (that can only be done by him). In the primary sales process, knowledge was not an issue. The organizing rule was let the "best" (wo)man solve it. Knowledge management is inherently correlated with the way you organize. If you organize in a competitive way, you will isolate knowledge, you will favour unequal distribution, but most of all you will make the organization inflexible. Little incidents (this number one salesman is leaving...) will have a big impact. New principles then? And how to apply them? Your company is not only supported by a primary process of isolated elements. It is the infrastructural glue that takes care that all areas communicate. You can do this only by balancing the activities in the right way; individual bonuses are alright, only if they are accompanied buy team targets. To do that you need to find a shared goal. And sharing knowledge could be one of it. Once you have addressed this human factor, than you might start to think about infrastructure and systems. Although very helpful, all knowledge management initiatives that start with filling databases on the intranet will fail 2006 Hans Bool |
