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- Redundancy
- Report Generator
- Rules of Thumb
- Scalability
- Schools of Knowledge Management
ReciprocityA key concept in knowledge sharing, reciprocity is what makes knowledge markets work. People will typically share knowledge when they know that others will reciprocate. People will contribute to a knowledge repository only when they feel they are in return gaining something which they value. Reciprocity may, however, stand in the way of some people enjoying access to a social network, if they have nothing to contribute for the moment. So many communities of practice allow legitimate “peripheral participation”. Employees can “lurk” in electronic mailing lists and discussion groups and get a feel of what is happening within a group. RedundancyAccording to Nonaka and Takeuchi, redundancy is the conscious overlapping of company information, business activities and managerial responsibilities. Knowledge creation is facilitated when a company makes available information that goes beyond the immediate operational requirements of organizational members. Effectively, redundancy means that concepts created by an individual or group are shared with other individuals who may not need the concepts immediately. Redundancy encourages dialogue and helps generate new ideas and consequently knowledge creation. When members of an organization share overlapping information, they can sense what others are struggling to articulate. Japanese companies like Canon organize product development teams into competing groups that develop different approaches to the same project and argue their case. This enables the project to be examined from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, the best approach is chosen. Redundancy can be facilitated through cross functional job rotation of employees. Report GeneratorA system that generates responses to queries, provides automated status reports, or reports on the contents of a database. RFIDSee Radio frequency identification. Roth, GeorgeA member of the research staff at the MIT 21st Century Initiative, Roth directs the learning history project. Roth has done extensive research on organizational learning and change. Roth’s current research interests include the following: Learning Histories: The use of documentation to capture, assess, facilitate, diffuse and sustain organizational improvement initiatives. Large Scale System Change: Issues involved in moving from team-based change efforts to organizational or system level change. Technological Change: Creating mechanisms for effective change while implementing new technology. Educational Interventions in Organizational Learning: Improving individual learning processes taking place in organizational settings. Business Process Learning: Building better business processes by enabling people to think differently about their work and business processes. Rules of ThumbShortcuts to solutions for tackling new problems that resemble problems previously solved by experienced workers. This kind of knowledge facilitates quick decision making. But one must be on guard, for situations where there is a paradigm shift and the existing thumb rules may no longer apply. S
The ability of the knowledge management system to support an increasing number of users and a growing volume of transactions. A system that performs well within a work group of limited size might not perform well when it is extended across the enterprise. Scalability is an important issue in rapidly growing organizations. Indian IT services companies clearly fall in this category. Scalability depends on a number of factors, including the flexibility of the architecture and the capacity of the hardware. Schools of Knowledge ManagementMichael Earl, one of the well known knowledge management gurus, has identified seven different schools of knowledge management: The systems school is perhaps the longest established, formal approach to knowledge management. The school believes in capturing specialist knowledge in databases and making it available across the organization. The content is validated, through peer and superior review. The systems school is not feasible without information technology (IT). Computer systems which capture, store, organize, and display knowledge are the key drivers in this school. The cartographic school is concerned with mapping organizational knowledge. By building knowledge directories, the aim is to make sure knowledgeable people in the organization are accessible to others for advice, consultation, or knowledge exchange. Knowledge directories are gateways to knowledge. People are expected to provide accurate and comprehensive profiles of their competencies and experience in the directories. The key driver of the mapping school is people connectivity. Consequently, the principal contribution of IT is to connect people via intranets, extranets and the Internet. The process school believes the performance of business processes can be enhanced by providing operating personnel with knowledge relevant to their tasks. The process school focuses on enhancing the firm’s core capabilities with knowledge flows. IT can be used to provide shared databases across tasks, levels, entities, and geographies to all knowledge workers throughout a process. The commercial school lays emphasis on both protecting and exploiting a firm’s knowledge or intellectual assets such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, and know-how to produce revenue streams. A specialist team or function is used to aggressively manage knowledge and intellectual property. Techniques and procedures are put in place to manage intellectual assets as a matter of routine. Many companies spend too much time trying to measure Intellectual Capital rather than actually developing and exploiting it. The philosophy of the commercial school is commercialization of intellectual property. The organizational school describes the use of organizational structures, or networks, for sharing or pooling knowledge. It believes in promoting “knowledge communities” or groups of people with a common interest, problem, or experience, within and across organizations. These communities can be intra or inter-organizational. Communities exchange and share knowledge interactively, often in non-routine personal and unstructured ways, as an interdependent network. The emphasis is on increasing connectivity among knowledge workers. IT, in the form of intranets and groupware, which can help connect members and pool their knowledge, both explicit and tacit. Most people prefer conversation to documents or IT systems. Tacit knowledge is most likely to be discovered and exchanged through discussion. The spatial school centers on the use of spatial design — to facilitate knowledge exchange. Typical examples are the water cooler as a meeting place, the open-style coffee bar or kitchen as a “knowledge cafe” and the open-plan office as a “knowledge building.” This school could also be called the social school, because the intent is to encourage socialization as a means of knowledge exchange. This school believes in nurturing and utilization of social capital that develops from people interacting, formally or informally, repeatedly over time. However, the label “spatial” is preferred because of the use of space to stimulate conversations and exchange. The strategic school sees knowledge management as a dimension of competitive strategy. Indeed, it may be seen as the essence of a firm’s strategy. The aim is to build, nurture, and fully exploit knowledge assets through systems, processes, and people and convert them into value as knowledge-based products and services. The strategic school provides an umbrella for the pursuit of all the other schools. This school views knowledge and intellectual capital as the key resource. The firm consciously chooses to compete on knowledge. With the firm viewing itself as a knowledge business, knowledge creation and sharing, drive rather than just support competitive strategy. The strategic school is essentially concerned with raising awareness of how value can be created by treating knowledge as a strategic resource. Corporate mission and purpose statements are used to send out clear signals about the importance of knowledge management. 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