Elements of Knowledge Management

 

It is important that organizations transform their structure and processes to become learning organizations leveraging Knowledge Management. Some insights into the Knowledge Management elements, as provided by Marquardt (1996):

1. Collaboration: People should be able to use the social media, the internet and internal systems and encouraged to collate data and share with their peers and teams.
2. Expertise and Access to Experts: Job rotations, cross- functional projects etc. facilitates transferring of knowledge across boundaries and also in enhancing the knowledge and expertise.
3. Communities of Practice: This forum helps in posting issues, solving problems and discussing key topics. People who share common interest in an area of competence and are willing to share their experiences come together to form a community of practice. Apart from meeting formally, collaboration tools, such as message boards, chats, web boards, discussion forums etc. can be used for this purpose.
4. Real-time information: The key concept of knowledge management is to provide information to the right people, in the right format and in the right period of time. Providing systems that people can readily access for information helps in this.
5. Knowledge of organization depth and scope: Having volumes of data is not useful unless it is coded and stored in a manner that makes sense to the people and which is easy to retrieve. Determining what to capture, how to capture, formatting to help people to analyse and make decisions is important.
6. Personalization and navigation of the system and interface: For people who are not computer savvy, it is difficult to understand the importance of collating data, entering it in a centralized system. Having a system which is easy to use, retrieve data and also enter data helps in leveraging knowledge to the maximum.
7. Difference between instruction and information: Data which has a meaning is information. Organizations encourage sharing information using collaboration, mentoring and socialization to inform people, which can be done through meetings, at workstations or as issues happen. Instruction is information that is taught as part of on-the-job training, class room training or web-based training.