Knowledge Management: How not to
In today’s world of fast projects, tight deadlines, reducing budgets and limited manhours, we need knowledge management. We resort to reinventing the wheel often with the slightest change in variables, which in turn, costs us time and money.
Recycling what we know and what we have today into newer projects is by far the simplest definition I can think of for “knowledge management”.
Most engineering projects in their respective field of work have something in common. Unless you hit a dead end with the conventional methodology and requires resorting to some research, most projects have a correlation. That correlation is the ground for knowledge management.
Enabling knowledge management takes some planning, and if done in a proper way, it can really reap enormous benefits for the company and people that work for it. Instead of looking at how to deploy a system, let’s look at what to overcome, how to avoid common problems.
To me, the most common mistakes in knowledge management that companies make are:
Lack of awareness—Many, many are unaware of knowledge management. For those who are barely aware, it’s a big cloud in the sky. This needs to be overcome. Hire people who can do this for you or provide your team some guidance on how you can effectively tune your company’s resources to maximum throughput.
One size fits all—A common misconception that by deploying certain software or certain personnel, your company has enabled knowledge management. The best way to review KM is from the people who use it. They will be able to tell you what is useful, working and what isn’t. Success of an effective knowledge management can be judged by improvement or lack thereof in users’ productivity. And therefore, feedback from them is of paramount importance.
Often, in a multinational company, all offices worldwide are made to use what the HQ prescribes. This may be good for deployment, but if your projects are different, users are different and clients are different, how can it be applied and digested everywhere with the same taste? Hence, there needs some room for customization.
Lack of definition—This is altogether a different scenario and similar to lack of awareness. Sometimes, people don’t really know what they want and they don’t know how to work smart. They are amazed to learn if someone shows that such a thing is possible. Push the idea of sharing resources within the company. Let people derive that idea into their own disciplines to define their own spaces and let them plan the way they are comfortable with.
Lack coordination—Implementation teams often work in isolation, without feedback from users, which in turn increases the learning curve and lack of interest from users for something that they’re compelled to use. Brainstorming sessions among employees should be targeted to consolidate existing information and effective methods of putting them upfront for everyone to use for maximum benefits.
Testing with users, and handing over a system for further maintenance and upgrade is very essential. To some extent, users should be made part of the building team in order to understand the underlying system, its advantages and disadvantages.
Improper use of tools—Often, proprietary blackboxes are deployed and even end-up paying for support because something is unknown. For most lazy admins and IT departments, this is an easy way out. Call the maintenance guy, let him fix and showel the tab up the company’s ass.
Knowledge management needs a proper choice of tools that the company personnel are comfortable with and which they can fine-tune to requirements. There are genuine concerns of exchange of data and an effort to avoid duplication of work. Hence, choice of proper software is important in making your raw data futureproof.
An interesting read on Knowledge Working:
The New Division of Labor : How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
Jun 22, 05 at 16:16