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Knowledge management is essential, a vision

By Alfred de Weerd posted 01-05-2015 11:13

  

Your organization has an enormous potential in its primary asset: the employees. It has gold in its hands. If your customers are positive about your professionalism (knowledge and skills), you can be content, but you cannot lean back. Each employee should strive for the highest possible professionalism in everything he does and the management should do everything to facilitate this. There is room for growth and there will always be room for growth.
Information workers are driven largely by their quest to get better in their work and thus gain more appreciation and to increase their market value. Knowledge management, when applied right, will affect have a positive effect on customer, company and employee.

Efficiency

Knowledge Management will lead to higher efficiency in both projects and day to day operation. In many cases, each new project is started from scratch. Even when a project methodology like Prince 2 is used in your organization, at project start up it has to be determined how the methodology can be applied to the specific project. For any given task during the project, non experienced workers will benefit greatly if there are guidelines, how-to documents and knowledgeable colleagues at hand. The same is true for operational workers, although in some cases the work is repetitive. Knowing what to do and how to it greatly helps in speeding up. The increase of efficiency is the result of not having to search for information, not having to think about an approach and actual help on how to perform the task in an optimal fashion.

Quality

On of the most obvious benefits of knowledge management is an increase in quality. This often takes the form of procedures and checklists. These can help in assuring that no important steps are missed. In this respect, there is a relation to quality assurance. In my days, when I earned my living as an ISO 9000 quality assurance consultant, I discovered there is also a big difference in how quality is perceived. Workers would invariably commented that my ISO 9000 quality assurance system did not measure real quality. To them (and I agree) quality had much more to do with the value of their work, based on all their skills and experience. This kind of quality hinges on knowledge. A additional plus for higher quality is also lower risks.

Innovation

An innovation can be defined as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs, or existing market needs. Innovations tend to be the product of combination of knowledge in different areas. For individual inventors a knowledge applications would not be required, but for a large company, with possibly groups of scientist all over the world, knowledge management can make the difference between bankruptcy and growth. I once did a consultancy for an international company in synthetic materials. Although they had a very good market position, lower market prices on bulk products forced them to come up with new materials, with higher margins. The way to go for them was to create a knowledge portal so that researchers from different regions in the world could more easily reuse results and integrate knowledge of different areas.

Image

For decision makers at customers the company image is determined by their experiences with the employees, services and products of the company. Whether this has been a positive experience is determined largely by the professionalism of the employees, which is in turn fostered by knowledge. Image is also a derived consequence of efficiency, quality, innovation and even employee satisfaction.

Employee satisfaction

The primary driver for knowledge workers in general is being able to grow professionally, as this increases both self esteem and the chances for obtaining a well paid and interesting job. When there is no exchange in knowledge, it will be difficult for each single employee to grow professionally. A substantial amount or senior consultants may be leaving the company and they are being replaced by junior consultants. Transferring (tacit) knowledge and skills is an important aspect of professionalization. Many consultants leaving the company do so because they think other parties offer better opportunities for them to grow professionally. In my personal experience this is more important than salary (although professional level and salary are quite strongly related!). For employees, professionalization contributes to pride in their own work, colleagues and the company. Professionalization is also self-reinforcing, because it implies a critical attitude towards their own work, methods and technologies. This opens the way for further improvement.

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