Successful KM implementations in business settings prioritize attention on soft issues – including human and cultural aspects, personal motivations, change management methodologies, new and improved business processes enabling multidisciplinary knowledge sharing, communication and collaboration – and see technology as an enabler.
Despite this, most efforts so far at addressing the challenge of KM in business environments have typically taken a “technology-push” approach, concentrating major effort on putting in place IT tools that will “solve the knowledge creation, sharing and reuse problem”.
The overall intention has been to provide meaningful and useful guidelines to companies, and notably SMEs (see below), as to how they might align their organizations culturally and socially to take advantage of the opportunities of knowledge sharing within and beyond their organizational boundaries.
If the Framework helps an organization achieve a common understanding of KM, align and focus its actions, identify what KM aspects are relevant to that organization, understand what is the right combination of these aspects, which processes should be tackled and how to develop KM both an organizational and individual level – then it has value.
Why KM in SMEs?
Owners and managers of SMEs differ in what they term success. Survival and continuity, profit, return on capital employed, numbers of employees and customers, pride in product, skills and service, employment for family members, and enjoyable work life, are frequently mentioned criteria.
This European KM Framework is designed to promote a common European understanding of KM, show the value of the emerging KM approach and help organizations towards its successful implementation.
The Framework should be considered as a starting point for developing, if appropriate, an organization-specific framework that serves best the needs of a particular organization’s KM approach.
The KM Framework considers three layers as most important for KM:
a) The business focus should be in the centre of any KM initiative and represents the value-adding processes of an organization, which may typically include strategy development, product/service innovation and development, manufacturing and service delivery, sales and customer support.
b) Five core knowledge activities have been identified as most widely used by organizations in Europe: identify, create, store, share and use.
c) The enablers represent the third layer and comprise two main categories, called personal and organizational knowledge capabilities, which complement each other. These capabilities should be seen as the enablers for the knowledge activities outlined above.
Core value-adding processes
In addition to supporting the improvement of the core processes of an organization, KM methods can also be applied within its supporting processes: competence management is one such example from the HR arena; developing best practice databases to capture and exchange knowledge about optimum procedures throughout the organization is another example from the area of continuous improvement processes; methods for intellectual property management (e.g. patents, copyrights) is a further example from the area of management of financial and non-financial assets.
Small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs) in particular are increasingly building networks to supply their products, to share their resources and to learn from each other. Long-term partnerships are established in order to develop new products and services that a single organization could not cope with alone. Therefore partners and suppliers, as well as clients, should often be involved within the scope
Empirical research, practical experiences and the analysis of more than 150 KM frameworks worldwide have shown that the following areas are, in most cases, the most important to address:
1. describe how knowledge is used
2. raise awareness about the required KM activities
3. reduce complexity
4. design a KM solution.
The five core knowledge activities are:
- Identify knowledge
- Create New Knowledge
- Store Knowledge
- Share Knowledge
- Use Knowledge
Two important requirements have to be fulfilled to achieve improvements from these core knowledge activities:
- First, the core activities have to be aligned or integrated into the organizational processes and daily tasks.
- Second, the core activities have to be carefully balanced in accordance with the specificities of each business process and organization. A KM solution should not focus only on one or two activities in isolation.
4.1 Personal knowledge capabilities
the following personal knowledge capabilities are usually required for a successful implementation of a KM solution:
- a) Ambition;
- b) Skills;
- c) Behaviour;
- d) Methods, T ools and T echniques;
- e) Time management;
- f) Personal knowledge.
Just asking simple questions like…
- Is there somebody else who might have knowledge that could help me further here?
- What did we learn in this project?
- With whom should we share what we learn?
…could have a significant impact on the way knowledge is developed, shared and used in an organization.
An often-used saying related to KM is “an hour of work in the library could save you a month of work …”.
Research indicates that the pressures of knowledge-based work are increasing in modern societies. These can include the need to solve unforeseen problems, taking greater levels of personal self-responsibility and decision-making, carrying out more coordination tasks in cooperative work settings, a greater number of information processing tasks and a higher dependency on the speed of input from colleagues and clients.
Organizational knowledge capabilities
Organizational knowledge capabilities describe the conditions that the leadership of an organization has to establish in order to facilitate effective knowledge use within its value-adding processes, by its managers, employees and other stakeholders.
The following organizational knowledge capabilities are typically relevant for a successful implementation of a KM solution:
- g) Mission, Vision & Strategy;
- h) Culture;
- i) Process & Organization;
- j) Measurement;
- k) Technology & Infrastructure;
- l) Knowledge Assets.
Culture
Since most knowledge processes are on a more or less voluntary basis and knowledge is to a large degree personal, there needs to be within an organization a culture of motivation, a sense of belonging, empowerment, trust and respect before people really start to engage themselves in developing, sharing and using knowledge. It requires a culture in which people are respected, based on the knowledge they have and the way they are putting it to use for the organization.
4.2.6 Knowledge Assets
The biggest challenge for any organization is to develop and make optimal use of the employees’ knowledge (their so-called “human capital”) and that of their external stakeholders (their so-called “customer capital”) by transforming this know-how into shared knowledge assets (so-called “structural capital”). Knowledge assets are those , which remain with the company when the employees walk out through the door –such as manuals, customer databases, process descriptions, patents etc. Typically, human capital is more related to the internal or tacit component of knowledge (experience, skills, attitude) and structural capital more related to explicit information.