Knowledge Management Enablers

Disclaimer: I do not own the copyright of the clip. 

 

The sharing of knowledge is really important. It is not just a matter of you acquiring knowledge, instead, equally important, your contribution of sharing YOUR knowledge.

Ever heard of the quote "It Begins with You"? It is pretty much true. I cannot say that I have accomplished many successes or I am the rightful person to tell you that you need to change, but history itself explains that successful leaders are the ones who share their knowledge.

Okay, to change the world might be a little over-exaggerating, what I would like to point on is self-development. You probably have gone through a lot of motivation sessions or team dynamics events or your school campaign about leadership and all, so by explaining about self-development here, it's going to be tremendously painful to write and to read..won't it?

What I want to share here is a picture of my understanding of Knowledge Management Enablers, which I learned in Mdm Azmawati's class and how these enablers are optimized for the knowledge management field.

Basically, we have three enablers, namely:

• Culture
• Technology
• Infrastructure

Let's dive in the scopes...

 

Culture

Upon Knowledge Management's interests, culture associates with the organization's norms. This explains about the behaviour inside the organization.

Are people willing to share what they know? Why?

Do they learn from their mistakes? How?

Do they reflect? How?

Do they give recognition for knowledge creation? How? 

The optimum or ideal culture of an organization is to create an environment where people appreciate the value of knowledge attributes alongside where people are motivated to make effort in generating and extracting knowledge and might as well use technology to implement the knowledge. 

The main reasons that this is not happening are due to complacency, apathy, lack of awareness, lack of understanding or proof of their value, or technology in the organization is not yet being up to the mark.

This is where YOU come to play the important role. You yourself ARE an enabler, because you belong in the organization. You must understand that this is your choice. You choose to be part of the organization.

So share, and believe what others share, no matter how little or small in significance the subject might be. Be prepared to lead and be led. The mutual understanding is a GREAT asset as collaborative efforts make projects run much easier and more successful. You might find giving rewards and remunerations give huge boosts to the performance of people. 

I would like to share a success story from Lafarge in Langkawi, Malaysia:

"In Lafarge, the Langkawi story is the most important example of a “postmortem”. A cement plant in Malaysia wanted to increase its use of petrol coke, a efficient energy that can be used by cement kilns. The technical director it was facing some challenges with the build up of residue in the kiln as a result of burning petcoke. 

 Using the technical centres and the knowledge sharing databases he discovered that a best practices developed by another cement plant. An experience exchange was organized and the two plants with the help of the technical centre collaborated on the implementation of the solution. The learning curve was sped up thanks to this exchange of knowledge. In 2001, petrol coke was used at 32% by the Langkawi plant. One year later it was used at 80% by the same plant, reducing the energy costs and increasing the returns in a shorter period of time."

*source: http://www.nickmilton.com/search/label/success%20story - KM success story #44

Technology

Technology is a really HUGE enabler of Knowledge Management. It relates to enabling the platform which Knowledge Management initiatives are built. Technology helps to extend the reach of knowledge and accelerates the transfer of knowledge.

It also promotes sharing and excellent in assisting to get the right information to the right person at the right time!

However, an organization might find that having an excentric focus or overdependency on technology would not be a good approach because that is the common pitfall in Knowledge Management. Of course, if you have the most advanced high-tech sophisticated technology, but no one bothers to use it, it is as good as nothing!

So it falls down again to culture. What the organization might wants to focus is on how to create an awareness and convenience for the people to use the available or developed wonderful technology facilities.

Having a great technology which everybody finds so useful and practical to facilitate data and information distribution and transmission is a bang for an organization. On the other hand, however, no matter how great the tech is, nothing of its sort could substitute the rich interactivity, communication, and learning that is inherent in dialogue.

This is because knowledge is primarily created by the interactions of minds. It is known that human intervention is the sole resource of knowledge generation. 

From Mdm Azmawati's slides:

Guidelines to implement technology:

• Understand the business purpose
• Determine whether the current technology can be adapted
• Identify internal support requirements for maintenance of the system
• Organize your content
• Design for ease of use
• Consider initial costs

Websites that provide services such as eBay, Facebook, twitter, etc. are common examples of technology enablers for knowledge. As these sites become more common and general in use over time, these services will change from technology knowledge enablers, to infrastructure knowledge enablers.

For example, 20 years ago, the internet is considered as a technology knowledge enabler, but as time passes by and internet has generally becoming widely used now and also heavily relied on, thus the internet has become one of the important infrastructure knowledge enabler. Google.com is now transforming from technology to infrastructure knowledge enabler.

 

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is defined as the underlying foundation and basic framework for a system or an organization. It is the system of public works for a country, state, or region and also the resources required for an activity.

Well, you already know this, the public transport, electricity power supply, highways, are easy examples of infrastructure, but those are the general examples. Specific examples for knowledge enabler are libraries, internet, help desks, databases, and classrooms.These are the enablers of knowledge management that an organization is going to depend on to generate knowledge and create knowledge flows. 

 

Measurement

By identifying these enablers and finding a way to manipulate them is the key to successful knowledge management in an organization. Thus, we have to measure the practices of knowledge management in our organization in order to develop the best sharing practices. 

How do we measure it?

According to Mdm Azmawati:

• Observe its impacts on other forces e.g. competition and innovation
• Employee morale productivity
• Product excellence

If you find that your organization scores good in the measurements, you are good in the long run of becoming a GREAT organization or knowledge worker! Promise!

You should be flexible and allow various options to conduct the measurings. You can measure through outcomes by observing the business objectives, needs and processes. Is everything falling into place? How? Can it be improved?

You can also measure through doing activities and find out how frequent users in the organization is accessing and utilizing your knowledge management applications.

Also, of great importance, measure the costs and returns; the costs associated with developing support systems and support costs to generate a database about costs vs revenues.

It is really important to measure because it is a method of knowing and understanding you and the organization's current status so that you can design the best future systems and applications and ensure the transfer efforts stay on track.

 

 

 

Only you can decide WHERE you want to be, HOW you want to be, WHAT you want to be and WHY. You already know WHO you are.

Please give a pinch of your thought by leaving comments and every feedback is deeply appreciated!

Thank you for your wonderful decision to read.