Sunday, February 6, 2011
Pro's and Con's of KM
Our textbook defines knowledge management as "the processes necessary to generate, capture, codify, and transfer knowledge across the organization to achieve competative advantage." In what ways has knowledge management provided a competative advantage for your organization? Is there a downside?
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Hi Alex,
ReplyDeleteGreat question. Is there a reference which stimulated this question for you? Have you noticed such a downside to knowledge management or its effects on competative advantage within your company?
Sueanne, its not polite to answer a question with a question...
ReplyDeleteKM is used within our organization to disseminate operational isses to customer service so that are aware of staffing or trucking isses. It is not used as a competitive advantage at this time to our competitive adavantage against our competition. Using KM is only as good as the information, the relavency of the issue of the issue to yorr specific need and if you can find the information easily. In the case of WM, I "discovered" our KM systems only after digging for a while in our intranet.
There are a lot of ways KM has impacted our company. Yes.
ReplyDeleteKM can be a very power tool if the company has the ability to capture information, but it will do no good if people can not readily access the useful information. I have worked for several Fortune companies that I am sure had the information but did a poor job of transferring the information to people that need it.
ReplyDeleteI do not see a downside to the KM other than the costs associated with managing the data pool, but I would think this is made up for many times over with additional work captured.
Matt, can you elaborate more on the how the KM has impacted your company?
Not being exposed to this strategy tool, I am looking forward to hearing the presentation this week to learn more.
My company does not have a cohesive solution for Knowledge Mgmt....yet. We utilize numerous point solutions to capture our collective understanding of our business, markets and customers. If I were to point to the area where KM provides us a competitive advantage it would be in product development. The R&D group shares several databases that retain product information across many geographies. I don't have a clear understanding of exactly how it is used day to day but feel confident in saying it is very valuable given the size of the databases and the security imposed.
ReplyDeleteOther examples of KM solutions in our company include databases dedicated to Sales and Marketing and M&A.
We are currently working on two KM related projects. The first is a Global Employee Intranet. The solution we are using will allow for people to share their expertise in a casual way. Our objective is this will bring people together from different parts of the company to solve problems and discuss new ideas.
The second is an enterprise content management implementation. Many of you are probably familiar with Sharepoint. We are launching a similar solution called Filenet. I would consider it a version of KM since it manages the storage of unstructured data such as Office files and PDFs which possess much of our company's knowledge. Today, those files are not organized or managed with policies that makes it efficient to find and use. Filenet will address the challenge of managing millions of files in a way that is more consumable.
Apparently Wells Fargo does have an entire KM department. Ironcially when I typed in "Knowledge Mgt" in our internal website it brought me to "Teamworks India".
ReplyDeleteWe define KM as "Systematic approach to enable information and knowledge to grow, flow and create value". This is not part of any corporate meetings, talks, etc.
I never knew of this site and it is not shared throughout any of our Mid Atlantic offices. I do know there are many initiatives to combine Wachovia systems with ours to eliminate redundancies, improve customer service, etc. This is a very slow process and is projected to take until 2013 to complete. Personally I think that is a generous time frame given our history. The downside is temporary but when we combine "KM systems" we directly impact external clients. As we all know clients can be resistent to change to their accounts so there is a short term downside.
Long term I believe we capture and generate data very well but do not create any competitive advantages from it. We can transform data into some "knowledge" but we never made it to "wisdom".
I do have a question about how to relate our HBS article to the case (yes, I'm tech challenged!). How does KM relate to "strategy under uncertainty" For example: If your company uses KM as a comp. adv does it make it easier to execute your strategy or does it make it harder?
ReplyDeleteWhen searching Loyola University Maryland's site for Knowledge management, i am directed to the Information Systems Operations Management department chaired by Gloria. There are courses, like ours, that will teach the subject. I could not find, however, that there is a department on site that deals with KM.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, we have a software system that is designed to share information. For example, the admissions office enteres a prospective family's information. The student matriculates and the record is now coded as student. Four years later, the student graduates and we now have an alumnus (and BIG donor). There is a sharing of knowledge to create competive advantage, but it is static. It is static in that as a fundraiser I don't have access to the student records (Guy you should be pleased with that one!) Regrettably, there is a lot of information contained in student records like extracurricular actiities, awards, study abroad, that would be very beneficial to know prior to meeting the students parents or the new alumnus. Afterall, knowledge is wisdom, right?
In short, we have a system in place for KM, but it is siloed in individual departments. The data can be accessed by asking others to do so, but it is not a seemless activity.
Since you asked, Alex, I will oblige.
ReplyDeleteWhen building a nuke plant that is going to be in operations for as long as 80 years (current technologies are being developed for several re-licensings - 20 years each under current regulation), KM needs to be developed very early on so as to ensure the long term understanding of the original engineering and design specifications and logic. Interestingly, the system that our project has begun to develop is called Galaxy. The goal of Galaxy for our project is to have a repository of of original information that can live on and remain meaningful long past commercial operation delivery of the plant. Our firm's view on the first generation of nuclear plant development in the U.S. was that the reliability issues suffered by so many in the late-70's and early-80's was due to a lack of KM systems. More specifically, the thought processes around engineering decisions were lost at plant specific sites as the human resources left the development phase of the project. Operations were very often run by people that did not have significant involvement in the construction decisioning and were therefore challenged to deal with engineering issues once they arose.
On the downside - would say the biggest we have encountered to date is a cost function. While they are confidential, I can only say that it is clear that investments into KM systems are very significant in the short run.
Move that sheds a little more light on my obviously sarcastic response.
Our hospital has some KM. But our hospital system has started to take more steps in this direction. As well as more and more applications that are being put in place that help with KM. I can also tap into some of my professional organizations/associations and find some help in KM. Still nothing like what is described in the article.
ReplyDeleteIts an interesting question when knowledge is a commodity. If it is something that is relatively easy to get, I doubt a there would be a formal KM. Looking at the trading desk, knowledge is not universal and heavily guarded by the traders. That is how they make money in their specific markets, it is what keeps them employed and what keeps them making the big bonuses. However, we need to capture that knowledge in a system to help them understand what they know. In that sense, there is very much a KM. However, it only reflects the trader. Looking at other parts of the organization, like our nuclear business, I would second what Matt just said. That is highly specialize and individualized information and it is imperative that it is preserved.
ReplyDeleteSo my answer to Alex is Yes and No.
Similar to Mark, my hospital has some KM. Our HIS system has some KM tools such as cabinets, libraries, references, etc... And we have created an employee intranet (I think it is a SharePoint product), but it does not contain industry benchmarks and best practices - Hopefully we will get there one day.
ReplyDeleteSince Alex asked...
ReplyDeleteKnowledge Management has been a significant part of our Company's competitive advantage for years. Our text noted the distinctions between data, information, and knowledge. We've built our sales and marketing efforts to capitalize on that value progression. Our competitors' products can all give you a test result, but in most cases that answer is just meaningless data to our customer. It's not until you can translate that data into a treatment recommendation that the test result has value. Our industry expertise (knowledge) is what sets our products apart from the competition.
There is a downside to this effort. When we do this well our proprietary, and unique knowledge eventually is shared to the point of being easily available. Over the years our chemists have taught water chemistry classes to trade associations accross the country. By now our treatment tables, charts, and calculators have been modeled and reproduced in the literature of all our customers as well as our competitors.
Our challenge is to creatively stay a step ahead, constantly using new tools to make the transfer from data to knowledge easier for the users of our products. Applying new technologies to to old tools can restore uniqueness to a product. Our newest products replace the traditional tables and charts with a cell phone linked to water analysis hosted on a cloud. But even in this we know that the pace of change is rapid, and any competitve advantage will be short lived.
Schindler uses a form of Knowledge Management as well. Similar to Paul's comment this has been an advantage of our company for many years. Until reading about some of my other classmates experiences, I didn't realize that many companies don't do a good job of having systems communicate together well. Our companies information systems department is a global entity, and has always had the task of communicating information across boarders and between many different languages and systems. Regardless of what type of employee you are, if you have access to a company computer or handheld device, you can access our sales information, dispatching information, project management tools, and on and on. Production managers have to communicate concerns and improvement ideas to the field operations, sales communicates customer concerns and sales ideas, field technicians communicate technical questions and product concerns, all through the different systems that are all somehow tied together into a system we call our SEC Portal. In turn the Portal will collect and disseminate the questions, concerns and ideas to the relevant business units so that action can take place.
ReplyDeleteAgain, like Paul's comments, the ease of pulling this data does pose risks, however as technologies change and improve our systems change and improve as well. Our company's goal isn't to try to defend against other companies understanding and duplicating our technology, but instead to continuously be developing and improving systems to that we can move forward. By the time our competition copies one technology we have evolved to another.
I'm probably a bit late to this game. We've worked with many many different platforms for knowledge sharing: wikipages, blogs, an Inet, sharepoint, virtual communities of practice and more. None have been a stellar success. The challenge is to capture elicit information in a way that doesn't make work...if a project manager has to enter everything into a second system to share the information that they already built into a primary operating system then they simply won't do it. Further, the real value is in the tacit information. The approach we are now taking (and it we don't know yet if it works) is to try and capture who knows/cares about different subject matter and then connect those people together. In connecting the people, we're hopeful that we're going to be able to get to a sharing culture for that tacit knowledge.
ReplyDelete