What happens to knowledge in Organisations?

To better manage knowledge and get the most out of it, we should be clear about what happens to knowledge in Organisations.

This understanding is important, as it will help align the KM interventions much better.

Before getting into understanding what happens to knowledge in organisations, let me also mention that I am not covering all aspects of what all happens with respect to knowledge in organisations. Since Knowledge is all pervading and features in everything that an organisation does it is difficult to cover everything.

Let’s only pick a key aspect. This is related to what knowledge helps us do.?

Typically any organisation performs different types of task. If you attempt to make a list of it, it will be very long. This list will become larger and larger based on size and number of business areas of an organisation.

For the sake of simplicity, let me name a few tasks that are performed by organisations:

1. Marketing of their products, services
2. Selling the products and services. differs based on B2B or B2C product or whether a service
3. Logistics, warehousing with respect to physical products
4. Researching and designing new products and services
5. Client management?
6. Product manufacturing, manufacturing processes, factories
7. Procurement function
8. Performance management of employees
9. Accounts management etc…

I told you, the list is not small. If you are working in organisation, try to make a list of the tasks performed. If you are a KM practitioner, I insist that you make one.?

All the tasks have a well defined objective with clearly defined or definable goals and metrics. For example marketing of products, needs to have some indicator of success or completion. Along with this there will be approaches, processes to perform the tasks and tools that can be used. Then the obvious set of skill sets required to perform the tasks.?

Go through the above paragraph again.?

Lets reiterate >>> Tasks have objectives which defines what the task is supposed to do, along with the metrics. Then there are processes/approaches, tools and capabilities required to perform those tasks.?

Lets now analyse what are these processes/approaches, tools and capabilities.

Processes/Approaches: Well defined or loosely defined steps to do a specific task. In KM terms, Know-how/Procedural knowledge on what needs to be done to perform a task.?

Tools: Physical tools or software tools that perform these processes or assist in performing these processes. What are tools? They are know-how/procedural knowledge embedded into physical systems or softwares. Softwares can be dumb simple logic driven or AI enabled softwares, which can learn on their own.

Capabilities: Skills that employees need to have to perform the task. This can be both know-how and know-why, causal knowledge.?

Hope you are with me till. Now let us go back to the task again.?

The ability to perform tasks by organisations vary in a range, where one end can be inefficient and ineffective to the other end, which is efficient and effective.

You can map each of the task performed by your organisation in this range. You can map them based on guesstimate or through well researched industry norm.

For each task the definition of being efficient and effective vary since the tasks are different.?

When you map each of the task performed by your organisation in the range of ‘inefficient/ineffective to efficient/effective’, you will understand that the position depends on the level of institutional knowledge your organisation holds across the approaches/process, tools and capabilities.

Goal of any organisation is to ensure that they perform the tasks efficiently and effectively. An efficient and effective process ensures quality, lesser bugs, faster completion, lower cost, higher sales, newer products, more revenue. Essentially all those parameters that directly impacts success of an organisation.

Hence leadership has a direct interest in ensuring the tasks are efficient and effective, which also means ensuring the organisation has the relevant knowledge to perform the tasks. Or in other words, the relevant processes, tools and capabilities.?

This squarely aligns to what a Knowledge Management function is expected to do. Not HR, not process team, not L&D team or quality function, but KM function.?

If in your mind there are doubts on what would be the role of KM function, let me make it clear in the next post.

Look forward to your comments.