Why 'Managing Knowledge' is a revolutionary idea!

Yes, you read it right! ‘Managing knowledge’ or the more popular term ‘Knowledge Management’ is a revolutionary idea. An idea that has the potential to help organizations make radical jump in its performance parameters to levels which it seemed unachievable. A revolutionary idea is something that can have a drastic and far reaching impact on ways of thinking and behaving. An idea becomes revolutionary, when it has the ability to bring a change to something that, it’s before and after may not have any resemblance.

Managing knowledge is not a new idea. It is something we have been doing involuntarily. The progress that we made and are making as human kind can be traced to our ability to apply knowledge and grow new knowledge. The KM movement over the past few decades, helped organizations appreciate the importance of formal management of knowledge and led to many organizations forming KM function. However we are yet to realize the huge benefits managing knowledge can bring to the organizations.

As a matter of fact, Our ability to learn from our experience, our mistakes, create new insights/knowledge, inculcate and improve as a result is key to our progress. What has been missing though, was the realisation of how powerful ‘managing knowledge’ is and availability of approaches to managing knowledge that can bring radical changes.

What makes managing Knowledge, a revolutionary idea.

Compare two organizations, both into project management. One organization which has just got into Project Management and another which has managed more than 50 projects. Invariably the organization which has managed more than 50 projects will be more efficient with respect to project management as its level of knowledge on how to manage projects is much larger. This difference in knowledge will reflect in the knowledge level of the employees, the processes and tools used. This improvement can be attributed to a large to a cycle of knowledge creation/acquisition, inculcation and application that keeps happening in organizations.

For the sake of discussion, let us call this process which involves knowledge creation/acquisition, inculcation of knowledge into the process, tools and employees skills and the application of the same as ‘improvement process’.

Let us analyse in simple terms how the ‘improvement process’ can have drastic impact.

1. When an activity is performed multiple times, we naturally improve through an involuntary knowledge creation/acquisition, inculcation and application process. This is ‘improvement process’ in action. 
2. In organizations also improvement process happens. In almost all cases, this is involuntary and as the size of the teams increases the ‘improvement process’ kind of stagnates, unless deliberately managed.
3. In organizations many teams perform the improvement process independent of each other and as a result huge variation happens in the way that any task gets performed. We can observe islands of good performance and bad performance as a result.
4. A similar variation can be seen between organizations on how they perform the improvement process. This variation has a direct correlation to the ability to perform the improvement process
5. The improvement process can be applied across any area of working/focus of an organization. The areas can be revenue growth, quality, cost savings, productivity etc.
6. An organization, with a well defined approaches to generate new knowledge from learning, inculcate those learning and apply the learning across the organizations, can fast track growth in key areas very fast. It will not only help spike efficiency, but also facilitate the effectiveness jumps. Most organizations fail at the effectiveness jump due to their inability to let go deep rooted assumptions.

The concepts related to improvement process seems simple and intuitive, however organizations are not practising this in totality. The above mentioned improvement process is something that is not new. It has been discussed and researched extensively as part of concepts related to learning organizations, continuous improvement, as well as to some extent in re-engineering. Some organizations have Process team, who focus on ensuring embedding the learning into the processes, however they are weak in creation/acquisition of knowledge.

How does ‘improvement process’ differs from the legacy Knowledge Management approaches

Legacy knowledge management fails in helping achieve drastic improvement in organizational performance due to two reasons. It is employee focused and adopts a reactive approach to reuse of knowledge. Traditional KM focuses on the information and knowledge needs of employees by creating structured knowledge bases and mature social networks. This they do in a reactive manner, where once the repositories are created, it is left to the employee’s decision, whether to reuse or not. This brings down the scope of reuse as well as the overall productivity of employees. The employee focused approach has only direct impact on employee productivity and finds it difficult to create any direct impact on other organizational success factors like revenue, cost etc.

Improvement process related interventions focus on tasks and considers employees as a medium to improve the ways tasks are performed. Employees play a critical role in this approach and through them knowledge gets created. However the knowledge is then not left for employees to reuse it, but there are well defined processes to ensure the new knowledge, based on its merit gets embedded into the way tasks are performed. These improvement processes are performed in cycles, with involvement of employees who perform the tasks, process teams and KM teams. Improvement process are a mix of systematic knowledge creation/acquisition (Learning) and embedding of the learning.

Managing knowledge and managing organizations: A new approach to organizations get managed

To successfully practice ‘improvement process’, the knowledge management function will have to take a more central role in the organization. Below suggested alignment enables organizations to give more focus on its critical resource and also enable the approach to systematic improvement.

As can be seen for effectively performing ‘Improvement process’, there may be a need to bring the KM function into the center stage with functions like Tools team, Process management team being part of it or working closely with it. This kind of structuring will help organizations give more importance to the knowledge it has and enable interventions that will be focused on improving maturity in the way tasks are performed.

This is definitely not going to be easy, as it is just not change management. This kind of proposal challenges the set pattern of working and can also result in fight for fiefdoms. However the potentials possible by making managing knowledge as the key is unprecedented. The benefits far outweigh the challenges one may face.

Making an organization flexible, agile and innovative at the same time is the holy grail that many leaders are chasing. Managing knowledge has this potential to help organizations be like that. However managing knowledge is a business idea and not a political idea. Hence unlike political ideas, which gets applied in many cases through violent ways, it will take a few big success stories for it to catch like wild fire. We are though not far away from this, as technology is enabling us to manage these complex processes.