Managing Knowledge - Aligning with what happens in Organisations

To better appreciate and manage knowledge, one needs to understand the difference between knowledge and knowledge management. Knowledge is all pervading in an organisation. Anything and everything that an organisation does is by leveraging the knowledge it has.

Knowledge is the state of knowing. Knowing how to do, why to do and what is the impact of when it is done. In an organisation knowledge is everywhere. It is in the processes, in the machines, with the employees.

Knowledge Management is the management practice that has evolved to help organisations manage knowledge. The practice becomes more effective as our understanding of knowledge as a concept improves. 

What I am saying can be better understood with a comparison.

Consider human body and healthcare. We are always in the process of understanding the human body. Better understanding of the human body is helping us with evolving more effective healthcare solutions. 

Both this aspects should be aligned, I meant the concept and how it is managed. In the case of Knowledge, it should be understood from an organisational perspective and management of the same planned accordingly.

Let me share some key aspects to be considered with respect to knowledge, which will enable us in better planning of it.

How knowledge is present

• Knowledge in organisations are in the following form: Embedded, Embrained, Encultured, Encoded, Embodied
• Knowledge can help in the following: Perform an action (Know how), Understand an action and its impact (Know why)
• Knowledge nature: Production knowledge, Logistics knowledge, Sales Knowledge, Marketing knowledge, Strategy knowledge, Employee management knowledge etc

Procedural knowledge and Causal Knowledge

• Procedural knowledge helps in performing a work
• Causal knowledge helps reason about any work done, any phenomenon, challenges etc
• Combination of procedural and causal knowledge is important.
• Causal knowledge helps in faster innovation and effectiveness
• Procedural knowledge helps in efficiency

Asymmetric distribution of knowledge

• Knowledge gets unevenly distributed across the organisation and tends to be locked in different places 
• Groups working on the same kind of work may have different levels of knowledge due to this
• Same activity may be done in different ways due to knowledge getting locked in different places

Knowledge stagnation

• Knowledge does not grow on its own
• Focused effort required to grow new knowledge or acquire knowledge
• If not grown properly organization will end up using the same type of knowledge again and again

Loss of Knowledge

• If not properly protected, organization will lose out the knowledge that it has
• This can happen when employees leave the organization or when they are moved around in the organization

Tacit, Explicit knowledge and Codification

• The percentage of tacit:explicit varies based on the nature of work done by organisation. More complex work means higher percentage of tacit
• Most of the critical knowledge cannot be easily codified

Simple, complicated and complex work

• Know how related to simple, complicated work can be documented
• For complex work, strategy related to sharing, collaboration and systematic, regular codification is required

Knowledge institutionalisation

• Knowledge resides with individuals, processes and tools
• Knowledge needs to be institutionalised for it to be leveraged across the organisation

Utilization of existing knowledge

• Existing Knowledge in the form of documents, learnings on its own does not get used by organization and its employees
• Employees tend to leverage only the knowledge that they have
• Employees tend to reach out to their peer group for help with respect to work      

Continuous improvement

• Involves the process of identify best practices, new learning, and institutionalisation of the same as employee skills, process improvement and tool improvement

New Knowledge

• Innovation is nothing but new knowledge (Quantum varies)
• New Knowledge can be created through systematic processes and support systems
• If new knowledge creation is not properly managed, knowledge creation will happen in adhoc manner

The above are some key aspects of knowledge that needs to be considered while planning KM interventions. There are many more and please consider those also.