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Knowing Knowledge

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Bombay, India. March 1989. A major brainstorming session in the office of the

VP, IS, of one of India's major pharmaceutical companies. We were reviewing

the extent of usage of the ambitious Executive Information System (EIS) that had

been implemented for the top management team. In spite of customized query and

reporting features, extensive training of all the stakeholders, and handholding

reminiscent of the treatment provided in the ICU of any major hospital, one

problem continued to be insurmountable: how does one make sure that the EIS gets

connected to the bedrock systems of the organisation and provides updates and

relevant data automatically to the management team.

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Manchester, UK. September 2004. At the fag end of an ambitious KM

implementation in one of Europe's major utility companies, one that has seen

an entire leadership team throwing away their box files and meeting folders and

using management cockpits to manage meetings, evaluate key vendors and access

and allocate people for projects throughout the system. While there is delight

at what has been achieved in a short period of time-the project is less than a

year old since initiation-and all praise for the bright consulting team who

have made this happen, there is concern that without becoming part of the larger

IS architecture of the organisation, the fledgling KM activity might lose

momentum and even come to a halt if the umbilical cord with the consulting team

were to be cut.

Ganesh

Natarajan

Unless large doses of training are provided throughout the process, every investment in process streamlining, technology or even leadership commitment and communications would go waste

Unless there is a well planned and executed effort to integrate KM

initiatives with the mainstream work and information flows of the organization,

knowledge management will remain a trophy item for a few CEOs and CKOs and will

not realise its true potential to transform decision making in business

organizations. Four years of doctoral research work in the area of knowledge

management maturity have given me some insight. KM maturity can be achieved only

by progression through a number of unavoidable stages: from the pre knowledge

stage to knowledge initiation through knowledge action to knowledge management

maturity. Second, there are many factors that could impede or facilitate the

organization's progress through these. Business process readiness is needed to

even start a sustainable KM effort, technology infrastructure needs to follow to

prepare the organisation for knowledge action and proactive leadership would

then be required to approach maturity. And through all these stages, a

continuous focus on building and moulding human behavior that is supportive of

the KM effort is a must-do for success. Third, and probably the most important

is that it is essential to recognize the interplay between the stages and the

factors and between the factors themselves.

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In both the cases mentioned here, any attempt to bring in a leadership fiat

to implement KM would fall flat unless the plan for integrating the KM system

both with the business process workflow and the other technology systems

available has been clearly laid out and communicated. And unless large doses of

training are provided throughout the process, every investment in process

streamlining, technology or even leadership commitment and communications would

go waste.

Ensuring that the process in the chosen area is elegant and devoid of non

value adding activities and looping, building applications through a

participative prototyping approach and ensuring adequate training and management

support is sometimes all it takes to get knowledge management off the ground,

sometimes in less than five to six weeks. Then comes the stage that both

organizations described here have reached-a period of doubt and "what

next"? This is where both the organisation and the consultants, if there

are any involved, will have to take steps to institutionalize what has already

been achieved and make the scope of the KM applications wider and deeper and an

integral part of the overall information architecture of the organisation.

The author is deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies

and chairman of Nasscom's SME Forum for Western India
Ganesh Natarajan

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