| Rules of Good Knowledge Management: People and Collaboration First |
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As a result, knowledge management (KM) is often part of a company’s quality management (QM) efforts – with dramatic consequences for those individuals whose data and information are to be managed: If KM is carried out with a QM approach, employees are often obliged to fill in endless fields and forms and enter seemingly arbitrary metadata – as dictated by ‘the system’. Instead of reflecting the meaning and significance that a given set of information has to the employee, the defined workflows are often mainly committed to the technological needs of the present QM system, and/or replicate rigid hierarchies within the institution. This ‘dictate of the system’ also reveals a popular misunderstanding of the benefits of knowledge management: The key impetus for companies to implement a KM strategy is often the fear of losing knowledge if an employee becomes ill or even leaves the company. But KM systems which are designed with the intention to extract knowledge from employees are often not well accepted: Implicitly, they give rise to the fear among employees that they might be made redundant once they have shared all their wisdom with the company. Knowledge management that is done correctly does not aim to extract wisdom: It aims to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration among the members of a given group, be it employees, managers or researchers. Rather than forcing people to adapt to the system’s standards, a good KM system is centred around the needs, preferences and the structure of knowledge the people bring in. Instead of “knowledge is power”, the organisational culture of the future thus has to switch to “sharing is power”. Next article in this section: |
For well over a decade, ‘knowledge management’ has been one of the buzzwords of the industry. But take a closer look at the way that knowledge management has been put into practice, and you will find that companies and institutions often resort to the traditional methods of the trade when it comes to an actual implementation.