The economy is constantly changing, from agriculture, to manufacturing, to services, and, now, to a knowledge base. Each stage offers its unique challenges for management.
Unsurprisingly, then, companies today are focusing increasingly on knowledge management – on the effort to capture and exploit the store of information, experience, and learning that is forever accumulating in their organizations.
Unfortunately, many of these efforts are falling prey to simplistic approaches and common managerial errors, according to this item in a recent issue of the WSJ. These range from thoughtless attempts to reduce knowledge to database-storable format, to ill-considered efforts to expand successful pilot programs into parts of the organization where the preconditions for that success don’t exist. Interestingly, one main cause of failure is identified as a tendency of the initiating team to create false barriers to entry for those who were intended to be the main participants in the system.
Please do link over to the referenced item; it is worth reading, and includes case studies of three examples of promising, but poorly executed, knowledge-management programs. One thing I think you may note, that was not identified in the article, is the top-down nature of most of the initiatives it examines.
This is a shortcoming of many management initiatives. Despite the very recognition of the value of organizationally vital knowledge in the staff that such programs correctly assume, managers seem not to consider that the staff may also be the best source for determining how to organize and exploit it.
But whether a promising approach arises from management or within the organization, its value is best tested and its dissemination best accomplished through market-based management techniques. Don’t take every initiative yourself. If you value the knowledge inherent in your organization, then give it some respect, as well; it will be repaid in kind.
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Hi, Jim,
Thanks for strongly suggesting the WSJ article; the did a good job of digging into each situation.
It would sure seem as if any knowledge management undertaking would, by definition, need to fully include staff across the company. In fact, as you are well aware, the lower you go in an organization, the more people know how things really work. Now that’s knowledge!
One imagines, too, of deadline-driven scenarios that promise a delivery date and then deliver something unworkable because the breadth and depth of the population weren’t included (too time-consuming).
Perhaps the KM examples are just one more indication of demanding too much, too fast, and without a thoughtful overseer to guide the endeavor.
Thanks, Steve, for your comments. I think you’re right, of course, that knowledge management programs should involve staff across the company. Unfortunately, as you know, as the WSJ article shows, and as I’ve seen too many times, they often don’t. It appears to me that they usually don’t.
I also agree that “a thoughtful overseer” is a vital aid to a successful process. Many of these programs are, or become, mere leaps onto the bandwagon, and sorely need such an advisor to save them landing short or, in some cases, even from landing in the bandwagon!
Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful and thought-provoking observations.