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Department wise
HR
• Attrition management through skill retention
which ensures that knowledge does not leave the company along with
the employees
• Better career management by self paced learning of new skills
• Move from organizational learning to a learning organization
• Competency mapping for job profiles for recruitment &
training needs
• Faster induction of new recruits
Finance
• Intellectual capital accounting
• Higher budget allocation on projects that enhance core competency
Production
• Process benchmarking
• Customer orientation
• Possible best practices
• Faster troubleshooting through self help knowledge bases
• Production cost reduction
Marketing
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Efficient supply chains
• Customer & Market insights
• Product knowledge
R&D
• Increased collaboration
• Prevents rework & duplication of efforts
• Trade secret management
• Patent portfolio management
• Prevent know-how losses
• Faster ‘idea to market’ times
IT
• IT competency management
• Better project management
• Cost savings by learning from previous projects
Strategic benefits
• More informed decision making
• Strengthening core capabilities
• Increased innovation
• Efficient external collaboration
In organizations where the management is sensitive to KM related
issues, knowledge strategies have been formulated. Strategic decisions
are driven by the knowledge strategy, ensuring that the company
is always in charge of organizational knowledge.
Outsourcing
Companies outsourcing non-core activities could be losing out
on acquiring & leveraging on knowledge that could have otherwise
been possible if these activities were to be undertaken inhouse.
For example customer capital (the value of an organization's relationships
with the people with whom it does business) is an important contributor
to the intellectual capital of the organization. For organizations
outsourcing customer support activities, the danger of losing out
on customer capital is a real threat as was the loss of vital process
know-how when IT system development was outsourced. These companies
have to include their outsourcing partners as part of their knowledge
management initiatives & ensure that knowledge is shared at
least on the customer & structural fronts.
Downsizing
One of the most used tools for cutting costs, downsizing reached
new heights in the IT industry during the economic downturn. Record
numbers of pink slips were issued so that the organization could
survive & come out of the red.
The loss of organizational knowledge when a substantial percentage
of its workforce is laid down is beyond repair. Normal attrition
can be managed through contracts that require employees to notify
the company a month before they intend to leave, so that they can
transfer critical knowledge & prepare incoming staff for the
position. Some HR departments undertake a structured exit interview
that tries to codify the tacit knowledge of the employee. These
steps do not work for large scale downsizing. KM in a firefighting
mode has been able to provide quantifiable benefits even in such
a situation.
M&A
Knowledge management helps in preparing a systematic methodology
for assessing the asset value of people, their knowledge and capability
during a merger or acquisition. Valuing & transferring intellectual
capital is a complex process during M&As considering the time
constraints involved. The focus of the management is on speed of
integration & lowering the cost of the overall exercise. Knowledge
transfer usually takes a backseat, considering the amount of time
required for such an operation. Job rotations, cross functional
teams formed by employees from both the companies, joint meetings,
a seamless collaboration (IT) infrastructure are some of the requirements
for extending the feeling of a community where knowledge is shared.
All of the above take time to accomplish, but provide returns by
preventing value erosion during M&As.
Telecommuting
A greater challenge than sharing knowledge across geographically
diverse locations is knowledge sharing between telecommuting workers.
The number of formal meetings could decrease, but the chances of
people meeting each other in the passage & exchanging tacit
knowledge is almost non existent. Research has shown that the strength
of relationships & hence the amount of interaction & knowledge
sharing between people decrease with time lapsed after their face
to face meeting.
While sharing of explicit knowledge could actually increase for
telecommuters (provided appropriate infrastructure exists &
change management issues have been taken care of), having a strategy
in place for enabling tacit knowledge sharing could result in increased
benefits (derived from KM) for the organization. In fact, there
is a school of thought that views telecommuting as a tool to further
KM in the company.
Business Intelligence & Competitor Intelligence reduces the
uncertainty due to the external environment in decision making.
Geographically dispersed offices do not create islands of knowledge
& costly mistakes are not repeated time & again. Every process
& department in the company stands to benefit from KM. Most
importantly, companies that manage their knowledge gain competitive
advantage over their competitors, who could be bogged down by information
overflow.
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