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| One of the prime drivers of a successful Knowledge Management in a company is how it manages and allocates its resources to the project. While infrastructural and technological resources are important to enable a smooth functioning of the KM activities, resource building takes a steep rise in importance where bringing together a team is concerned. The current article hence stresses more on the human resource in Knowledge Management project in a company than its other resources. The selection and structure of the team handling Knowledge Management in the company is vital to its success. The right mix of executives from various business functions is necessary to enable a balanced growth in all the areas of the organization. However this is marred by the basic and popular misconception among companies implementing Knowledge Management to think of it as technology project. This perspective reflects poorly on its resource allocation and consequently its execution and effectiveness. Technology is important to a Knowledge Management project only to the extent that it helps to enable the protocols and procedures that are planned to bring about knowledge sharing, transfer and growth. One of the benefits of KM is efficient management internal and external relationships of the company and technology helps in bringing closer people who are far away. It also helps in indexing and archiving of important documents and ‘knowledge assets’ for their easy retrieval and for this, technology infrastructure is imminent. However to dub Knowledge Management as a technology project is to kill the project even before it starts! KM – permanent; KM project – temporaryOne more thing that has to be understood about Knowledge Management projects for the purpose of resource allocation is that while the managing of knowledge is permanent and never-ending effort, the ‘Knowledge Management Project’ is and (should be) temporary. The difference between the two is while the former indicates the organizational culture and in-built nature of its doing business, the latter is a process to bring the company towards this attitude of managing knowledge. Having the Knowledge Management project to run permanently would mean that the company employees and business units by themselves never becomes self-reliant at managing knowledge. It also would give rise to the wrong notion that business as it is usually done and knowledge sharing/ creating/ capture are two mutually exclusive ideas!
The CKO...The CKO need not be technically proficient, though it helps if he or she is aware of technological capabilities so that the he can make realistic expectations and assumptions from technology and not get scared at the prospect of building a Knowledge Management System. The champion of the project, the CKO has a quite a few things to attend to. First of all he has to be aware and well researched in terms of company’s existing intellectual assets. After discussing with his core team, he has to draft a KM roadmap and policies in which he has to decide which knowledge assets to build, which to maintain and which ones to scrap. The CKO should be good at motivating individual team members and keeping them aware of the collective vision. He has to keep an eye on the progress of KM initiatives of different departments. The CKO is the one who pioneers the KM effort and liasons with the CEO and his executive office to ensure their commitment, support and participation, oversee budgeting and its sanctions. He should act as the captain of the KM ship and coordinate work between the individual departments and the IT/ human resource departments. The CKO should be something of an entrepreneur, technologist, consultant and environmentalist1. ...And his menThe CKO is backed by a core team that facilitates the execution and planning of the project. This team should include representatives from each business unit/ product line, representatives from Human Resources and those from Information Technology departments. The reasoning behind the mix is such: the business unit representatives can bring to table their very own set of problems and opportunities in managing knowledge in their area of operation, they can relate and communicate to their departments more effectively. The human resources and information technology representatives act as the support structure to the rest of the team. The IT department is obviously required to help crystallize the ideas generated by the group using its available technological infrastructure and resources and seek means to develop the best possible solutions in shortest possible time. Human Resources is needed to offer the group services such as training, skill mapping, formulating policies, carrying out surveys etc. With the probable exception of IT and Human Resources representatives, all the other members of the Knowledge Management core team should be put full time on the project. In other words, no one should have his or her usual business tasks to fulfill AND carry out his/her Knowledge Management team member role. This ensures that due attention is paid to the KM project and the members are rescued from the almost certain fate of ‘The urgent taking precedence over the important’. The urgent in this case is any current business task that is most likely to take precedence and most of the team member’s time from the important – the Knowledge Management project. Once again, it is the prime objective of any KM project to ensure that the knowledge nurturing culture is permeated in the fabric of the organization after which the structure of the core team will dissolve and the members go back to their departmental responsibilities. However till then, the team has to remain concentrated on the task at hand. The business unit representatives that are selected/ volunteered from each department have themselves to be enthusiastic and convinced about the idea of building organizational knowledge. They may not be the heads of the department; the head of the unit may have other ‘urgent’ business to handle. The team members should be able to see value for their company as a whole, for their individual businesses and for the individual employee working in their department who thanks to a successful initiation in managing knowledge will be able to devise better products, answer customer queries faster, find information faster and help colleagues facing problems such as his with his gained expertise. Their task is to dissipate the zeal of knowledge sharing among his department, keep an eye on existing knowledge communities and with the help of the core team develop them to perform better. He or she will be principally responsible to identify and motivate the ‘knowledge champions’ – people in the company who are experts in their respective domains and also Rudis2 so that they can be the ones who are mentioned in the company’s online directory of knowledge so that people from other business units or branches can seek them for help on specific topics. He or she will be responsible to conduct discussions/ talks among his/her department and brief everybody about the company’s KM initiatives and the value that it gives to sharing/ capture/re-use of knowledge. The human resource and IT departments as is mentioned above provide support roles with their respective functions. Specifically they help the Knowledge Management project in the following tasks: Information Technology: Perhaps the very reason that technology is the last step towards
bringing an idea to fulfillment and that it is the most tangible(sic)
process, the function invites so much attention (most of it though
is due towards strategic and operational planning). Nevertheless,
the information technology function helps the Knowledge Management
project come to life by its following functions: Human Resources Having human interactions and employee development as a forte
helps the human resource department be a valuable support system
for the Knowledge Management project in an organization. The tasks
that are specifically laid out for the HR department include among
others:
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2 Source: Thomas Stewart in Intellectual Capital, The New Wealth
of Organizations - Rudis is a term used to describe those people
in organizations “..who are not key people for any one product
line, but had important expertise in skills and technology that
all the product lines depend on. Rudis were named by Patricia Seeman
when she worked at Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffman-LaRoche.
As a part of a project....she asked people what they knew and what
they did, she encountered several – the first was a man named
Rudi – who answered simply, 'I sort of help people out' ”
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