Successful Knowledge Management: The Importance of ...



Successful Knowledge Management: The Importance of Relationships

Invited Paper – Universidad Central de Chile

Peter A.C. Smith, President, The Leadership Alliance (TLA) Inc.

© Copyright TLA Inc. 2003

The potential of Knowledge Management (KM) to make a valuable contribution to optimal organizational performance is widely accepted. This article proposes that the success of a KM implementation, or indeed any significant change initiative, re-organization, or merger, will be critically dependent on the collaborative nature of the target community’s social fabric. This social fabric is comprised of relationships that are significantly influenced for better or worse by important non-rational people-factors that are ignored during the typical change initiative, and that are essential to a successful KM implementation (Smith & McLaughlin, 2003).

Like many organizational transformations, although KM is often proposed as a viable means to enhance enterprise performance, there is a growing concern that it all too often fails to deliver on its promise (Fahey & Prusak, 1998; Newell & Scarbrough, 1999; Storey & Barnett, 2000; Lindgren & Henfridsson, 2002). The new knowledge economy for both public and private sectors is founded on having ready and effective communications across collaborative partnership-networks of all kinds. It is not just “What you know” but rather “Who you know and how well you know them” that leads to viability and well-being. In other words, the extent to which public and private conversations can take place across an organization, including its customers and stakeholders, will be critical to the widespread sharing and generation of knowledge.

Each individual’s relationships with other individuals in an organization form that individual’s Social Capital (SC), and close relationships enhance SC. Furthermore, the SC of individuals aggregates into the SC of organizations. As Burt points out (Burt, 1992; pp. 52), a critical property of SC is that it creates opportunities for the transformation of Human Capital and Financial Capital into profit.

The formation of SC clearly depends on having positive individual attitudes and emotions with respect to forming and sustaining interpersonal relationships. The fundamental reason for sub-optimal KM performance in many cases is directly attributable to the ambivalent or negative non-rational people-factors that exist across the enterprise, since such factors deter formation of appropriate relationships and suppress knowledge creation (Stacey, 2001). Since most organizations operate under a facade of rationality (Smith & Sharma, 2002) these people-factors typically remain un-acknowledged or un-discussable, and enhancement of SC is effectively blocked.

In trying to most effectively implement KM it is tempting to begin by simply introducing a system-wide technological solution. When the predicted performance benefits are not achieved further technological upgrades are undertaken. However, although the centralization and codification of knowledge via storage/retrieval systems and the like are often useful, a big impact on KM and related performance should not be anticipated. This is because significant breakthroughs and competitive advantage typically come from the social exchange, exploitation, and augmentation of current tacit knowledge, rather than codified explicit knowledge based on past contexts.

Without an understanding of the “as is” state of the community’s inter-personal and collective relationships and their implications, plus an appreciation of how the community’s culture (people-factors) combine to influence these relationships, technological approaches are almost certainly doomed to failure. Indeed, a purely technological solution may make matters worse by creating a “credibility black hole” for future interventions.

Smith and McLaughlin (2003) describe in detail a number of practical remedial initiatives that may be undertaken to help “get the people factors right” in trying to ensure successful KM implementation. These initiatives relate to three systemic performance drivers: Focus being a clear “who, what, where, when and why” of the performance envisaged; Capability being the wherewithal to support Focus; and Will being the intent to perform Focus given the status of Capability. There are typically serious endemic barriers to developing and sustaining people-factors in most organizations, whereby Capability is usually explicitly over-developed; Focus is under-developed; and to all intents and purposes, Will is not dealt with at all. This does not mean that Focus or Will in the employee community is necessarily weak. On the contrary, Capability is exerted through “overt and covert control over emotional displays” (Putnam & Mumby, 1993; pp. 37), with an implicit effect on Will. These authors talk of “emotional labour” being expended in this effort (ibid; pp. 37) that for example will produce relationships based on compliance rather than the interest and commitment essential to successful KM.

Initiatives recommended by Smith and McLaughlin (2003) to “get the people factors right” as part of a convincing workforce development effort include:

□ community-wide collaborative development of a Vision for the KM system since this provides excellent Focus and Will for relationship building based on a sharing of the individual yearnings of all employees

□ an appreciation of the physiological needs of individual employees based on Maslow’s theory (Maslow, 1943) that will enhance the Will to form relationships via the need for belongingness, esteem, and striving to be the best a person can be

□ improving the way people meet (and form relationships) by helping them become sensitized to the semiconscious and unconscious impulses that operate as individuals and groups struggle to come together. Concerns such as these may be explored through the discipline of group dynamics (most notably psychoanalysis, field and systems theories, and Gestalt)

□ actioning the concept of a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). This notion involves Action Learning based workshops, plus post-workshop Communities of Practice (Saint-Onge & Wallace, 2003), that populate an individual’s PKMS with appropriate cognitive, affective and resource related factors

□ fostering voluntary Communities of Practice (Saint-Onge & Wallace, 2003). These offer a powerful framework for the natural development of Focus, Will and Capability, and promote formation of appropriate relationships based on conversations and activities of interdependent people in complex responsive processes (Stacey, 2001)

The work of Smith and McLaughlin (2003) has now been extended, and based on new research it is further asserted that KM systems may be made more effective by first ensuring that they are based on a sound social-network structure, together with an understanding of how the quality of collaborative relationships and the influence of opinion leaders may be facilitated.

Special analytical techniques are required to visualise the complexities of how people communicate in social networks. When mapped “real” communications channels are often seen to be distributed unevenly, since dense clusters tend to form around established relationships. The strong ties formed in these clusters have many benefits, but it is also critical to have “weaker” links between clusters to ensure the quick flow across the community of new ideas, and the timely awareness of new opportunities and challenges. For this reason, identification of weak ties, and knowledge of how to form and leverage them, is an important aspect of any KM implementation or optimization effort. The special analytical techniques noted above are particularly necessary for pinpointing these weaker links, since such ties are often informal, having little obvious relationship to the official organisational-communications design.

Because of the importance of social network structure to the success of KM, an organization should develop an appreciation of, and the means to carry out, social network analysis (Wasserman & Faust, 1997), plus the expertise to interpret the emergent social and communication patterns (Cross & Prusak, 2002). In this way the organization’s networks of relationships may be visualized and compared to optimal patterns e.g. “small world” networks (Buchanan, M., 2002), and contextual remedial interventions undertaken as necessary.

References

Buchanan, M. (2002), “Nexus”, Norton, New York

Burt, R.S. (1992), “The Social Structure of Competition”, in Nohria, N., Eccles, R.G. (Eds) “Networks and Organizations”, Harvard Business School Press, Boston

Cross, R., Prusak, L. (2002), “The People That Make Organizations Stop – Or Go”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 80, No. 6

Fahey, L., Prusak, L. (1988), “The Eleven Deadliest Sins Of Knowledge Management”, California Management Review, Vol. 40, No. 3

Lindgren, R., Henfridsson, O. (2002), “Using Competence Systems: Adoption Barriers And Design Suggestions”, Journal Of Information & Knowledge Management, Vol. 5, No. 2

Maslow, A. (1943), “Theory Of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review, Vol. 50

Newell, S., Scarbrough, H., Swan, J., Hislop, D. (1999), “Intranets And Knowledge Management: Complex Processes And Ironic Outcomes”, Proceedings 32nd Hawaii International Conference On Systems Sciences

Putnam, L.L., Mumby, D.K. (1993), “Organizations, Emotion And The Myth of Rationality”, in S. Fineman (Ed.), “Emotion In Organizations”, Sage Publications, London; pp. 36-57

Saint-Onge, H., Wallace, D. (2003), “Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage”, Butterworth-Heinemann, New York

Smith, P.A.C., Sharma, M. (2002), “Rationalizing The Promotion Of Non-Rational Behaviors In Organizations”, The Learning Organization, Vol. 9, No. 5

Smith, P.A.C., McLaughlin, M. (2003), “Succeeding With Knowledge Management: Getting The People-Factors Right”, Proceedings 6th World Congress on Intellectual Capital & Innovation January 15-17, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

Stacey, R.D. (2001), “Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations”, Routledge, London

Storey, J., Barnett, E. (2000), “Knowledge Management Initiatives: Learning From Failure”, Journal Of Knowledge Management, Vol. 4, No. 2

Wasserman, S., Faust, K. (1997), “Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download