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Balanced Scorecard
Program Management
China
Knowledge Management
The Investor's Edge
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Key Benefits
- Knowledge Retention
- Increased Collaboration
- Infrastructure for Problem Solving
Components
- Collect, Classify, Catalog the
Information
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- In assessing why other companies' Knowledge Management (KM) systems
fail, we've found one common thread... Many people assume
that data and information
are equivalent terms. We know the difference.. from a
lot of bad experience....
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- An Illustration
- Once upon a time... (or long, long
ago....)
- When we were in college, we bought a bunch of books. For most
of the semester, they were strewn around the apartment in odd piles,
and it looked like we had everything we needed to produce excellent
grades. Unfortunately, this didn't prove to be the case... Just
because the data was in the books didn't mean that we could apply it
to a task. It was just data, not anything useful.
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- (We seemed to learn this lesson best when undergoing an All-Nighter
in preparation for a test. And because we lacked both sufficient
maturity and any form of Knowledge Management infrastructure, we
re-learned this lesson each and every semester.)
Knowledge Collaboration
One of the major problems facing companies with either knowledge
"domain" experts or high turn-over is a lack of desire to share
information.
For the domain experts, "knowledge is power". Your key
Sales Rep or your Chief Scientist depends on his or her knowledge to acquire
and retain customers, develop patents, or merely acquire prestige as a
"guru".
With high turn-over, employees are hesitant to share information when that
intellectual capital may exit through the door with a departing co-worker.
So how do you develop a collaborative atmosphere?
Our staff can design a tailored set of incentives that will appropriately reward
your people for sharing knowledge. Incentives can take many forms, including the obvious ones of money
and recognition. We understand that every organization has its unique
motivational factors, and we'll work to match the incentives to the people,
rather than the other way around. The result will be an environment
where people proactively share information, and generate superior solutions to
business problems.
As a result of knowledge sharing, you'll end up with
teamwork rather than just individual contributions. The term "Synergy"
will become a practical reality, and instead of incremental efficiency growth,
you'll begin to observe exponential increase in performance.
Isn't that what you want?
Knowledge Management Infrastructure
We'd like to tell you that you can accomplish miracles by merely setting up
a Knowledge Management database. Unfortunately, just like owning a car, you just don't buy
it, you have to maintain it. The goal with Knowledge Management is to
keep the information fresh, and provide a conduit for collecting and
disseminating new information.
Another Illustration
When one of us was a Manufacturing Engineer, building a radar system at
Texas Instruments, there was a fine old lady who worked on the assembly
line. Her major job was to "tweak" the potentiometers on a
control board, and she did her job to perfection. In a staffing cutback,
she was offered the opportunity for "early retirement", and took
it. When she left, we immediately began to have problems with our
systems passing QA testing. No matter what we tried, our production line
was dead in the water. We brought in some expensive engineering
consultants, but all they proved was that we were building the control board
to specifications.
In a fit of desperation, we asked the ex-employee to return and help us
resolve the production problem. She watched our best technician assemble
the board, and started laughing. She said, "He's turning the pot
the wrong direction!"
You see, it turns out that the drawing was incorrect, but she didn't worry
about it because she knew how to turn out a control board that worked....
Unfortunately, we lost over $200,000 in payments, and darn near lost the next
contract with our customer... because we hadn't installed the proper processes
to capture her knowledge before she retired.
A bunch of engineering drawings is just data... When you have the
infrastructure and processes to capture data, refine it and apply it you
generate information.
So, How Can We Help?
We'll design the technical and process infrastructure required to maintain your
knowledge. More importantly, we'll work with you to define the skill
sets required to manage your knowledge and make it available to your team
members. We can advise you with respect to training and getting your team to effectively integrate Knowledge Management into their
daily processes.
The result? Focused knowledge, applied to specific problems, and a
maintainable, synergistic work environment.
Are you ready to start?
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