Much ado about knowledge management

BASED on experience and observation, one of the contributing factors that annoy people in the workplace and stifle their office’s smooth operation most of the time is the lack of know-how in a particular job or task. This occurs when the only person in the office with that know-how is on leave for a long period or has unexpectedly severed ties with the organization. Another hopeless situation that hampers the workplace’s operations and productivity occurs when the data needed for daily operations are disorganized, making them practically useless.

Without being mindful of it, there are institutions that have become comfortable with having knowledge just stay in their heads. It is regrettable that they are not able to share this knowledge in the organization. When key staff members leave, they risk losing important know-how. Unfortunately, they do not make the habit of documenting and replicating successful solutions, so they are bound to repeat mistakes and experience failures.

The absence of knowledge or its muddled condition results in unproductivity in any organization. If people, finances, organizational structures and the like are scientifically managed in the organization to contribute to institutional objectives, so is the need to manage knowledge. Scientifically, this is called “knowledge management” or “managing intellectual capital.”

Vincent Ribiere of the Institute for Knowledge and Innovation Southeast Asia defined knowledge management as “the process of capturing an institution’s collective expertise, knowledge and skills wherever they reside — in people’s heads, on paper or in data/information repositories — and distributing them to wherever they can help produce the biggest payoff/value to support the institution’s mission and goals.”

The “knowledge” in knowledge management sounds too broad, but, in reality, there are two kinds of knowledge found in our institutions: tacit and explicit.

Tacit knowledge is the information we all possess, gained from personal context and experience, and most of the time, it is individualor personal-based. Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is something logical, objective and structured. This knowledge is easy to articulate, document and share. It can be acquired via reason and application, something that can be securely stored and accessed through research reports, user manuals and the like.

In other words, knowledge management is a purposeful and systematic integration of people, their processes, and the technology they use that is geared toward collecting, developing, capturing and executing an organization’s creative infrastructure to meet institutional objectives. More and more institutions have become conscious of the need to practice knowledge management other than those in the business sector. In a world that has become so focused on efficiency, anything that precludes productivity, delays meeting deadlines, obstructs reaching peak performances and misses accomplishments is considered unacceptable. In any industry, this would mean losing a huge amount of the bottom line. Knowledge that is in total disarray yields not only inefficiency but also high costs.

Who would not want to be in an organization that manages their knowledge that produces the results intended by their organization? The keen practice of knowledge management is equal to expecting a result for better performance, better productivity, and quality that creates market value and social value.

On the other hand, it would not be enough to say that knowledge management simply means delivering the usual results expected of the organization’s normal or standard operations. It should be something that creates new value: innovation.

Peter Drucker was right when he discussed the importance of managing knowledge in his book “Management Challenges of the 21st Century.” He said “knowledge is the source of wealth. When applied to tasks, we already know it becomes productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes innovation.”

Innovation is one of the sublime ends of knowledge management. Sadly, much of the time spent on innovation for progress is caused by a lethargic approach to it, such as the lack of space and freedom, of motivational support, and so on, but it is largely attributed to disorganized knowledge due to a lack of knowledge management. This is tantamount to not realizing that “knowledge is the source of wealth” the main potent ingredient to innovate inside the institution.

If we apply knowledge management to an institution of higher learning, like a university, for instance, would it be presumptuous to say that being a university means being the creator and dispenser of knowledge through teaching and research? Are universities aware that, in their best application of knowledge management, they not only run their operations seamlessly but can also have a huge impact on the needs of society?

That is why there are some questions that need to be asked:

– Using all its scientific approaches and effort, has your university / organization clearly identified all the knowledge it possesses?

– To what extent does your university/organization clearly identify all the knowledge it does not possess yet but might need in the future?

– Exploring and making internal scanning, does your university /organization clearly identify its critical (valuable and at risk) knowledge?

Jesus Jay Miranda, OP, is an organization and leadership studies resource person. He teaches at the Graduate School of the University of Santo Tomas and the Department of Educational Leadership and Management of the Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, FSC-College of Education of De La Salle University in Manila.

jaymiranda.op@ust.edu.ph