Knowledge Management Codification At My Current Environment

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Knowledge is very difficult to manage because it lives in people’s heads and managing it is not really easy. The people who are responsible for managing the knowledge or who are tasked with making sure that knowledge flows easily within organisations usually focuses on establishing an environment in which people or employees are encouraged to share what they know, employees are encouraged to learn from those who know and use the knowledge they have for the benefit of the organisation, and the organisation’s customers (Servin, 2005:3). This leads us to the concept of Knowledge management. So if knowledge resides in people’s heads. How do organisations make sure that valuable knowledge and expertise is not lost when experienced employees’ moves on or retires? Organisations of all kinds, as discussed by Mentzas (2004:3-30) in his paper: "A STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR LEVERAGING KNOWLEDGE ASSETS", have realized that knowledge is the only way for them to remain competitive in their respective industries. So if knowledge is that important to the organisation, it needs to be managed. Organisations needs to identify this key knowledge and find or develop a comprehensive understanding of knowledge strategies, processes and tools for the creation, transfer and deployment of this knowledge. So Knowledge management has become a very important part of many successful organisations. Knowledge management, like Knowledge has been well defined in many research papers.

Knowledge management can be defined as "the conscious practice or process of systematically identifying, capturing, and leveraging knowledge resources to help firms to compete more effectively" (Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney, 1999:106-116). Knowledge management is more concerned with ways in which knowledge is created, shared and used in organisations. "It is not about setting up a new department or getting in a new computer system, It is about making small changes to the way everyone in the organisation works" (Servin, 2005:3).

Every company that invest in a knowledge management initiative or strategy expects to reap the rewards of that initiative but the problem is that the results are not always guaranteed. It is very important for organisations to design and implement a knowledge management initiative in such a way that it can result in higher agent productivity as well as "shorter call times, greater self service customer satisfaction, and reduced costs thanks to call deflection". So in a way, getting it right the first time, getting the design and implementation right will almost ensure the success of the initiative. On the other hand, "a poorly designed and implemented knowledge management system can drive up call time, annoy customers (leading them to abandon self service), and increase agent frustration (due to the distraction of too many tools on agents desktops). To succeed, knowledge management initiatives require well thought out strategies that align closely with the needs of contact centre agents and self-service customers" (Oracle, 2011:1). Organisations use different approaches to implement Knowledge management, but there are two essential strategies to knowledge management: the Codification strategy and the personalisation Strategy approach (Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney, 1999:106-116).

Codification strategy.

The main objective of a codification strategy is to collect, codify, and distribute information. It requires the availability of information technology. The main benefit of this strategy is the ability to re-use the knowledge at any given time (Ribière & Román, 2011: 549). "Some large consulting companies, such as Anderson consulting and Ernst & Young, have pursued a codification strategy. Over the last five years, they have developed elaborate ways to codify, store and reuse knowledge. Knowledge is codified using a "people-to-documents" approach: it is extracted from the person who developed it, made independent of that person, and reused for various purpose" (Hansen et al., 1999: 106-110). This result in what we call Explicit Knowledge.

Mentzas (2004:3-30) defines Explicit knowledge as "knowledge that has been articulated in formal language and which can be easily transmitted among individuals. It can be expressed in scientific formulae, codified procedures or a variety of other forms. It consists of three components: a language, information and a carrier. The language is used to express and code knowledge. Information is coded externalised knowledge. It is potential knowledge, which is realised when information is combined with context and experience of humans to form new tacit knowledge. The carrier is capable to incorporate coded knowledge and to store, preserve and transport knowledge through space and time independent of its human creators". Codification of knowledge is actually trying to make some of the tacit knowledge more explicit. The objective of codifying the knowledge is to help organisations to re-use some of the existing knowledge by extracting it from the heads of the knowledge bearers and making it available to all those who might need it. All these is done that even if the bearer leaves the organisation or in the knowledge bearer’s absence, someone can be able to replicate it and in so doing, achieve the same result.

Technology is one of the key factors in implementing successful codification of knowledge. This is supported by Sanghani (2009: 1 -15). In his paper he asserts that "proper knowledge management is unthinkable without appropriate technology". He further states that all managers need the availability of information systems in order to implement successful knowledge management initiative. Most organisations invest heavily in technology to make sure that all the relevant information or knowledge is saved. The reason for using technology in knowledge management is to create a connected environment for knowledge exchange. This environment acts as the technical characterization of the corporate memory. The environment, in particular, must make the exchange and transformation from tacit to explicit knowledge easy and possible. The ability to move that tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is a very critical step in transforming individual knowledge into organisational knowledge (Apostolou et al., 2000:1 - 20). Choo (2003:6), in his paper "Perspectives on Managing Knowledge in Organizations" highlights some principles that he says were first were first mentioned by Davenport and Prusak (1998) that should guide the codification of organizational knowledge.

"Managers must decide what business goals the codified knowledge will serve".

"Managers must be able to identify knowledge existing in various forms appropriate to reaching these goals".

"Knowledge managers must evaluate knowledge for usefulness and appropriateness for codification".

"Codifiers must identify an appropriate medium for codification and distribution".

Knowledge Management (Codification) at my current Environment.

Just to give a little background of my work environment, I am working for one of the big 4 banks in South Africa. I am working in the software development department. We have got a very good Knowledge management strategy. There is a Wiki that every developer has to contribute to after every piece of work that he adds to the team. Every now and then developer’s gets assigned to different projects and once you complete your project, you have to develop a document detailing everything that you covered in your project. After every project you do a full presentation to the whole team about the technologies you used, the database tables that you used, the class diagrams, and UML diagrams of your project. After the presentation the information is deposited into our wiki page where every developer who has got an interest in that project can go and retrieve the information at anytime. We have to give client support on all the softwares that we release so all developers who are working on client support needs to have access to that information. The wiki page is also used for all the new guys who are joining the team. The senior developers prepares documents on how to get started, using the wiki only, a new guy can setup his working environment without asking a lot of questions or disturbing anyone. All the basic information will be on the wiki. The wiki again contains all the information about the project that our bank is running. Any employee who has got access can browse and see what other teams are up to or working on. So sometimes by searching the wiki, you can find some useful information about a similar project to the one you are working on, that another member from a different team has worked on. The wiki has so far saved the bank a lot of time and in turn a lot of money. Most of our software specifications are found on the wiki. This also makes our lives easy if we want to re-write our system. The availability of such systems within organisation is very essential as shown in a study by Hansen et al., (1999:107-111), where they analysed how Ernst and Young and Anderson consulting codifies their knowledge.

Fig 1 shows the kind of knowledge that can be gained by searching our wiki page. So, anyone who would want to work on a thesis submission project can just look at the figure/diagram and will immediately understand the flow of events. It is very important that organisations stores these kind of information because diagrams like the one in fig 1 will be there long after the creator has left the company.

Fig 1: Activity diagram for a thesis submission.

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Personalisation Strategy.

Not all the knowledge can be shared by simply storing it in information systems or by documenting it. Some knowledge can only be gained by doing the actual work. You need the person who possesses that knowledge to sit with you and show you step by step what to do in order to achieve the results. Through mentoring can this be realized? Mentoring is probably one of the most effective ways that people can share their experiences. And when it works, it develops two for the price of one. Alred, Garvey and Smith (1998:1 - 4) in their mentoring Pocketbook gave a very good and interesting definition of mentorship:

"Mentoring is a process in which a more skilled or more experienced person, serving as a role model, teaches, sponsors, encourages, counsels and befriends a less skilled or less experienced person for the purpose of promoting the latter’s professional and/or personal development. Mentoring functions are carried out within the context of an ongoing, supportive relationship between the mentor and mentee." So mentoring can help in this kind of knowledge management strategy

This kind of knowledge is called tacit knowledge in Literature. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that people only lives in the bearer’s heads. "It is much less concrete than explicit knowledge. It is more of an "unspoken understanding" about something, knowledge that is more difficult to write down in a document or a database. An example might be, knowing how to ride a bicycle – you know how to do it, you can do it again and again, but could you write down instructions for someone to learn to ride a bicycle? Tacit knowledge can be difficult to access, as it is often not known to others. In fact, most people are not aware of the knowledge they themselves possess or of its value to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas and experiences. It generally requires extensive personal contact and trust to share effectively" (Servin, 2005:3).

The personalization strategy focuses on developing some set of contacts for connecting people so that tacit knowledge can be transferred. It doesn’t heavily invest in IT like codification strategy (Ribière and Román, 2011:550). Hansen et al., (1999:107-110) describe "personalization strategy as the knowledge that is closely tied to the person who developed it and is shared mainly through direct person-to person contacts". According to their research findings, computers are mainly used to communicate knowledge in this strategy, not store it.

Knowledge Management (Personalization) at my current Environment.

As already alluded that I am working for a bank, Knowledge management is a very important concept in our space. We do not only document our processes. We also have contact sessions to discuss our processes. Our manager encourages group discussions, brainstorming before all the projects can be developed. We are working in an agile environment where everyone sits in an open office setup. Before any project takes off, we run different scrum session where employees from different teams sits together to discuss the requirements. This session always is facilitated by a senior employee who makes show that he shares his knowledge of the system and that all the corners are covered. The senior member will be part of the project until its fully developed giving guidance and sharing his knowledge where it’s needed.

Because the bank has different offices located at different provinces, sometimes teleconference is used to communicate with other teams from different office space in order to clarify project requirements. If that is not enough, teams arrange meeting where they will all sit in one room to make sure that all the project corners are covered.

We also have employees exchange programmes where our developers will spend time in a different office just to be trained on the products from that specific office. Recently, some of the developers where sent to our offices in India just to learn some of the important skills that we didn’t have.

The limitations of exclusively focusing on either approach.

The two strategies are important in successfully implementing a knowledge management initiative. The two, codification and personalization Knowledge Management strategies are able to co-exist. "Companies must use both strategies simultaneously, but might need to put more emphasis on one of these strategies than on the other" (Hansen et al., 1999:106-116). Organisations just need to identify the right knowledge-flow strategy and put more focus on that in order to successfully implement Knowledge management initiative.

The limitation in focussing on codification for example might be that the knowledge sharing tool is not user friendly or the language used in it is not clear to someone who has no knowledge of the environment. Imagine expecting a new guy who is joining the banking industry for the first time to just visit the wiki and start reading some banking terms and understand them, imagine how that person will struggle to make sense of the business terminology used in the documents. So having a mentor can bring that person up to speed. While reading documents a mentor can demonstrate some of the things that are not clearly defined in the documents.

The principal findings in a study by Hall (2006:117 - 126) about the nature of knowledge codification were that "the process of knowledge codification also involves the process of defining the codes needed to codify knowledge, and second, that people who participate in the construction of these codes are able to interpret and use the codes more similarly. From this it can be seen that the ability of people to decodify codes similarly places restrictions on the transferability of knowledge between them".

Disadvantages associated with the personalization strategy according to Boateng (2010: 281 - 292) in his journal of knowledge management include an organization’s inability to store knowledge beyond the minds of individuals without some process of communication. In other words, personalized knowledge is difficult to be transferred to other people. His findings were that:

"serious difficulty associated with personalization strategy as a support for evidence-based medical practice is the lack of confidence on the part of some patients to share their tacit knowledge with doctors. The codification strategy does protect the loss of knowledge associated with the exit of employees because such knowledge is taken from individuals and codified for general organizational use. The fact that knowledge is codified, however, makes organizations "externally vulnerable" because codified knowledge can easily be leaked out of the organization. It is also costly pursuing a codification strategy because it is based heavily on information and computer technologies" (Boateng, 2010:281 - 292).

Research highlights the role that organizational culture has on the selection of the two KM strategies. It is very important that an organisation’s chief Knowledge officer explore the culture of the organization first and decide what strategy will best fit their needs and which will be the most likely to succeed based on their organizational culture (Ribière and Román, 2011).

Conclusion.

In conclusion, I believe the two strategies can work together depending on what the company wants to achieve in terms of their knowledge management. If they rely heavily on explicit knowledge they can invest on IT infrastructure but have some investment in the personalisation approach as well. It is important for my managers at the bank to maintain both strategies as they do now. We rely heavily on each other and we also need to easily access the information about what our peers are working on. Our organisation’s culture allows us to have person-to-person information sharing and also invest in codification strategy. Although research suggests that the best results are achieved when an organisation focuses on one strategy. There are things to be considered when selecting a strategy;

Any organisation first needs to identify the kind of knowledge they are dealing with or they rely on, whether Explicit (Codified)/ Tacit (Personalized)

Also identify the right strategy that will best fit their culture.