In 1992 a James Carville quote became a political catch phrase "It's the economy, stupid". It communicated quickly to the Bill Clinton campaign team, the fundamental importance of the economy to voters, and to keep the campaign message focused. Business leaders need to remember, no matter the technological advancements and artificial intelligence capabilities, your people are your business; they will enhance or constrain your progress, and you should keep their satisfaction and progress center of your radar.
Businesses place a great deal of importance in knowledge management, since the access to information is critical to productivity, efficiency, and performance in nearly every job function. Effective knowledge management improves decision-making processes, promotes innovation and cultural change by fostering a learning environment and sharing practices, reduces duplication and errors, and increases customer satisfaction. Knowledge management is the foundation to employee integration and streamlining and standardizing such functions and processes as human resources, financial reporting, production, maintenance, inventory, logistics, supply chain management, quality management, and customer service.
Imagine an established business where all of your employees have a tenure of less than three months. You have the best possible knowledge management system (KMS) with easy access to all data, information, manuals, financials, past approaches and initiatives, and business performance. Information is completely in control, retained, accessible, and customized and security clearance is controlled and can be obtained by the user, at the point of need. How would you fare? Before reading on, think about this for a moment-What would go well? What would be difficult?
What scenarios did you contemplate? I would imagine financial and monthly KPI reporting would go off without a hitch, as would employee orientation, and any standard output of any standardized process. But would key customers have confidence in your sales team? Would the product development, marketing, and sales teams understand your strengths, niche market, and brand to make sound decisions? (Anheuser-Busch says "no".) Would operators or engineers change high tech production lines over fast enough? In any crisis situation, how long would it take for this team to organize, exchange information, frame the problem, and know their role? Even in a futuristic situation where "Computer" is listening for a question as in Star Trek, or "Mother" is eager to help as in Alien (let's not talk about HAL!), employees are still critical to the relationship that generates output. In the foreseeable future, there may be less employees, but there will be employees and they will be critical to business success.
The figure below shows the relationship between employees and output. Here is what is happening:
Employees input decisions and initiate action using their skill level, experience, knowledge, motivation, thinking and learning.
They use all of this in the process (any process), accessing information, utilizing technology, going through the steps of the process, possibly waiting for others to perform their steps, then doing theirs.
Due to the design of the process, an "output" is produced. The output can be anything--production, new employee, monthly report, a purchase order, a shipped order, a new customer, new product, etc.
The more mature and advanced the knowledge management system, the more the aspects with greens dots are incorporated into the company's information system. Employee skill levels and experience are documented through job descriptions and personnel files. Employee knowledge is captured in workflows, procedures, spreadsheets, and databases. Processes and their intra- and interdependence are documented and technology is controlled through software. Output is registered through data entry and documentation. Employees create explicit knowledge (knowledge that is straightforward and easy to articulate, document, and share) which becomes part of the company knowledge base, housed in the KMS.
But implicit knowledge (intuition, experienced based instinct and ability) isn't so easy to house in the KMS. Usually, this takes on the form of notes, checklists, or troubleshooting guides. But that instantaneous, instinctive know-how, is contained within the employee. The impact on the business of such knowledge is enhanced by their individual motivation, thinking (solo or in a group) and learning (adjusting to feedback from the system). If you think of the impact of an Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, you can appreciate the potential impact of this dynamic within a single individual. Combine this with other motivated, capable, thinking, and learning employees, you get transformation. You understand that the knowledge management system is a tool. The people bring the magic; the power of your business is within your people.
Contact PLS Management Consulting for help in how to build employee engagement and collaboration to increase the implicit and explicit knowledge increasing motivation, thinking, and learning. Contact us here.
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