Integrated Knowledge Management in the Natural Work Environment
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Aug 1, 2003
- 4 min read
Knowledge management is not a goal; knowledge management is a means to achieve organizational objectives. Employees don't come to their workplace to manage knowledge, but to perform their routine work in the best, highest quality, and most efficient way possible.
With this in mind, we need to find solutions to knowledge management problems within the organization.
The solutions we implement in the organization must be based on three fundamental principles:
Be oriented as much as possible to the employee's natural work environment - the environment where the employee is already present for performing their routine work.
PUSH solutions - pushing knowledge to the employee, as a complementary means to knowledge pulling by them.
Context-oriented solutions - pushing the right knowledge, in the right place, at the right time.
Additionally, it's essential to remember that knowledge transfer and knowledge use are optional. It's possible to integrate knowledge provision and its use into work procedures and various types of management instructions; however, ultimately, the implementation of the activity depends on the employee's willingness to share and apply knowledge.
To create willingness, we need to adhere to several basic rules: the knowledge transfer process must be easy and integrated into work processes, existing knowledge must be reliable, current, innovative, and easily retrievable.
This entire introduction is intended to emphasize the need to integrate knowledge management (knowledge transfer and knowledge pulling) into routine work processes.
How do you do it?
After mapping the knowledge needs of the designated group within the organization, as well as the knowledge suppliers and consumers surrounding this group, we must learn and understand the group's work processes, the computing platform they use, map the group's strengths and weaknesses in knowledge management aspects, and perform cultural mapping.
It's essential to note that every solution must address all these aspects. In this review, we focus on the practical aspect of integrating solutions into routine work processes.
We must consider how to integrate the mapped knowledge needs and the natural work environment, complemented by various supporting steps to encourage a sharing culture (encouraging a sharing culture will be discussed in a dedicated review).
Thus, if we're dealing with service representatives who handle customers based on a CRM system, we can display a tip for the representative on the optimal, innovative, or quality way to handle the customer, according to the classification of the inquiry in the system that the representatives use to record the inquiry. We don't change the representative's work method; the representative already needs to open a customer ticket in the system and classify the type of inquiry. In the natural work process, we push tips for the optimal handling method. If the representative handled the customer in a slightly different way, in a manner the representative found effective and innovative, the representative can click a feedback button from the customer screen, and using Copy-Paste copy the details of the handling method from the activity description in the customer record that the representative is required to document anyway in the customer ticket, to the feedback page which will be transferred to the system manager for review and entry into the existing tips database.
Another example: Suppose the main activity of a certain group is handling routine problems in a factory that need to be solved as quickly as possible to minimize machine downtime as much as possible; and suppose the group already documents its activity in a certain computer system for ISO certification purposes - we must support them by providing a knowledge base through which they can solve problems in the fastest and highest quality way, we must create for group members a unified event characteristics base so that if they encounter a problem they don't know how to solve, they can use the system to retrieve events with similar characteristics that occurred in the past to learn from them how the problem was handled, and get hints and new ideas for handling and solving the current problem, plus ideas for preventive activities that were implemented and tested on how to avoid problem recurrence in the future.
From the sales world, we can provide an example of a sales agent preparing to attend a meeting or make contact with a customer in any other way. The sales agent will enter the customer's card and be able to see tips and guidance about the customer, such as: to close a deal, you must arrive at a meeting with XXX; the contact person is a mother who finishes work early; it's advisable to call until 2:30 PM, etc. From this page, where the sales agent will update about the meeting that was conducted, they can pass on an additional tip for the optimal handling method for the specific customer, if they have acquired such a tip.
In parallel, it's possible to create infrastructure for knowledge transfer and sharing within existing work and team meetings by providing tools to facilitate effective knowledge transfer among participants during the meetings. From our experience, verbal knowledge transfer also requires learning and direction toward specific methods, techniques, and content that should be conveyed.
In Summary
Four examples are presented here from different content worlds and activities with various purposes, in which knowledge management solutions have been integrated into routine work processes and successfully implemented in practice.
In all the examples presented, the employee doesn't need to search for knowledge; knowledge is made available to them by performing their routine work, according to the established work procedures for the organizational unit. Additionally, the knowledge transfer process doesn't require the user to perform a unique activity in a dedicated system.
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