The discipline of knowledge management started gaining momentum in the late ?90s with the recognition that knowledge assets being created by organisations needs better protection and harnessing. Hence knowledge management function began to be entrusted to specialists to facilitate storage, dispersal and sharing of knowledge in the organisation. In the early days of evolution of knowledge management, the focus was primarily on structured knowledge and hence the function worked in tandem with quality and delivery or operations processes. The objective in this phase was to ensure process adherence and the knowledge derived from practising these processes was captured and shared with all concerned in order to ensure that quality of output is enhanced and decision making concerning various aspects of production, delivery and after sales service could become more effective. As use of IT increased across the organisation and connecting different functions within the organisation became feasible, the role of knowledge management got expanded to support global teams as well as sales and marketing teams delivering impactful knowledge objects such as case studies, white papers and best practices. With the number of users and contributors to the knowledge management system started increasing, expectations from the knowledge managers also expanded and the questions related to measurement metrics, protection of knowledge repositories and facilitating the knowledge spiral as expounded by Nonaka and Takeuchi i.e. converting explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge and vice versa started gaining more importance.
Just as the chief knowledge officers (CKOs) started feeling it was no longer required to hard-sell the importance of knowledge management and organisations were beginning to see value from the knowledge management systems that they had painstakingly built, the tsunami of data and digital revolution has started impacting organisations resulting in the need to rethink all dimensions of knowledge management and the role of CKOs as well.
As organisations are transforming themselves into digital enterprises, organisations are forced to go back to the first principles to define what knowledge is for their businesses. As of now knowledge is being created and shared internally in the organidation and selectively some of the knowledge objects are being shared with external stakeholders with clearly defined ownership and usage rights.
Knowledge managers have had to deploy methods to coerce and cajole employees to share or use knowledge objects. Knowledge repositories have been by and large static and the dynamic characteristics are being consciously facilitated by the active intervention of knowledge managers. Most importantly, KM function has largely been seen as a support function to businesses and while KM?s potential to strategic direction of the business has often been talked about, it was difficult to see this in action.
As a result, knowledge management function has been entrusted to either the IT function because of the extensive use of technology to capture and disseminate knowledge or to the HR function to find ways and means for maximising employee participation. Basically to make KM initiative a success or as part of operations or marketing teams to support them manage their processes effectively and enable in faster and superior decision making.
With businesses increasingly keen to develop better connectedness with external stakeholders inspired by the power of social media, there are three key factors that are leading to the need for a radical change in how CKOs function. Firstly, it is no longer just the sales function which is interacting with the customers and is solely responsible for bringing in new understanding of the market place. In the context of businesses going social, barriers of communications have ceased with all the functions having numerous touch points with the external world. Therefore knowledge creation is no longer restricted to specific functions, knowledge is co-created by multiple stakeholders.
Secondly, the multiplicity of data forms and channels have dramatically increased in the last few years which is expected to increase manifold in the coming years. This is posing a stupendous challenge to businesses to sift and prioritise the data from which knowledge that is relevant is derived. They also recognise that knowledge objects are no longer required to be boxed in uni dimensional constructs?the multi-dimensional potential of knowledge objects could be powerful levers for decision making. The intelligent combination of content, technology and contextualisation can lead to knowledge discovery about use of their products and profiles of end customers which could prove strategic to businesses.
Thirdly, in the new world order, motivating people to share knowledge per say is not as much of a challenge as the question is around how much to share and the rights to ownership of knowledge that is co created.
These tumultuous changes impacting businesses call for a new look at the role and expectations from the CKOs. CKOs have to become externally focused and align the knowledge management systems to support all functions to be market centric. In the past if they derived strengths came from their experiences with quality, systems or processes, now the success of the CKOs would significantly depend upon their ability to put their arms around multifarious data and bring in analytics capability to their function. A sound understanding of the interplay of social media and psychology of players as well as machine to machine and machine to people interactions is expected from CKOs to design systems that are capable of drawing upon huge amounts of tacit knowledge that is being generated and converting them into explicit knowledge that could be put to smart use by the business heads in the areas of design, service delivery and new product creation.
CKOs would also be expected to develop market research perspectives and help functional heads on how to use tools such as crowd sourcing to tap into the explicit knowledge of potential and current customers, the skilful interpretations of which could lead to conversion as tacit knowledge that could be used in serving the customers better. In short, CKOs now have the unique opportunity to play the pivotal role of helping CEOs to steer the course of the business. Success of the CKOs in the digital era will largely depend upon their ability to redefine their roles with customer as their primary focus and clearly calling out the business value they can generate.
The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company
