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Putting Knowledge at the Heart of our Development Strategy

January 19, 2021

It is heartening to note that discussion is taking place after the release of the 4th edition of the Global Knowledge Index (GKI), jointly produced by the UNDP and Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Bangladesh ranked low in GKI among 138 countries. Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the ICCCAD at IUB, in an op-ed in The Daily Star on December 30 rightly stressed the need for a "national consensus" to make the necessary paradigm shift to transform Bangladesh into a knowledge economy over the next decade.

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The Role of Community Champions in Fostering a Successful Community of Practice

January 17, 2021
Guest Blogger Ekta Sachania

Communities of Practice are collaborative networks (can be both formal or informal) depending on to foster sharing of ideas and knowledge outside the structured learning environment.

Communities are always developed around a certain skill, profession or learning purpose. In fact, a shared identity is the glue that binds the members of a Community together (Wenger, 1998).

Community champions play a key role in fostering successful communities. Champions are recruited from the practice, so they are deeply aligned to the purpose of the specific community and are best positioned to connect members and the business to better serve their clients. They work as the bridge between the business and the KM practice.  Champions are instrumental in ensuring that the business goals and the associated knowledge programs of the community are well-defined and met.

Listed below are the ground level responsibilities of a smart community champion:

  • Follow the community and relevant hashtags to surface the community activity to the intended audience.
  • Regularly seeds and monitor the discussions on community feed.
  • Initiates, support roll-out and facilitates community activities aligned to the business goal.
  • Monitor and provide input to ensure community content relevancy.
  • Promote community activity, campaigns, and resources across their personal network for better visibility.

Monitor content metrics to determine community health and suggest appropriate actions to update, retire or refresh the community.

The list above is not exhaustive and varies with the changing business priorities. However, they define the basic guidelines for any champion role to moderate an impactful and successful community.

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Facilitating Knowledge Management Through Storytelling

January 15, 2021

Quite often a good story is the best way to impart knowledge (Davenport and Prusak 1998).

Storytelling is the oldest technique of knowledge transfer and has been touted as the most effective medium to pass across a message to someone since we tend to memorize stories better than dry facts and can easily link them to our personal experiences. Medical technologies have also proved that storytelling is a natural way for brain to capture and retain information.

During the recent years “power of storytelling” has garnered a lot of attention from the perspective of Knowledge Management and harnessing the tacit knowledge of an organization. In a domain that has been primarily dominated by charts and facts, storytelling has a great potential as a knowledge transfer and learning tool. Capturing tacit knowledge is a pain point for most organizations so no wonder, storytelling is fast gaining recognition as a KM tool.

Let us see below how the role of storytelling in a KM framework.

Fostering collaboration – In an organization people often come together as teams, groups, communities. Using narrative techniques during these sessions help people collaborate and learn from each other’s experiences as they have a context missing in the traditional form of meetings.

Transfer of tacit knowledge and understanding - Stories allow tacit knowledge to be shared more easily as stories provide context and focus on issues relevant to the listener. Storytelling allows a seamless leap from information to knowledge.

Ideation leading to Innovation – Ideas pave the way for Innovation. Employees have hands on experience with processes, clients, products, and customers. When they collaborate to share their stories while collaborating formally or informally, they create a new paradigm by introducing new ideas with potential for improvement and innovation.

Organic way to learn - The wider purpose of any KM framework is to equip employees with knowledge for greater good of the organization, and the medium of learning is vital. Various studies have proved that story telling is most effective in imparting and capturing of knowledge. Tacit knowledge from experienced members and outgoing employees can be embedded in narratives to help inexperienced employees learn and upskill.

If the question is why stories work so well in knowledge management, then the answer–simply–is that “our brains seem to be wired to easily and almost automatically organize information into stories” (Reamy, 2002).

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Unlocking Tacit Knowledge in Knowledge Management

January 7, 2021

In the last two decades, the creation and enablement of knowledge as a source for an organization’s competitive advantage has been highly emphasized.  There has been a paradigm shift in how an organization's knowledge is now viewed and nurtured.

Knowledge Management is all about knowledge creation and the activities that support the creation and dissemination at various organizational levels. It starts from instilling a knowledge vision, building a collaborative culture, facilitating conversations, globalizing local knowledge, and encouraging creativity and innovation. The integration of the above processes leading to the generation of new sources of knowledge is the key to the success of any organization.

Knowledge can be both explicit and tacit. The knowledge that can be quantified and documented is explicit knowledge. It is tangible and can be conveyed through processes, documentation, books, videos, etc. However, this just forms only a fraction of any organization’s knowledge while the rest of the knowledge bound to peoples’ experiences, intuition, insights, expertise, and personal conclusions is the tacit knowledge. Recognizing the importance of this tacit knowledge and capturing it in a methodical way to make it explicit is a challenge for most organizations. The tacit knowledge may seem too fluid and inconsistent, but its fluidity is what makes it a powerful innovation tool. The conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge known as externalization is critical for an organization’s long-term success.

So how can organizations capture it?

Instilling a collaborative culture to encourage discussions and socialization among employees to get people talking about their experiences and observations, is how tacit knowledge can be assessed and used for the creation of new concepts and products.

How to do it:

Instill a knowledge-sharing culture – As the saying goes, lead by example. If leaders inculcate the culture of sharing their learning and experiences via forums like CoPs, stream, blogs, etc., people are sure to follow.

Create Best Practices directory – Encouraging a culture where people share best practices, not only enables collaboration but also saves the organization both time and money.

Nurture Community of Practices (CoPs) – The foundation of the CoPs is to connect people by encouraging conversation to build and share knowledge. The moderators should periodically reach out to its members to harvest and tag knowledge leading to its dissemination across borders and different organization levels.

Set up a Post-Mortem process – Put in place a process to document analysis and learnings from all team members at the end of each project. This will enable externalization and improvement in processes.

Set up exhaustive exit interview - These are no longer the times when an employee used to join an organization straight out of college and work till retirement. When a company loses its employee, it also loses the accompanying knowledge and experience. The need is to have an exhaustive exit strategy in place where outgoing people capture their experiences, feedback, contacts, insights, and a directory of work that can be passed onto the replacing employee to get a head start.

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How Knowledge Management Leads to Cost Savings

January 5, 2021

Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to work better leading to a well-informed, efficient, and innovative workforce. Let's see below how it leads to cost savings for any organization.

  • Connecting people to people via the medium of Knowledge Management (KM) communities or knowledge-sharing platforms provide them with a streamlined channel to capture, store and share knowledge leading to increased efficiency and decreased response time.
  • With a KM framework in places, people are well versed with best practices followed by employees from other teams working on similar projects leading to a decrease in errors and an increase in quality of work output.
  • A higher degree of employee accountability is created when knowledge is easily shared and accessed via various KM channels and tools like communities, knowledge repositories and discussion forums.
  • With increased focus on KM employees get a chance to connect with global peers to share and learn from each other leading to Innovation and creation of new products and efficient ways to perform services.
  • Client satisfaction is a vital component of sales & delivery for any organization. By having easy access to the knowledge sources, you need to perform your job efficiently, you shorten the sales cycle.

Well, these are reasons enough to start putting together a KM framework for your organization if not already in place. And coming up in the next article is how to capture knowledge and make it available for value creation via various KM channels.

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