KNOWLEDGE, ITS MANAGEMENT, CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in unmanned systems, cyber, C4ISR, and logistics and modernization to government and commercial customers worldwide. In the year 1997, 12000 of its workers retired. Many of them were experts in various systems of the B-2 bomber, the most complex aircraft ever built. As the productive life of the B-2 bombers was predicted till 2037 the company was in the midst of a problem due to the shortage of expert knowledge. It tried to mediate that by taking the exit interviews of the retirees but to no avail. One of the leading software development companies in Nepal shared the same fate when most of its programmers who had been involved in the development of its flagship software left the organization. It saw a significant drop in market share because of its poor customer support as it took them a lot of time to fix even the simplest of the bugs. We often see these kinds of dependency on individual for the execution of organizational activities and many of them are value adding activities. Relying on individual rather than in process and system is really fateful for any organization. However individuals tend to learn and gather experience when they rigorously involve in a given set of activities. S/he learns using the resources of the organization but his learning, experience and insights tend to remain inside him. The knowledge that s/he has gathered is actually organizational property but when organizations fail to claim that property, the precious knowledge leaves the organization along with the person who possess it. Todays technological tools have enabled organizations to capture a huge volume of data and process that data into information. Information however is not always self-describing and rarely does it trigger action. Knowledge however is actionable. According to Webster's Dictionary, knowledge is "the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association". A frequently used definition of knowledge is "the ideas or understandings which an entity possesses that are used to take effective action to achieve the entity's goal(s). This knowledge is specific to the entity which created it." Knowledge is a process. It is dynamic, personal and distinctly different from data (discrete, unstructured symbols) and information (a medium for explicit communication).Knowledge is information that is contextual, relevant, and actionable. Knowledge is also referred to as intellectual capital or intellectual asset. It is accumulated through experience and much of it is kept in peoples minds, on paper notes, on discussion transcripts, and in other places that are not readily accessible to a companys employees. Knowledge is derived from information but it is richer and more meaningful than information. It includes familiarity, awareness and understanding gained through experience or study, and results from making

comparisons, identifying consequences, and making connections. Some experts include wisdom and insight in their definitions of knowledge. In organizational terms, knowledge is generally thought of as being know how, applied information, information with judgment or the capacity for effective action. In the year 1991, Ikujiro Nonaka wrote a startling article titled Knowledge Creating Company in the Harvard Business Review. At the heart of Nonaka's work are the identification two types of knowledge: tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge is subjective and experience based knowledge that cannot be expressed in words,sentences, numbers or formulas, often because it is context specific. This also includes cognitive skillssuch as beliefs, images, intuition and mental models as well as technical skills such as craft and knowhow. Explicit knowledge is objective and rational knowledge that can be expressed in words, sentences,numbers or formulas (context free). It includes theoretical approaches, problem solving, manuals anddatabases. Nonaka argues an organization is like a living organism. Much like an individual, it can have a collective sense of identify and fundamental purpose. This is the organizational equivalent of self-knowledge- a shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it is going, what kind of world it wants to live in and , most important, how to make that world a reality. Tacit knowledge is sticky in the sense that it is very difficult to extract this kind of knowledge from the possessor. The knowledge is highly unstructured and the possessor of the knowledge might not be aware about the possession of this valuable knowledge. According to Nonakathe success of an enterprise depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole. If this argument is valid then the role of management and the organizational culture has a great role to play for organizations to preserve what it learnt. Organizational culture can be defined as the shared, basic assumptions that an organization learnt while coping with the environment and solving problems of external adaptation and internal integration that are taught to new members as the correct way to solve those problems (Park et al., 2004). In their best-selling book In search of Excellence Peters and Waterman have written that it is the organizations that do not fear failure and let their employees experiment are the ones that are continuously improving and innovating. In many organizations employees are threatened to lose their position of an expert if they share their knowledge. While in many others possession of knowledge is not rewarded and not recognized and the employees are less forthcoming when it comes to learn new things. This indicates the lack of motivation. The perks, in the form of promotion, grades, rewards have very little to do with the performance of an individual in many organizations.Employees need a strong motivator in order to share knowledge. Employees do not share knowledge without considering what they may gain or lose if they shared what they know. The informal ways in which employees share experiences and ideas are discouraged. Organizations are often very less encouraging when there is a difference of opinions and an employee suggests improvement on the decisions made by the management. These cultures are not conducive for sharing and creation of knowledge and these organizations are always entangled in the vicious cycle of reinventing the wheel every time. The organization where the employees trust each other, the communication are facilitated and there is a great social networking between the employees the chances of dissemination of existing knowledge or the creation of the new knowledge is high. The traditional organizational structure offer more hindrances in the process of knowledge creation and dissemination.

Since individuals have different goals and contexts,contradictions are inevitable among individuals and theorganization to which they belong. Traditional organizationtheories try to solve such contradictions through thedesign of organizational structure, incentive systems,routines, or organizational culture. However, if we viewan organization as a knowledge-creating entity, we cansee such contradictions as necessities to create knowledgeinstead of obstacles to overcome. Knowledge is created through the synthesis of contradictions, instead of finding an optimal balance between contradictions (Nonaka and Toyoma, 2003). Knowledge is often created unconsciously; somebody who has learnt by carrying out an activity is often unaware that s/he has learnt something. When the knowledge is explicit, the possessor can easily tell the knowledge/information seeker on how to do things, how to fix a problem, how to please a whining customer but the transfer is really painful when the knowledge is tacit. Tacit knowledge is informal and is developed after years of experience but still very difficult to articulate. Organizations processes are often poorly documented or not documented at all. This leads to lot of confusion, lack of standardization making them vulnerable for mismanagement of authority. On the other hand there is a huge gap between how a process is documented and how it is accomplished; the only way to get through this gap is by constantly updating the processes, documents and the manuals. Then what should be the strategy or how should knowledge be managed. While Nonaka proposes four forms socialization (tacit to tacit), externalization (tacit to explicit), combination (explicit to explicit) and internalization (explicit to tacit), Nohria, Hansen and Tierney have put forward two simple approaches viz., codification and personalization. According to them some companies, the strategy centers on the computer. Knowledge is carefully codified and stored in databases, where it can be accessed and used easily by anyone in the company. This is a codification strategy. In other companies, knowledge is closely tied to the person who developed it and is shared mainly through direct person-to-person contacts. Though they use computers the chief purpose of computers at such companies is to help people communicate knowledge not to store it. They further add the strategy depends on how the company serves its clients, the economics of business and its people. However it is also determined by the nature of the industry. For example in manufacturing companies the activities can be expressed properly, there are steps to follow and they are often precise but in service sector like Employees Provident Fund itself the processes are more unstructured. Let us take the integration of accounts for example, one might learn from an expert who has been working in the integration of accounts for a long time on identifying the criteria for the integration of accounts but many times its the insight that works. By going through the statements from several fiscal years one after another the experts are able to find the links and that kind of cognition cannot be expressed in words, it requires training, apprenticeship or experience. It however does not imply that a company should go for hundred percent codifications or hundred percent personalization. Employees might find the tacit knowledge, expertise and experience more handy at integrating accounts of contributors who have hopped from one organization to another in their service period but there are steps by following which one can easily find out whether a contributor is eligible for the special loan or not. Knowledge Management refers to the set of business processes developed in an organization to create, store, transfer, and apply knowledge.Knowledge management is the attempt by organizations to put procedures and technologies in place to do the following: Transfer individual knowledge into databases. Filter and separate the most relevant knowledge.

Organize that knowledge in databases that allow employees easy access to it or that push specific knowledge to employees based on pre-specified needs.

To transfer knowledge into manageable online resources, some companies require workers to create reports of their finding. Others, especially consulting firms, require their employees to create reports about sessions with clients. Technology is at the heart of any organization today but before we start discussing the role of technology in the management of knowledge we should know the Knowledge Life Cycle. Knowledge Management System includes the process of knowledge creation, capturing the knowledge, refining, storing and dissemination of the knowledge. In todays context technology can play an important role from the very step of knowledge creation. They not only support the storage of data, information and knowledge, with exponential rise in their processing capabilities aided by the development in the area of Artificial Intelligence, technology is also supporting organizations to create new knowledge. The tools of data-mining, business intelligence and analytics they are capable of identifying the association, find the patterns in the data, making prediction and also provoking actions. Today we have machines with artificial insights with their capacity to process and analyze tremendous amount of data. While explicit knowledge is easy to be shared and managed through the use of information and communication technologies, the unstructured nature of tacit knowledge makes it difficult to be easily managed and shared by at least traditional knowledge management systems. IT certainly can enable individuals to share their tacit knowledge (or atleast the knowledge with low to medium degree of tacitness) by supporting various conversions of tacit-explicit knowledge, although it may not be as rich as face-to-face interactions. It can provide a field that people freely express their personal new ideas, perspectives, and arguments. It can establish a positive dialog among experts enabling them socially interact about their job related issues. It can build an environment that allows experts locate each other and develop the domain of their professional network. And finally it makes information more available. When information is readily available work flow is smooth, decisions can be taken more accurately, promptly and they are highly effective. Formal-informal meetings, apprenticeship, publications etc. can help a lot. The coming of Web 2.0 has made internet much interactive, usable and interesting. Organizations maintain internal wikis, blogs, IMs (Instant Messaging), and some are already experimenting with the internal social media. Planned use of these technologies with supporting policies processes and strategies have yielded better results. Organizations have been successful at securing knowledge, employees are able to work better and dependency on specific people is coming down. Processes have enhanced and organizations are more driven by agreed upon and uniform policies. Employees Provident Fund, Nepal needs a workaround to tap the tacit knowledge. Committees after committees have been formed to understand processes unfortunately they have produced more printed reports than results. The existing processes are poorly documented, searching is a cumbersome task. Knowledge sharing is not encouraged. Too much focus is on the collection of data, their quality now needs to be assessed. Trainings have been provided but the trainings should be based on bottomup demand. To bring about efficiency we need the requirement of an intranet portal highly inclusive, with comprehensive information fostering collaboration, co-ordination and knowledge sharing.

However if we think knowledge matters, then technology should be the last focus, the primary focus should be on the cultural shift, the identification of dependencies on specific people, proper planning for trainings, personalization and documentation. That is the major problem that most organizations are entangled in when they try to experiment with management philosophy with the use of technology. Knowledge management is not a technological issue nor it is a management fad, it is a serious business and top management engagement is a must. In our context IT departments are smaller when we take a birds eye view on our organization, when we relegate the entire responsibilities to IT department it brings more pain than gain resulting in not only loss of money but loss on trust of technology itself.

Sources Brown, S, Seely & Duguid, Paul. Balancing Act: How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It (May-June, 2000). Harvard Business Review Davenport H. Thomas, Harris G. Jeanne, Long De W, David, Jacobson,L. Alvin. Data to Knowledge to Results (2001). California Management Review Nonaka, Ikujiro. The Knowledge-Creating Company (1991). Harvard Business Review About Northrop Grumman. Retrieved August 1, 2013, from http://www.northropgrumman.com/aboutus/Pages/default.aspx Denning, Steve. What is Knowledge. Retrieved AUgust 1, 2013, from http://www.stevedenning.com/Knowledge-Management/what-is-knowledge.aspx