KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge management is a concept that has not been around for very long. It came about as a result of employees leaving their companies with important knowledge they had gained throughout the duration of their employment and probably from previous employment. Organisations then came to realise that they lost valuable information when they lost such employees and they came up with a method to ensure they were not badly affected if the holders of valuable knowledge left such organisations again.

This led management to undertake a “knowledge management'” strategy in an effort to store and retain employee knowledge for the future benefit of the company (Forbes, 1997). Organisations are now trying to use technology and systems to capture the knowledge that inhabits the minds of their employees, so it can be easily distributed within the organisation. When stored, this knowledge becomes a reusable resource that can provide a wealth of competitive advantages, including enhanced organisational capacities, facilitating output, and lowering costs (Forbes, 1997).

My understanding of knowledge management can be said to be the process in which an organisation attains and stores the knowledge of knowledgeable employees and in a way that is readily available to other employees of that organisation and can help that organisation develop new opportunities. This knowledge can be shared in an organisation by socialising, groupware, networking and encouraging employees to exchange information formally or informally and by other means.

According to Maria Martenson (2000) Knowledge is a critical factor for the survival of any organisation. As it can be said to help improve performance (Ostro 1997), a way to reduce research costs and delays (Maglitta 1995), a way to capture the best practices (Cole- Gomolski 1998) and also a way to improve sharing and using of knowledge within an organisation (Maglitta 1995) and also improve business performance, quality and performance( McAdam and Reid 2001) and to help gain competitive advantages. Although Rob Sharkie (2003) points out that for knowledge management to help a business gain competitive advantage, knowledge must be unique to that organisation as publicly known knowledge only helps improve business performance and rarely allows that organisation gain a competitive advantage.

If this is the case why is it that employees find it difficult to share their expertise amongst themselves? Forbes(1997) explains that the reason for this might be because employees are competitive by nature so they might feel the need to hoard any knowledge they might have gained rather than share such knowledge. Organisations, in an attempt to better exploit knowledge now try to store individuals’ knowledge by making tacit knowledge explicit and transforming individuals’ knowledge into organisational knowledge, this process has been made possible through recent developments within IT (Martenson 2000).

According to Mark W Sailsbury (2003), there are three different stages in knowledge management. First, the knowledge is created, then it is preserved and it is finally distributed. This distributed knowledge might also be an input for solving new problems in the next knowledge creation phase. This process could be said to be the knowledge management cycle.


THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Using Abercrombie & Fitch as an example, one cannot help but notice the “creation, preservation and distribution” (Mark W Sailsbury 2003) phases of knowledge when a problem arises. Take for example: It was noticed that employees could not bring back their giveaways (free uniform) to exchange it for a different size on their new systems once it had been put through the till. This was because it had been programmed into the system as 100% reduction in the price of the item. Any attempts made to scan the item and try to exchange it, caused the system to override the transaction leaving the employee with a balance to pay as it did not register that the item they wanted to exchange it for was discounted at a 100% as well. It became quite a big issue as having over 400 employees, there was always a queue of people did not try on their uniforms before taking it over to the till.

This was not working as customers also had to queue at the same till to pay for their purchases, and some left without paying for the merchandise as queues were getting long. A senior manager was then alerted about the problem as no one had any idea of what to do about it. He then later figured out that if you scanned the item and manually entered the 100% discount, you could later exchange the same item for a different size or colour as long as it was something from the giveaway collection.

This phase could be called the knowledge creation phase, as a new problem was identified and then it was solved so knowledge was created. The next phase, the preservation phase although not directly applicable in this scenario as the knowledge gained was not recorded in any format, Although the problem along with the solution was relayed to other management staff. So one could argue that that was preserving the knowledge. The distributing phase could be directly linked to the training that the cashiers were given each morning to help them deal with the problem if they ever encountered it again. Or the senior managers reporting it to their superiors(the regional managers) who in turn discussed this problem and its solutions with other regional mangers.





REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Groenhaug, K. and Nordhaug, O. (1992), ``Strategy and competence in firms'', European Management Journal, Vol. 10 No. 4, pp. 438-44.
• Forbes (1997), ``Knowledge management: the era of shared ideas'', Forbes, Vol. 160 No. 6.
• Martensson, M. (2000), "A critical review of knowledge management as a management tool", Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 4 . Number 3.
• Ostro, N. (1997), ``The corporate brain'', Chief Executive, Vol. 123, May, pp. 58-62.
• Maglitta, J. (1995), ``Smarten up!'', Computerworld, Vol. 29 No. 23, 5 June, p. 84(3).
• Cole-Gomolski, B. (1997b), ``Users loath to share their know-how'', Computerworld, Vol. 31 No. 46.
• R. Sharkie(2003) “knowledge creation and its place in development of sustainable competitive advantage” Journal of knowledge management vol 7 no1 2003.