Today there is a lot of talk about knowledge management within organizations. The importance given to it is such that management models, methodologies, indicators, ratios, etc. begin to be applied. typical of the fixed assets of any company.
As in these cases, there is also the risk of confusing what is an end with what is actually a useful tool to achieve a goal.
Really, the knowledge and the management of the same must be an objective?…
The answer is no. Knowledge management should be a tool that allows us to improve the efficiency of the company's business processes. Or as Thomas H. Huxley said, "the great end of life is not knowledge, but action."
And like all tools, there are good and bad, there are profitable and less profitable, there are those that are used correctly and there are those that are not.
If the knowledge management is not correct, the action or the desired result will surely not be achieved.
But, suppose management is good, there is also a risk that the quality of such knowledge leaves much to be desired. Therefore, a series of variables can be identified on which we must act.
- The quality of the Content The Authors of the content The experiences of the author when it comes to reflecting the content The Content Management Model The Technology that supports the management model The Content Recipients
For example, Don José María Marcos Espinosa, Director of Strategic Planning for Posts and Telegraphs, in an article published in the Club Intelect 2000 magazine says: “Correos' commitment is to use the facilities provided by information technologies in the creation of virtual communities connected through the corporate Intranet, which allow the organization's knowledge to be mobilized for innovation and for strategic and management decision-making ”
In this paragraph you can see how some of these variables are perfectly identified: the Management model of the chosen content is through connected virtual communities and the Technology that supports the management model is a corporate intranet.
However, this model in itself may not be successful if the other variables are not acted upon: the Quality of the Content, the Author or authors of the content and their Experiences in reflecting the content. In itself, a model and a technology would leave knowledge management a very poor tool.
However, this is the current trend of online knowledge management models. They limit themselves to using the Internet, or an Intranet, to capture content and serve content in different modalities, pdf, multimedia formats, links. This is actually a virtual library. You can find a lot of content, more or less structured, more or less pleasant for its design and comfort. But, again, the use of said content is left to the will of the receiver and to his capacity for self-learning. In reality, knowledge management has little. Of course, a clear cost reduction is achieved by improving accessibility to content. For example, place barriers no longer exist.
Well, although this cost reduction is not always achieved. Failures can be found in designing multimedia content and marketing it. Huge amounts of thousands of euros invested by business schools in changing knowledge management have remained on beautiful web pages, with videos and multimedia demos.
But, that is from the author. Where is the person who created the content? What happens to this person's experiences during this process? Why are these experiences not accessible, if technology already allows it?
In reality, knowledge management is similar to the process of innovation and product development. In this sense, automobile companies have achieved a high performance process by understanding the advantages that feedback on real-time experience of the next stage of the innovation process has in time, cost and quality. This is what is known as concurrent engineering.
Similarly occurs with knowledge management. Concurrency must be achieved between the stages of the learning process. And since these stages depend on the recipient's previous experiences, the same result cannot be achieved through content management with a simple Intranet. Real-time experimentation between the author of the content or knowledge and the recipient of the same is necessary. Furthermore, the greater, in frequency and times, this concurrence, the greater the result of knowledge management is to be expected.
Today, technology facilitates this interaction during the learning process. Colaboria was born with this philosophy.
