Issue 18 winter 09

PDF Downloads This article All articles in issue 018 Create 'My eIQ' Email send via email Contact EIRMA send us a messageLinks SIG-III Day in the Life of Jacky Doumenjou of CRIGEN, the Natural Gas and Renewable Energies Research Centre of GDF SUEZ The role of knowledge management in project-based R&D

by John Otten and Rik Biel of the Knowledge and Library Services group at  Corus/Tata Steel RD&T, IJmuiden, The Netherlands

Knowledge management (KM) is becoming increasingly important as economies globalise and companies grow internationally through mergers and acquisitions. Cultural differences across these large organisations, made up of people drawn from many business and geographical backgrounds, can be difficult to understand and manage. KM can offer tools to address these issues.

A more dynamic workforce

Employees are also acting more dynamically and globally now. Many employees will only stay with one employer for a few years before moving on to the next. New people bring new knowledge and develop it within the company, which is good. But then they leave, taking that knowledge, or at least a mental copy of it, with them, which is bad for their employer. It is up to the company to harvest that knowledge, and to absorb and retain its crucial elements, in order to ensure continuity and get the best value from its employees.

Europe’s ageing population is also driving the uptake of KM tools, as companies look for ways to retain the expertise of a generation that is beginning to retire en masse. Many experienced employees will soon leave their long-term employers, taking their knowledge, skills and corporate memory with them. At the other end of the age range, a shrinking population of young adults is making it difficult to attract enough skilled young people to take over these roles in time to learn directly from the retiring generation.

KM

So what is KM? Its main goal is usually seen as fostering the innovation that companies need to survive in a global economy by ensuring that everyone within the organisation ‘knows what it knows’, that is, that they know what sort of knowledge and experience the company has, and how to access it. In a practical sense, KM is usually seen as having two key components: ‘hard’ information technology; and ‘soft’ human resources issues.

Many large companies now have (often small) departments dedicated to spreading knowledge within their organisations. These are often part of the IT department, because the KM function has been interpreted as the provision of software tools, which can be less effective, or as part of a strategy or communications department, because it is seen as a human resource issue. This can be a more effective approach.

People and openness

The most important issue in KM is to get people to be more open. It can be counterproductive to introduce IT-based KM tools if this is not done in a culturally sensitive way: at best the tools can be ineffective; at worst they can be rejected outright. This makes the human resources issues of KM the most important - and the most difficult to deal with.

Nowhere is this more important than in project-based R&D, where the problem is to capture, retain and refresh the knowledge built up during one project so that it is available in subsequent projects. There’s much more on this in a piece by Jacky Doumenjou of CRIGEN, the Natural Gas and Renewable Energies Research Centre of GDF SUEZ , here.

Companies should try to choose applications that work well for all cultural groups

It seems likely that the IT component of KM will be more strongly influenced by human resource issues as the importance of user acceptance becomes more widely recognised. We’ve already seen the first indications of this trend in a recent meeting that considered the influence of social networks. This, together with the reality of multicultural organisations, will result in companies trying to integrate multiple KM systems, or trying to choose applications that work well for all the cultural groups in the company.

This is likely to be a work in progress. Many companies already have well-established intranets holding large volumes of information, and document management solutions that facilitate structured storage of reports. Even if these tools are not yet used in all of a company’s units, at least standard solutions and best practices have usually been established and are available to be applied when it becomes appropriate.

These networks and information silos represent a top-down approach: a structure is imposed and the company’s information is loaded into it. Given the cultural issues to do with adoption, they may or may not work well. And despite all this structure and its apparent rigour, it is not always easy to find what you are looking for in these archives. Information overload poses a real challenge and that’s why search has become a hot topic.

Search

Some companies are investigating enterprise search functions, in which private search engines are set to index all the systems, databases, intranets and other information stores in the company. There are obstacles to such search strategies, such as security policies that restrict access to certain information, and the segregation of information among various systems within the company. Breaking down these barriers can help make enterprise search more effective.

The development of semantic search is being seen as another way to improve access to corporate knowledge, by dealing more intelligently with full texts. Semantic search involves indexing more than just single words, and taking into account the semantic structure of sentences and texts to yield more relevant search results.

Social media

Social media is also providing a new way of sharing knowledge, although perhaps one that is less structured, more rapidly evolving and more open than many companies would like. Public social media tools, such as blogs, wikis, and video-sharing sites, enable anyone to interact with published content online by publishing, adding, editing, or rating the information.

These tools can be replicated on company intranets to support and enable the growth of existing social networks, making contacts within them less dependent on shared times and locations. This bottom-up approach, in which employees exchange knowledge as they do in their offices, may be more popular than top-down approaches. But social networking can be fraught with danger, in terms of accidental or deliberate disclosure of proprietary information with resultant damage to personal or corporate reputation, so companies are exploring its opportunities with care. Many have yet to strike a comfortable balance between control and openness.

With the pressure to innovate growing all the time, companies are increasingly turning to KM to make better use of the work they do. EIRMA has had a special interest group on KM (SIG-III) for the past ten years, which draws an international audience to biannual meetings held in cities across Europe.

The group pays attention to both the tool and human resources issues of KM through expert presentations, and also acts as a community of practice for those who implement and run KM schemes in R&D organisations.

John Otten and Rik Biel

Knowledge and Library Services group at Corus/Tata Steel RD&T, IJmuiden, The Netherlands

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