This is part one of a series on Knowledge Management. We revisit why we view knowledge management as a core competence of Embrace IT, what that means, and what we are doing to build our learning capability from first principles.
The virtues of knowledge management and organisational learning have become somewhat of a parroted commonplace. Accompanied by some mumbling of the 'interconnectedness' of an 'increasingly complex world', the regurgitated epiphany is commonly lost on us as we proceed to the next item of business. Yet, stripped from the hand waving and mystique, knowledge management is a topic worth investigating.
Some basics first. The central assumption in knowledge management is that it is important for organisations to manage the knowledge of their employees. Intangible assets such as knowledge are said to have replaced tangible assets like machines and factories as the main drivers of economic growth (Massingham, 2014).
Knowledge that is difficult to copy and replicate and which is firm-specific, that is - building from and linking to existing knowledge within the organisation, is a key resource (Hislop, Bosua, & Helms, 2018, pp. 17-18). Examples of firm-specific knowledge include the ability to operate and maintain specialised equipment or software, familiarity with procedures, techniques and processes to produce output related to the organization’s value chain, and the body of knowledge and experience that employees draw on when searching for innovative solutions (Wang, He, & Mahoney, 2009).
A usually implicit corollary is that sharing and applying knowledge is more effective within organisations than outside of them (Hislop, Bosua, & Helms, 2018, pp. 17-18). Sharing, integrating and creating knowledge is not just something firms do, it is one of the key reasons firms exist (Conner & Prahalad, 1996).
Sharing, integrating and creating knowledge is not just something firms do, it is one of the key reasons firms exist
Despite the need for the modern developer to keep at least 12 tabs of StackOverflow open at any given time, this corollary still holds true in software engineering. There's no place better than the organisation to learn about the domain, stack, and specific problems that an engineer faces every day.
What does this mean for a startup company like Embrace IT? While engineers at Embrace IT have to be comfortable in many domains (we are an outplacement firm, after all), it's no less true that the value of the company is tightly linked to the skills and know-how of its individual employees.
Simply having that knowledge on an individual basis, however, is not enough. If we don't do anything with that knowledge as a company, our employees might as well employ themselves as freelance specialists. There would be no opportunity for growth. Training employees to become better software engineers needs to be a core competence of the company. Without growing and sharing knowledge in a structural way, Embrace IT will never be greater than the sum of its parts.
Without growing and sharing knowledge in a structural way, Embrace IT will never be greater than the sum of its parts.
Given that Embrace IT's raison d'être is to provide a knowledge sharing mechanism, we ought to spend some time thinking about what that means and how one goes about 'managing' knowledge in a meaningful way. Broadly speaking, there are two problems: knowledge is both sticky and leaky (Huysman & Wulf, 2006).
Sticky knowledge is costly to acquire, transfer and use in different contexts (Von Hippel, 1994). This means, for example, that it's hard to codify knowledge acquired by one employee and convey it to others. Lessons learned in one context are often hard to apply in another. One task of knowledge management is to somehow lift knowledge from the individual level to the organisational level where it can be converted into economic and competitive value (Ipe, 2003).
It's the sticky knowledge that we're interested in. Teaching a junior engineer a framework, say Angular, undoubtedly requires time and effort, but isn't exactly ground-breaking. The real challenge is sharing the practical lessons that we learned the hard way - to enable our junior colleague to reach for idiomatic and pragmatic solutions when faced with real-world engineering problems.
Leaky knowledge refers to knowledge as potentially fleeting and ethereal. Contained within individuals, it can simply leave the organisation, evaporate when unused ('unlearning'), or worse, by accident or deliberation be acquired by competitors (Hislop, Bosua, & Helms, 2018, pp. 137-140). Knowledge tends to erode over time. Two additional tasks of knowledge management, therefore, are to prevent the organisation from forgetting the knowledge it has gained, and to protect knowledge from leaking to the competition.
In practice, as a small business with a diversified employee skillset the potential damage when knowledge evaporates is huge. Many projects rely on one or two knowledgeable individuals. Meanwhile our customers rightly expect us to build and expand on the knowledge of a shared domain, be it in the realm of RPA or a jointly developed web application.
The answer to these challenges is not immediately clear. Over the past three decades a broad variety of organisations have engaged in many knowledge management initiatives, and this has spawned an industry of software solutions, vendors and consultants to match demand. But the results have not been stellar. There is no silver bullet. Building capacity and using that capacity effectively takes time and effort.
In this blog series we share how we view the challenge of knowledge management at Embrace IT, and how understanding the problem shapes the solutions we're creating. First up, a deep dive into the concept of knowledge itself.
Conner, K., & Prahalad, C. (1996). A Resource-Based Theory of the Firm: Knowledge Versus Opportunism. Organization Science, 7(5), 447-501.
Hislop, D., Bosua, R., & Helms, R. (2018). Knowledge Management in Organizations: A Critical Introduction (4th ed.). Glasgow: Oxford University Press.
Huysman, M., & Wulf, V. (2006). IT to Support Knowledge Sharing in Communities: Towards a Social Capital Analysis. Journal of Information Technology, 21, 40-51.
Ipe, M. (2003). Knowledge Sharing in Organizations: A Conceptual Framework. Human Resource Development Review, 2(4), 337-359.
Massingham, P. (2014). An Evaluation of Knowledge Management Tools: Part 1 - Managing Knowledge Resources. Journal of Knowledge Management, 18(6), 1075-1100.
Von Hippel, E. (1994). "Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation. Management Science, 40(4), 429-439.
Wang, H., He, J., & Mahoney, J. (2009). Firm-Specific Knowledge Resources and Competitive Advantage: The Roles of Economic- and Relationship-Based Employee Governance Mechanisms. Strategic Management Journal, 30, 1265-1285.