Today, knowledge has become a significant source of competitive advantage for organizations. As a result, businesses need to keep knowledge management human by putting people at the center of every stage and activity during this process. They should adopt a human-centered approach to ensure that the process of capturing and using knowledge begins with its employees and ends with them. Although technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence and analytics, offer tremendous capabilities, it is imperative not to imbue them with excessive intelligence at employees’ expense.
Furthermore, organizations need to focus on creating and transferring useful knowledge and “know-how.” This term implies that the knowledge recorded ought to be valuable. With the proliferation of the Internet, information exists and can be created from any employee, process, customer, document in an organization. Most importantly, the intelligence documented by the enterprise should create business value (Barão et al., 2017). For example, it should help make better decisions, products, and strategies. Therefore, an enterprise ought to collect practical knowledge, which can help improve future projects or processes.
Moreover, collecting artifacts means capturing substantive knowledge about a project and the process or procedure followed to complete the task. Artifact knowledge describes the “know-how” utilized to manage and complete an assignment (Wechsler & Schweitzer, 2019). It also refers to lessons learned about the process of performing a specific task. This observation implies that organizations should capture insights about the project process and use this intelligence to make future projects more successful.
Additionally, organizations should avoid an insular, isolated focus on knowledge creation and transfer. Insularity means failure to keep in touch with new consumer demands and needs. It entails being rigid to change and creating an environment that discourages sharing ideas both within and outside the enterprise. Organizations have to fight to break the status quo and foster knowledge sharing to avoid creating barriers that may prevent them from receiving valuable information.
Finally, it is vital to “keep it fresh” by continually analyzing the macro and micro business environments to find new knowledge. This point is crucial because the knowledge lifecycle is becoming increasingly shorter (Barão et al., 2017). The information which is useful today may lose its value next year. Thus, organizations must continuously find out what plans, processes, and strategies work and continue improving them to stay on the course.
References
Barão, A., de Vasconcelos, J. B., Rocha, Á., & Pereira, R. (2017). A knowledge management approach to capture organizational learning networks. International Journal of Information Management, 37(6), 735-740.
Wechsler, J., & Schweitzer, J. (2019). Creating customer-centric organizations: The value of design artifacts. The Design Journal, 22(4), 505-527.