05/ 12/ 2008
by Pamela Mills-Senn
It's a nightmarish scenario that too often comes true, particularly where it concerns small businesses whose processes are very often informal. A long-term employee departs, leaving nothing but empty drawers in his wake. Suddenly it dawns on you that no one else has access to what that person knew about his job (the "it's all in my head” syndrome). The end result? Innumerable hours spent in reconstruction and guesswork. Unless you are an archeologist, you and your staff have more productive ways to spend your time.
Even if it's not a matter of knowledge walking out the door with an exiting employee, if vital information is self-contained rather than shared and easily and immediately accessible by others who need it, productivity is bound to be detrimentally affected.
Consider what happened years ago at Xerox, says Christine Sevilla, president of lumin guild, an instructional and information design firm based in Pittsford, N.Y. Now a model of knowledge-sharing, Xerox became this way because for so long it wasn't. For example, copiers are complicated machines, and it takes a long time to become an expert at fixing them, Sevilla explains. Field technicians would come up with their own solutions to problems but there was no way to transmit this information to other technicians, who might be grappling with the same problem and with how to fix it.
And not only were technicians constantly having to wing it, or spend valuable time trying to ferret out information they knew somebody had, there was no formal way to validate the solutions, to demonstrate that what worked for one technician would work for another facing a similar problem.
All this is why companies should treat knowledge as a corporate asset and manage it, she says. Not only does knowledge management avoid the problem of having information held by a single individual, it also reduces between-group confusion and isolation. Companies simply must enable people to get the information necessary to do their jobs and encourage them to update and build upon this knowledge base as well, Sevilla says.
It's not all that complicated.
"A knowledge base is really at its core, a database," she says. "But the use is a bit different. Input can be direct from the field, rather than some controlled data entry structure. The information a knowledge base captures is intended to be distributed as needed and in the manner needed, whereas information from the traditional database might be more structured, say in the form of reports and tables."
Back to Xerox. First, the company involved the technicians in the building of this knowledge database, who were motivated to do so because it would make their jobs easier and less frustrating, Sevilla says. Once this process began in earnest, the advantages were immediately evident.
"When a technician was stumped, he or she could log in and query the knowledge base to see if anyone else had encountered the same problem and what solution they found," she says. "Names and contact information were stored with solutions so future searches might include a phone call to ask more questions.
"After a while they recorded many solutions and techs began to rate them," Sevilla continues. "The knowledge base grew rich in information and more than paid for itself in reduced training costs and increased customer satisfaction."
Let's summarize some of the benefits of establishing a good knowledge management program. According to Sevilla, such a program:
- Standardizes procedures and operations, resulting in better outcomes.
- Improves productivity by eliminating guesswork and reducing errors.
- Creates cohesion among groups.
- Keeps a company moving forward through the accumulation and sharing of knowledge.
- Assists in identifying tacit knowledge ("People don't always know what they know," Sevilla explains) and provides a mechanism to express it.
Knowledge management also makes the task of supervising employees easier. With the routine aspects of the job put in writing and readily accessible to staff, small business owners and their managers are freer to address more unique situations.
But some employees balk at sharing knowledge, concerned they will become less valuable to the company, and their position less secure, if everyone knows what they know. "This is a significant and not uncommon problem," Sevilla explains. "People have grown up in environments that encourage competition and hold their cards close to their chest."
There is also the problem of those employees who simply do not want to continue to learn. Both attitudes can damage a company's health, she says.
How can you bring employees on board with your knowledge management program? First of all you must foster an environment that encourages sharing. Equally essential is involving the group.
"Gather your people together and ask them what information they're missing, what they want to access but can't and what would make their jobs easier," Sevilla says. "Ask them to define what they need and then find out where the information is and how your staff would like to access it."
Building the knowledge bank in this way—from the bottom up rather than from the top down—will engage employees and promote buy-in. Also, turn to employees who see the value of this process, she suggests.
"There will be people who feel threatened by knowledge management, but there will also be people who realize that holding information is detrimental to everyone," Sevilla says, adding that the savvy small business owner will empower these people to help enlist their less enthusiastic co-workers in contributing to the knowledge bank.
