Knowledge Management & HR

In the last two decades the views and writings of thinkers on strategic management shifted the understanding of the sources of sustained competitive advantage for organizations from an “Outside Driven Perspective” to an “Inside Driven Perspective”.  It was no longer markets, competition or technology that created sustained competitive advantage for your organization rather, competitiveness was driven from hard to implement, rare, inimitable sources like high performance work systems,  well defined internal processes, robust organizational structures, strategic customer acquisition and servicing etc., that get created within the boundaries of the firm. (Barney, 1991,  Jackson & Schuler, 1995).

Although sustained competitive advantage may seem to be an oxymoron - since what you have today will be eventually copied by others and therefore, your competitive advantage would no longer exist as it was intended to be,  the fact is that organizations do gain what is called a ‘fast mover’ or a ‘first mover advantage’.  

Knowledge assets [read as people, their skills and knowledge] as sources of competitive advantage are more difficult to imitate and remain your organizations sources of advantage for a longer time than other physical,  technological assets or financial assets. Weave this into a processes for acquiring,  developing, disseminating and utilizing the knowledge and this becomes all the more difficult to imitate, as it is the substance behind the form that these systems and processes take that is difficult to copy.  It implies that it is easy to get finances, buy technology, systems or other infrastructure to manage knowledge creation and sharing,  and hope you have arrived at achieving the advantage however, it is not easy to exploit some of the other facets like - getting the willing participation, the proactive contribution, the sustained commitment of stakeholders etc.

These above facets are an outcome of creating what we can call as a culture of learning and sharing, whereby knowledge is created, shared and leveraged without inhibitions and barriers in order to drive the business pursuits of the organization.  This blog attempts to show how HR plays an important role in creating and sustaining an environment for collaborative learning & knowledge sharing which is an important element of managing knowledge in an organization.

Knowledge Management: What is It?

There are various views when it comes to defining Knowledge Management.  In literature one can find several ways to define knowledge management.   One way to look at this term is - “ability to create sustaining mechanisms including procedures, processes and systems to acquire, create, capture, share and access knowledge that we can leverage to provide best in class services and solutions to customers.”  A simple framework for knowledge management implementation will have four distinct elements -  People, Technology, Process & Culture.   The first three are a triangulation elements of design and are embedded in the fourth element which we call as the culture, the sustenance element.   Pictorially one can visualize it as given in Fig 1 below. 

Fig 1:  Knowledge Management Framework

From an organizational design point of view organizations find it easy to work on the first three elements but without the crucial element of culture built into the design the other three elements would be set up for failure.

In my next blog I will share seven ways in which human resource function can help shaping and establishing knowledge management practices and adopting the same for organizations.

References

Barney, J. (1991). Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Journal of Management, 17 (1), 99-120.

Jackson, S. E., & Schuler, R. S. (1995). Understanding Human Resource Management in the context of Organizations and their environment. Annual Review of Psychology, 46, 237-264.