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.
