By Ramesh Ramamurthy

Sharing knowledge across borders

As companies have their offices spread across more and more geographic locations and a large scale of employees working in different countries, it becomes even harder to represent a single organization as one unique entity. The key lies in raising awareness for the company’s vision and mission as well as equipping staff in all locations with the latest technologies. Advancements in communication technology have led to a deeper focus on knowledge management activities – benefiting both the organization and the individual.

Knowledge management – a definition

Knowledge management (KM) is a strategy aimed at enabling people to develop a set of activities to share, exchange, update and use knowledge. KM focuses on the following aims:
Enable employees to create and use knowledge

• Define techniques and processes of maintaining and sharing knowledge within groups
• Decide upon the form of knowledge stored (manuals, database, intranet, workgroups)
• Bring together people to identify the key focus areas of technologies
• Add innovation initiatives within the organization by identifying key resources.
  
  

Knowledge management team

The knowledge management team (KM team) is the central core that helps bridging the gap between the various teams in an organization and enables them to share or exchange knowledge. As the customer base locations are spread globally, it is essential for people to have regular meetings and knowledge sharing sessions to understand and meet the client’s requirements.

The knowledge management team focuses on the following:

1.    People
2.    Process
3.    Domain

1. People

Even the greatest abundance of knowledge is worthless if people are unaware of it. International organizations hold such an abundance of knowledge, however, it is spread over numerous staff members in the various teams and locales. Communication is essential for sharing and exchanging knowledge. Employees around the world must have the opportunity to get to know people in other teams and locations and develop a good idea of the work of this team. The KM team provides forums and open discussion meetings in which people get the chance to come closer and learn about each other’s roles. This helps people within the organization to know their colleagues from other teams and to identify points of contact regarding their work fields.

2. Process

Different business units or teams follow different sets of processes. If one of the teams follows a definitive process, process knowledge should be shared across teams to help implement best practices and techniques to improve the process company-wide. People from different teams might be able to increase quality and improve the cost factor by adapting to the benchmark process. The KM team enables such activities by initiating process trainings with key people.

3. Domain

An organization works in several domains of interest. It is very important for people in today’s IT world to be conversant with the current domain they are associated with. To add value to their work and to advance the level of knowledge they possess, domain knowledge plays a key role. Seminars and trainings organized by the KM team on specific topics related to the domain enable learning and knowledge exchange.

Furthermore, these core activities of KM can be classified into some sub-topics wherein the KM team initially decides on the KM planning activities and their key focus areas.

Understanding goals and objectives

An organization comprises of several business groups or teams working on different domains or technologies. Employees within an organization need to effectively understand the goals and objectives of the organization. The KM team facilitates this by providing corporate information through the company’s intranet portal, corporate blogs, RSS feeds and well-planned seminars that include talks by senior management team members.

Webinars help to effectively deliver messages from management in which employees across all geographic locations can participate in open forums and ask questions. Live and recorded sessions of management talks can also be provided on the company’s intranet portal. These sources of information are made available by the KM team in order to deliver the goals and objectives of the organization to employees across all locations.

Apart from this, it is also important to know and understand the different teams, their technical domain expertise and the growth opportunities within the organization. The importance of such knowledge recently evolved within corporate companies in which people are hungry for information. In the era of Information Technology, it is highly important for people to be more communicative and possess vast amounts of knowledge with skills spanning across several areas. In order to achieve this objective and to meet the appropriate knowledge levels, individuals have started focusing on knowledge as a key aspect in today’s corporate world.

The power of knowledge helps them to identify their key skills and carve their future career. There is a benefit for both, the individual as well as for the organization. This has led to a new knowledge thirst. Compared to previous times, today’s employees are keener on further education. Without proper learning and knowledge exchange, it is very difficult for them to position themselves in today’s corporate world.

Also, to sustain their career within the organization despite of any changes in the global economy, it becomes highly crucial for employees to share and exchange knowledge and add value to their work through initiatives and best practices. Activities to meet this thirst of knowledge are met to a great extent by such knowledge management teams.

Benefits of KM

Knowledge management delivers mutual benefits. Based on a corporate team’s key skills, the KM team can draw inferences regarding skill specialization and can further focus on providing advanced training. This helps the organization to identify key personnel with advanced skills in specific areas. Consider, for example, a company looking to develop a flash presentation for their KM portal. If certain key talents have been identified within the organization, the company can use the resource effectively for producing the flash content. Those skills can also be used for imparting any training related to flash for other employees. This will save the costs for an external trainer.

The knowledge management team provides a platform for all employees within an organization to help understand the different teams within an organization, their roles and objectives within their business units and their key domain knowledge. This helps employees to know and understand the organization better and gives them a chance to utilize the resources available in the company. Employees will also become more aware of new career opportunities.

A chief knowledge officer usually heads the knowledge management team. He or she is responsible for scheduling regular meetings, discussions, seminars, trainings, etc.. Training within the company is an important activity. The knowledge management team identifies a list of trainings depending on the resources available within the company. Usually, the internal trainer would be selected from any team.

They help in providing training or exchanging knowledge with respect to the specific skills they possess in their current role or from their previous experience.

Why do we need knowledge management team?

The introduction of a KM team in the Knowledge Process Outsoucing and IT sectors has brought in several changes in organizations and led to the innovation of specific technology areas. There are many reasons behind this KM effort. They are given below:

•    Manage innovation and new learning techniques.
•    Drive the e-learning methodologies and help exchange knowledge
•    Solve technical issues by bringing teams together
•    Have share point discussion groups for internal product reviews
•    Leverage the expertise of people from various teams
•    Help employees to get answers to their questions or any specific work challenges
•    Provide additional domain expertise through certifications and trainings

Innovation, new ideas, and creativity are essential for the growth of an organization. Specific technical issues can only be solved if the organization employs people possessing these advanced skills. Share point usage within companies has led to a great amount of knowledge exchange. Certain product reviews can be done internally. Employees get answers to their queries through web forums. Certifications and trainings are required for employees to gain knowledge in specific areas. All of these requirements have been part of the knowledge management and learning activity. This has led to the KM effort and the creation of a bigger knowledge network as well as increased learning activities within the organization.

Conclusion

International Knowledge Management is driving high impact as new teams have started growing in various global locations. There is a high requirement for the new resources to be trained. This training can cause significant costs for the company.

Internally organized trainings through net meetings/ phone calls and internet conferences can help save costs. They also help to avoid travel expenses. The international knowledge management team works with people from all teams spread across several geographic locations.

The expertise and experience levels of the employees and managers in specific skill sets can be utilized to share or exchange knowledge within the organization. Knowledge can also be made available in the form of e-learning courses, e-books, SharePoint, online discussion forums, etc. apart from the classroom training methodology.

Classroom trainings can also be made available through video conferencing. The knowledge management team identifies a list of trainers for specific topics and enables the conducting of such trainings or seminars. This helps people within the organization to develop or enhance their skills and gather new skills that may be helpful for their current role or any new roles.

International knowledge management has made it even more important to create and build a knowledge base within a company for people working in different global locations.