Indian companies are yet to seriously buy into the concept of knowledge management, whilst organisations world over consider KM very crucial for their sustainability and growth.
This at a time when an average Fortune-500 company loses close to $62 million due to an ineffective knowledge sharing.
Analyst groups estimate that by the end of 2003, companies would face a knowledge deficit worth over $ 30 billion.
Speaking on 'intellectual capital is the only competitive advantage for organisations,' at the Madras Management Association, R Ramkumar, the chief knowledge officer of Cognizant Technology Solutions India, said: "Success in today's global, interconnected economy springs from fast and efficient exchange of information. Sustainable competitive advantage is no longer rooted in physical assets and financial capital, but in effective channelling of intellectual capital."
Knowledge management is very important for any organisation, be it big or small. Therefore proportionate investment in KM would change the basis of competition to knowledge and help sustain the differentiation.
"The benefits of knowledge management are crunched time to market, faster learning cycles, knowledge loss avoidance due to exit of key resources and therefore enhanced value for the customer," he said.
Ramkumar pointed out that organisations often have the misconception that KM is synonymous with technology.
In fact less than 20 per cent of a KM initiative has to do with fine tuning organisational structure and culture, defining process that align with business objectives.
KM in the company can be harvested by making sure knowledge is shared among employees about projects, initiatives, failures, successes, best practices and learned lessons. Knowledge of these factors must be readily available and accessible to employees in the organisation.
Organisations have to address four key aspects to implement KM. Like identifying knowledge asset, secondly align business processes with the knowledge assets, handle culture change management issues and finally handle technology change management issues.
Companies must give incentives to employees for sharing knowledge about learned lessons from winning or losing a project, successes, best practices etc.
The incentives can be in the form of motivations, financial and non-financial rewards and also recognition.
"The mindset that hoarding knowledge increases one's premium and marketability has to be quashed first for a successful knowledge management initiative," Ramkumar pointed out.
Organisations should link knowledge sharing to performance management and also regularly report metrics, while constantly focussing on return on investment, he said.
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