The necessities for a successful Knowledge Management implementation within an organization are as follows:
1. Strategy:
The organization needs to ensure commitment to a program of KM improvement and how it could be harnessed to bring about, tangible organizational benefits.
The rationale behind the implementation and the business objectives to be fulfilled must be clearly defined and the knowledge framework must be tailored to meet this objective.
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2. Organizational culture:
The strategies discussed above will have a limited role in making a KM program effective as well as successful in realizing organizational objectives by it. A strong organizational culture that fosters knowledge creation, sharing and reuse provides the requisite backbone and enable effective management of knowledge.
KM envisages a rapid change in the traditional organizational working methodology and necessitates strong cultural change among its employees.
Awareness and Commitment A strong awareness of the key concepts of KM coupled with a strong commitment by the top management acts as an effective strong catalyst to help establish strong organizational culture and continually evolve strategies for improving business performance.
3. Focus:
An organization needs to have a strong focus, on its internal as well as external environments, in order to detect and act upon opportunities being continually thrown up and sustain its competitive advantage in the global economy.
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This also demonstrates whether an organization is attempting to look beyond its own boundaries in order to maximize its business opportunities.
Organization In order to foster a learning culture within an organization as well as ensure the success of its KM initiatives, an effective organizational structure that supports KM needs to be developed.
The initiatives should be guided by a senior management person with considerable functional expertise along with an understanding of the KM principles, as the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO). An optimal size of the team responsible for the KM implementation within an organization is around 10% of the employee size.
4. Knowledge application:
The knowledge inherent within an organization needs to be exploited in an effective manner to bring in sustainable business benefits. Knowledge, unless applied judiciously, does not have any value. Knowledge needs to be acted upon so that fresh insights, judgments as well as experiences of individuals can be added up; knowledge is transferred and in the process renewed.
5. Technology enablers:
An organization should have an adequate technology backbone to effectively deploy as Well as support KM initiatives. The organization must have an elaborate schema for building, maintaining as well as protecting its information and knowledge assets.
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Evaluation/Measurement An organization should be able to measure its IC as well as the efficacy of its knowledge initiatives.
The growth of its knowledge capital should be measurable. The techniques for measuring the knowledge quotient or the knowledge capital or the IC of an organization are presented in the subsequent sections.
Incentives In order to foster an effective organizational culture as well as to improve awareness among employees and ensure their commitment to the various knowledge initiatives, companies need to devise and implement an effective incentive policy and structure.
6. Implementation Phases:
For a knowledge initiative to be successful, an organization must ensure the design of robust KM architecture besides having an implementation strategy in place. Generally, most organizations employ a three pronged methodology as listed below:
7. Strategic planning:
The key to success of any major initiative is the commitment of the top management. The need to create a strategic plan or incorporate any major initiative such as KM into an existing plan is absolutely essential.
The strategic planning process focuses top management attention on the KM initiative and with proper promotion of the concept and acceptance by stakeholders; top management commitment is greatly increased.