An Autonomous
Perpetual Mechanism For Collective Knowledge Work
That Redefines
Knowledge Management
Raj Kumar, Director, Aim Knowledge Management Systems Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, India
ABSTRACT:
The mechanism to assimilate and apply collective knowledge requires workers to organize their contribution and next action. It dates beyond 300BC. The rapid change underway exceeds its knowing-doing capacity causing wishfulness, politics, knee-jerk reactions, and inertia. The knowledge process serendipity has foiled IT’s attempt to upgrade the mechanism for driving superior judgments and productivity. The incentives essential for motivation trivialize the knowledge work required for sparking insights, spurring innovation and reducing the knowing-doing gap, to “Give” and “Take”. The science of interactions defines repeatable components for normalizing knowledge processes. Teamwork norms harness IT and evolve the mechanism to organize and anticipate worker actions. A tell-all smart interface helps assemble the component flow and work processes on each event. Replication technology enables ubiquitous knowledge work. The mechanism’s seduction for intra/extranet collaboration earns it the sobriquet bmail. Its way fosters perpetual free-flow for purposeful knowledge creation and destruction to advance learning, governance and team-ability.
Introduction – Improving
The Collective’s Power To Deliver Success
Nonaka (1991) set the stage
for superior collective thinking by emphasizing the importance of “tapping
the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions and hunches of individual employees and making
these insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole”. Since
then story telling (Buckman Labs, 2001) to communicate concepts, knowledge
sharing with customers (World Bank, 2001), communities of interest (Cynefin,
2002), internal knowledge sharing (Xerox, 2001), knowledge transfer (Dixon,
2000), Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence have been
associated with Knowledge Management (KM) and contributed significantly to
business performance. Organized collective thinking and its application are
included in KM but have yet to assist teams focus in their daily work to make quality
decisions, progress growth, sustain initiative, and reduce the anxiety of stakeholders.
9/11 established its importance (Rabbi Salomon, 2001):
“The tragedy today is not that our lives will never be the same again. The
tragedy is that, in all likelihood, our lives will actually be very much the
same again.”
Business results (Marcum
& Smith, 2003) reflect the tragedy:
“By the time you finish reading this article (999 words),
forty-six businesses will shut down and three will have filed for bankruptcy.
By the end of the day over 2100 will have called it quits….”
It is widely believed that
professionals behave rationally. Sufi philosophy (El-Ghazali, 12 AD, pp. 55)
records a key human frailty: “what
people call belief may often be a state of obsession …. it is essential for
people to be able to identify it”. The Tao Te Ching or “The Virtuous Way
To Ultimate Reality” (Lao Tzu, 500 BC, Part 1) eloquently describes its impact:
“Those who are bound by desire see
only the outward container.” Increase in possibilities during uncertain
times pronounce this weakness of human nature. Indian philosophy defines wisdom
as the ability to pierce Maya or the surrounding illusion. Tom Peters (Peters,
1993) encourages “cannibalization” to
strip away the dross. IBM’s Cynefin Center Of Organizational Complexity
(Snowden, 2000) believes reason lies buried in the complex and chaotic
interactions. An authoritative study of wrong decisions (Marcum & Smith,
2003) has reported:
“Political pressure, or the intensity
of a decision, often prevent people from facing the facts that are crucial to
the company. Our research shows the damaging effects of ego, facades, lazy
thinking, and politics on the businesses top and bottom lines.”
The following anecdote
(Shepherd et al, 2003) illustrates another aspect of the elusive reality:
“A scientist is
searching for dinosaur traces. One long day, while standing in a seemingly
large crater, he vented in frustration, ‘I see no evidence of a dinosaur
anywhere.’ Hearing this his colleague, up in a helicopter, radioed back to
inform he was standing within a huge footprint.”
Knowledge Management then
must enhance the collective’s power to perceive the reality. The way of working
has considerable importance. It determines innovation, the single most
important determinant of business success. While KM pioneer Richard Ballard’s
adage (Ballard, 2000) “The more you
know, the fewer the choices” is true, it is also true that work must
help internalize knowledge for it to be useful, e.g., the fresh graduate is
often confused by learning. IDC’s estimate that the Fortune 500 will loose 31.5
billion dollars in 2003 due to intellectual re-working, sub-standard
performance, and unavailable resources emphasizes the need to manage knowledge
for results. Accountability is essential to overcome the failing (Rabbi
Salomon, 2001): “We forget...we
deny...we rationalize - and sadly, we stay the same”.
The Need For A Superior
Mechanism
The corporate need is sustained
success. Countries need good governance (UNESCAP), i.e., the process of decision-making and the
process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented).
Developing and applying collective knowledge daily to operations may only be
managed by organization. Both, the country and corporate require a reliable
mechanism that:
¨
Will
support agile teams, promote knowledge absorption and unify team efforts to
apply it
¨
Will
organize purposeful knowledge exchange to spark insights and spur innovation
¨
Will
coordinate distributed action on each event and aid leverage the knowledge of
experts
¨
Will
ensure decisions have every chance to be grounded in reality, strategy,
perspective, etc.
¨
Will
offer a reliable facility for introspection, focus and more quality decisions
in a given time
¨
Will
counter complacency, foster alertness to reality and anchor prudent risk
taking, and
¨
Will
manage accountability, expectations and follow-up on each event to quell
anxiety.
The pursuit of knowledge is
as old as ancient India’s Rig Veda (first verse, ~1200 BC): “Let noble ideas come to us from everywhere”. Chanakya (Naik, 2002), the powerful
minister who master-minded the roll back of Alexander the Great’s invasion of
divided India in approximately 322BC, understood “Knowledge is important. Knowledge is cumulative. Once it exists, it
grows.” The welfare
administration instituted by him ran a huge domain, almost the size of India,
for over a century. He held the king responsible for its motivation, reasoning
that “one wheel alone does not move a chariot”. His parameters of good governance,
viz., organization, focus, thinking ability, character, communication and
vigilance against excess and laziness apply even today. The concept of an
User-conducted mechanism to build a team’s ability to assimilate and apply
knowledge, viz., focus, infer reality, formulate strategy, define problems,
innovate, develop perspective, etc., is thus ancient. The nineteenth century raised the
ability with better logistics enabled by the telegraph (1844), phone (1876),
wireless (1895), and transport revolutions.
The twentieth century
raised the User-conducted mechanism’s team-ability with professional management
and better structures. More possibilities created by rapid
change in technology, attitudes, competition, globalization, etc., have now
swamped the team-ability. Terrorism has raised uncertainty. Of 500 companies surveyed (KPMG
2002/3, insight 4), knowledge was a strategic asset for 80% but they had
difficulty achieving its benefits: 45% did not realize decision-making gains,
while 55% could not improve access to experts. An earlier report (KPMG, 1999,
Item 1.6) reported 65% suffered from information overload and (Item 1.8) only
1% had succeeded in their strategy to assimilate and apply collective knowledge
daily.
Drucker (1999, pp.135) has
set a goal for higher team-ability: “The most important,
and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was
the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing.
The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is
similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge
worker.” Productivity is not faster decisions but more quality decisions, i.e.,
response to reality with strategy and perspective, etc., in the same time.
The
knowledge mechanism can aspire to put the company in learning mode to be great.
Senge (1990) has described the disciplines an organization needs to pursue to
lead change, e.g., shared vision, team learning, etc. Collins and Porras (1999)
and others have identified the knowledge work and abilities that distinguish
the super achiever companies from the rest, e.g., the pursuit of audacious
goals, countering complacency, sagacious experimentation, etc. After 2300 years of the knowledge
imperative, Knowledge Management then must “bake in”
(Davenport, 1999) a dependable mechanism to develop and apply collective
knowledge for growth and results in times of rapid change with protection from
human frailty in uncertainty.
The Nature Of Collective
Knowledge Work
Conduct of knowledge
processes like problem definition, strategy formulation, etc., determines
team-ability. Knowledge processes also enable organization-learning disciplines
like shared vision, self-mastery, etc., and activities that improve risk taking
for visionary growth like setting audacious goals, reinforcing values, etc.
Teams perform them by doing knowledge work, i.e., establishing working
assumptions and conclusions to be revised as results accumulate, and acting on
them. Members evolve opinion with a purpose defined by the knowledge process.
Collaboration to develop content is an associated activity. Follow-up and
accountability is key to limit excess and mental laziness. The process
effectiveness determines the collective responsibility and hence courage for
the firm action needed to reduce the knowing-doing gap.
The knowing-doing gap
distinguishes knowledge work from collaboration. Collaboration could just be an exchange of information.
Knowledge work takes responsibility for results. It is aided by quiet time and
organization, is rather sensitive to autonomy and is strongly determined by the
work experience (Davenport & Cantrell, 2002). It follows collaboration and
is rather serendipitous:
¨
Knowledge
work normally involves a mix of knowledge processes, e.g., problem definition
followed by solving followed by review of facts and so on at the discretion of
personnel.
¨
Knowledge
work is primarily agreement on the assumptions and conclusions to apply. Work
must be organized and opinions classified, viz., problem, strategy, etc., for
efficient application of knowledge in context by organization members, spread
across departments.
¨
The work may involve a study of related past events, particularly successes and
failures.
¨
The
next knowledge action could be in parallel or sequential, with or without
transfer of accountability, conclusive or circulatory, etc. Personnel thus have
discretion over selection of personnel, process, action and opinion label in
contributing to the knowledge flow.
¨
The
knowledge worker may hold multiple roles across departments and locations. Each
role normally has to deal with multiple events and multiple personnel, and the interactions
multiply daily. The worker has to participate responsibly on each event amidst
chaos.
¨
The
conduct of knowledge work may be asynchronous and anytime and anywhere,
including offline. Besides, it would be inefficient to depend upon the desired
contact/s being available. This requires conflict management on development of
content.
¨
Knowledge
work generates anxiety. Personnel always need to know their accountability
(where they have to take action) and outstanding expectation (where they have
taken action) on work-in-process. They can lower anxiety with a prompt overview
and action like recall or guiding downstream discussion or contributing to the
emerging opinion, etc.
¨
Personnel
need shielding from anxiety over security, deadlines, oversights, follow-ups,
etc.
¨
Knowledge
work takes place on unstructured documents. The opinion, however, must be
documented by person, Document categories, knowledge label, etc., to be
meaningful.
¨
Knowledge
work builds on collaboration. The organization structure must be flexible and
foster communities of interest to promote meaningful collaboration and opinion
evolution.
It would be safe to say the
knowledge worker is unaware of the next process step on an event till it is
taken. Knowledge work may take place within a work process at every process
step preceding action. As the following composite flow indicates, it determines
the work progress:
Fig. 1:
Composite mechanism. Action is taken
when a working conclusion is established
The IT Response – More Tools,
Platforms and Self-organization
The
leap in connectivity, storage, and processing power post 1993 gave IT the
potential to deliver the required mechanism for Knowledge Management. Email and search engines held promise
but suffered a limitation (Grove, 2001): “When it comes down to the bulk of knowledge work, the 21st century
works the same as the 20th century. You can reach people around the clock, but
they won’t think any better or any faster just because you’ve reached them
faster. The give and take remains a limiting factor”. Nonaka’s
revelation of the importance of tacit knowledge (Nonaka, 1991)
institutionalized incentives for sharing knowledge to overcome the
constraint. IT developed structures to solve specific problems where 50% of the
solution (Satyadas, 2003) relied on success of incentives. The KPMG surveys
indicate this to be a complex permanent commitment. It is possible incentive driven Give and Take does not inspire confidence (Balla, 2003) for the daily knowledge work since:
¨
Incentives
render Give and Take as separate discretionary acts, foreign to the daily work
process. Give is identified with document repositories instead of tacit
knowledge. Formal systems (Davenport, 1998) are needed to capture it. Isolated
Take is poorly internalized.
¨
Incentives
favor desires. Hence personnel are not protected from seeing what they wish to
see or from what they have time or the disposition to see or from the fear of
possibilities created by uncertainty. This is the Maya of Indian philosophy and
root cause of mistakes.
¨
Incentives
tend to create a passive culture (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000) of briefings,
discussions, and planning sessions in which sounding smart is increasingly
rewarded in place of overcoming the knowing-doing gap for real world results.
IT’s failure to power an
autonomous mechanism for knowledge work has grave implications:
¨
Level-1: Possible consequences of poor work
experience that incentives cannot influence
o Low coordination on knowledge processes with ill-defined purpose and inadequate off-line support leads to absence of quality thinking time and stagnation of team-ability
o User-dependent time management and
downstream awareness leads to stakeholder anxiety
o Poor means for identity, purpose and
collective responsibility lower ability for risk and action
o Dependence on User to organize the
next process step imposes productivity limitation, and
o Poor accountability to counter
inertia for progressing action leads to “as we were”.
¨
Level-2: Sub-standard assimilation and use of knowledge
irrespective of success of incentives
o Reduction of knowledge work to Give
and Take leads to isolation instead of evolving opinion
o Dependence on discretion and effort
for Document creation make knowledge capture erratic
o The internalization of available
knowledge is poor since the understanding is not tested
o The knowing-doing gap remains
unaffected due misplaced emphasis on sharing per se
o Poor checks on wishful thinking or
mind sets – Maya – causes repeat mistakes, and
o Teams are unprepared for the improbable,
viz., are prey to complacency.
¨
Level-3: Anemic support, beyond the scope of
incentives, for visionary growth
o Poor awareness of the possible and
fuzzy goal definitions limits horizons, and
o Isolation leads to poor insights and
hence delayed or knee-jerk response to change.
¨
Level-4: Action to improve the Collective ability
has to be taken at a fundamental level
o
IT’s tools are not natural
to the work norms in use. Norms must change to improve ability.
It is clear that advance of
technology shall make little difference to team-ability till personnel
regularly use it for conducting knowledge processes. This requires automation
and perpetual availability since knowledge work is ubiquitous. However, the
conventional wisdom holds knowledge process automation to be impossible since
the next process step is unpredictable. Ray Ozzie (Weber, 2000), the creator
of group working, endorses the wisdom by conveying: “People work best when they can self-organize, cooperating spontaneously
in free-form ways”. Incentives fail to promote
adoption of IT’s tools with reason (Gartner, 2003): “... workers are
overloaded with an incoherent mix of tools and systems all purporting to
support their work activities, but designed and delivered without any composite
perspective of the work process."
Fig. 2:
Typical composite process as conceived by IT. Knowledge process is User-driven
not IT-driven
Fig. 2 shows IT’s emerging
approach of embedding collaboration tools in work processes. The approach will simplify
collaboration in context with a better sense of purpose. However, it neglects
the knowledge process serendipity and the need for off-line working. It retains
the key flaw of dependence on incentives for User-motivation to share tacit
knowledge and use IT for the purpose. It is possible IT hopes to change work norms
by leveraging the superior collaboration of the new approach and the urgent
need for a better knowledge mechanism.
Knowledge Management
Redefined: Knowledge Free-Flow
Conventional Knowledge
Management has degenerated into support systems and incentives for adoption of
IT’s tools to conduct knowledge processes, in its bid to harness the
extraordinary power of IT. This paper redefines Knowledge Management as
creation of a motivating, autonomous perpetual mechanism for purposeful
knowledge work in context to advance learning,
team-ability, governance and risk-taking, in particular, spark insights and
spur innovation. The following concepts presented over the years reveal the
facility required:
¨ Colonial success (Drucker, 1988, pp.
48): “..the best example of a large and successful information based
organization, and one without any middle management level at all, is the
British civil administration in India”. Regular asynchronous flow of assumptions
and conclusions in context was its foundation. Commitment to progress opinion
and deliver results ensured action. In free India the growth of hierarchies and
locations has introduced inertia.
¨
Spiral of knowledge (Nonaka, 1991, pp 97): “Articulation
and Internalization are critical steps in this spiral”, key to the success
of Japanese companies. Interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge redefines
premises to promote knowledge creation and organizational learning.
¨
Perpetual
Revolution (Peters, 1993): Tom Peters avers that “what counts” for
keeping complacency at bay and spurring innovation is a means to “mercilessly attack yourself”.
¨
Creative
Destruction (Foster & Kaplan, 2001): McKinsey studies of more than 1,000
corporations in 15 industries over 36 years establish that sustained
marketplace leadership requires corporations to continuously and creatively
reconstruct themselves.
The above concepts are
variants of the natural conduct of knowledge work depicted by Fig. 1. Open
debate, viz., enterprise wide free-flow of knowledge, is their unique common
feature. Success of knowledge communities, Ricardo Semler’s Semco (Semler,
2003) and the Silicon Valley experience (Meyer, 1997) demonstrate free-flow can be driven
by personnel self-interest like developing opinion, gaining recognition,
influencing action, collective responsibility, etc., for remarkable results. However,
free-flow is difficult to achieve. Semler’s norm reversal of giving up power
has been dismissed as maverick though it has demonstrated its success. Either
knowledge worker priorities (Davenport & Cantrell, 2002), viz., work norms,
or the conventional wisdom on knowledge process automation must change for
free-flow to succeed.
A Process For Free-Flow
Of Knowledge (Kumar, 2003)
The conventional wisdom’s
premise is that a one-size-fits-all knowledge process is impossible. My Science
Of Interactions (Kumar, 2003) normalizes all knowledge processes to one size
and provides the intelligence to conduct it. Briefly, Darwin’s Theory of Natural
Selection implies stable patterns evolve when many forces are at play. Teamwork
based on the flow of documents has evolved over centuries. It stands to reason
that a structure of parameters, norms and relationships has evolved to govern
how teams conduct their interactions in context to develop, manage and apply
knowledge. I have identified the structure by iteration. The major premises of
the Science are:
¨
Real
or virtual events progress an issue. They may be captured by Documents that
have a structured part to capture the organization reference using meta-data
such as Customer, Group, Pursuit, etc., and an unstructured part to capture
content.
¨
Knowledge maps,
with a common structure but unique to the enterprise’s work groups, relate the
meta-data of Documents. They make Document capture simple and rapid.
¨
Documents have
a life: creation followed by teamwork, collaboration, opinion formation, action
and archiving, all at personnel discretion. The State reflects the Document
status.
¨
18 repeatable
Actions assemble at least 90% of all actions taken on Documents. The balance
10% may be modeled using the same parameters. Action on a Document may lead to
an outstanding expectation. A Token controls right of Action.
¨
The Document
meta-data and any outstanding expectation are the primary determinants of the
Actions possible on it. The evolution of teamwork has established the norms
that govern the Actions possible on a Document. They are sensitive to the
Document State.
¨
The conversion
of knowledge to action has identifiable elements though the process loop is
unpredictable. The possible flow in Fig. 3 defines the elements of daily
decision-making on an event. The tacit knowledge heads may be used for labeling
knowledge capture.
Fig. 3:
A possible Knowledge to action conversion process
Fig. 4:
Document Workspace. Exists for each Document entry in the smart interface,
shown in Fig. 5, defined for each person. Screenshot shows the possible Action buttons
applicable to the Document. The Speak Action has been selected. The personnel
who qualify are shown for multiple selections. On OK, the expectation and
opinion are recorded and the nominee for follow-up is updated. Space for online
meeting is pre-defined
Using the tenets it becomes possible to create architecture to effortlessly
capture all multi-media unstructured events as Documents as shown in Fig.
4. Personnel may attend to them from a smart interface as shown in Fig. 5.
The interface organizes all Documents by centrally established categories and
offers the next possible Actions for execution as shown in Fig. 4. The figure
also shows the direct link from the Document to its opinion space vide Fig. 6.
Fig. 5:
Smart Interface. The categorization follows automatically from Document capture
and Action. Views provide for meaningful drill down. A Document workspace, shown in
Fig. 4, is defined for each Document in the interface. Note that the
interface gives the message on sight
Fig.
6: Opinion space for each Document linked to its workspace as shown in
Fig.4
The following are notable
features of the architecture for the smart interface:
¨
Document
Capture: The
taxonomy is defined for the organization per a framework that is common across
departments. The built in framework relationships capture Documents
effortlessly. The taxonomy aids the interface’s categorization of the pending
Documents.
¨
Knowledge
categorization: Fig.
3 illustrates that a broad understanding of the process is sufficient to create
labels for the knowledge exchanged to evolve superior judgment, do post-facto
analysis and reuse knowledge effectively. Only the relevant labels are
automatically offered, based on the Document meta-data, to update opinion.
¨
Tell-all
interface:
Categorizes for Users all the Documents-in-process across departments.
¨
Content: Token clearly defines
responsibility for progressing action and access rights to the Content.
Eliminates the need for conventional check in-check out to manage conflicts.
¨
Action:
The norms determine
the possible Actions that can be assembled in the Document workspace as shown
in Fig. 4, for effortless routing. The Actions can build any valid ad-hoc
composite flow as shown in Fig. 7. Note the categorization by expectation with
each Action. Where no expectation is pending a pre-mapped work process action
is permitted.
|
|
ß
Token possession
|
Fig. 7:
Spontaneous, unstructured workflow on a Document. Shows how Actions normalize
the knowledge process and transfer accountability. Parallel movements are also
possible
¨
Normalization: All knowledge flows can be
expressed in terms of the established categories (see Fig.5 & 6), the
possible Actions (see Fig. 7) and the knowledge labels (see Fig. 3). This
enables the interface to conduct and monitor any polyglot knowledge process.
¨
Collaboration: Space is defined for exchange in
context to form opinion. Members who do not possess the Token but are involved
may access the space to contribute.
¨
Opinion: Is normally contributed by the
Token holder. The space may be arranged as desired for prompt study. The
privacy, security and organization are preserved. Personnel with security
clearance may also study the evolution of opinion and contribute.
¨
Workflow
hooks: The system
is designed for ad-hoc flow in response to the knowledge process. Workflows may
be pre-defined under different Document Reasons. The smart interface offers an
icon to trigger action per the workflow map for the corresponding Reason,
specified at capture, when there is no pending expectation on the Document.
¨
Follow-Up: Special follow-up may be desired
both for Documents circulated internally and exchanged externally. A special
category called “Follow-Up” would be reported in Fig. 5. The User may
self-assign Follow-up or assign it to a team member.
¨
Roles: Personnel may hold multiple roles
with flexibility for rapid re-assignment.
¨
Routing: Sequential or parallel routing,
with or without transfer of responsibility follows from the Action selected.
Action integrated with the resource map for easy selection.
¨
Structure: The system supports a flexible
organization structure design that automatically re-routes the Documents in the
event of changes and imposes the revised security. Communities of interest are
created by the structure to promote expert advice or idea fertilization. The
flexibility encourages corporate re-structuring in response to the need.
¨
Security: It is determined in default by the
flexible organization structure and automatically specified by the routing. It
may be altered manually. Team members access the Document based on the roles
held by them and the security specified on the Document.
¨
Storage: The framework uniquely defines each
group’s storage space.
¨
Control: Where members are accountable for
an event, they have the option to transfer either the accountability or only
the responsibility for action on the Document. Where only the responsibility is
transferred, the Document may be recalled from downstream.
The interface is smart
because it organizes and anticipates the knowledge worker and intelligently
handles the following important activities among others from a single
interface:
¨ Dynamic cross-categorization of the interface (particularly by outstanding expectation) for swift review of action status and rapid drill-down. The interface resolves anxiety without imposing on team members for information, viz., it facilitates unobtrusive management;
¨ A natural way to share, develop and manage opinion and contribution in context, with accountability, even where the personnel are not in same-time contact;
¨
Either conducting pre-defined structured workflows
where permitted by the knowledge process or managing the exceptions that arise
in external workflow systems;
¨
Sparing the
User the following self-organization in conducting knowledge work:
o Intelligently aiding the creation and categorization of Documents on creation;
o Specifying security, circulation and recipient details each time an Action is taken;
o Storage of Documents and collaboration thereon across processes, departments and roles for easy review by desired indices;
o Aiding the next step on each Document and recording the expectation for pending status. The interface mitigates anxiety by providing the pending status on sight with drill-down;
o Creating follow-up records and assigning personnel for maintaining follow-up;
o Housekeeping the interface. Actions decide the archiving and category/status changes;
o Observing knowledge process rules while conducting workflow. E.g., refraining from forwarding a project to the next group while an internal query is pending;
¨ Search for experts for a given set of parameters;
¨ Conducting all work with means for prompt tracking and control of the chaotic progress of work on each Document. The chaos is managed and not eliminated. E.g., disallowing dispatch of a response Document where a new receipt has superseded its parent;
¨ Manage a two level categorized Knowledge repository: Level 1 provides event history and content, and Level 2 the flow of opinion on Level 1 as shown in Fig. 6; and
¨ Transparent access to all technology as needed by the User. The User need not bother about design of entry points, what technology to use, proper conduct of the process, creation and management of a community, etc. The smart interface offers a single window to handle the entire mechanics of the User’s work.
The smart interface harnesses IT to power the composite mechanism of Fig. 1 preserving the existing norms, i.e., it evolves the way of working. The way meets the communication needs of the virtual organization (HMCL, 2000). Its marvelous work experience assures its adoption (Kumar, 2003). Coordination and fully documented knowledge capture are by-products. Knowledge free-flow may be expected. However, the interface by itself only creates a portal.
Bmail – A Perpetual Mechanism For Free-Flow Of Knowledge
The seductive power of
email lies in its marvelous work experience for total satisfaction of the
personal communication need anytime and anywhere. The technology, however,
imposes for business communication over the intra/extranet and fails at
Knowledge Management. The email inbox requires the User to self-organize for
making sense, with poor downstream awareness and recall. It also does not capture the
expectation with which Documents are circulated or manage its own housekeeping.
In brief, it ignores the needs of knowledge work.
Group members may be
distributed across servers or may desire to work offline. The smart interface
needs to have email’s offline functionality to be a perpetual mechanism.
Replication technology is harnessed to provide this without imposing on the
User. Norms defined for the Actions are used to resolve all replication
conflicts that arise from Document sharing, e.g., cancellation of any
upstream Action deletes the Actions assembled downstream as also any content
development that may have taken place. In effect this overcomes the need for check
in-check out of Documents, with the Token concept playing a decisive role. The
replication not only refreshes the interface and Documents but may also be
tuned to refresh all reference Documents and related collaboration so that
personnel may function offline with full support.
Smart replication to
support anytime and anywhere knowledge work is a key component of the perpetual
mechanism. Any reliance on email for communication between interfaces shall
destroy the all important work experience. The facility has been christened
bmail since its primary function is the daily business communication over the
intra/extranet, and it promises the “seduction” email has for personal
communication. The intuitive way for performing the communication delivers the autonomous
perpetual knowledge mechanism as a by-product.
Conclusion
The present day collective
knowledge mechanism, supported by IT, requires the User’s energy for organizing
interaction and the next knowledge process step. The dependence is at least as old
as 300 BC. With the pace of change exceeding the mechanism’s knowing-doing
capacity, the collective falls prey to wishfulness, politics and inertia to
imperil decision-making. Drucker (1999, pp. 73) deems the response to change an
essential competence: “One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of
it”. This makes the
vulnerability to hidden motives and inertia doubly unsafe, as risks must be
taken to lead change. Authoritative studies of corporate performance show
the way. The need is a better mechanism to develop and apply the collective
power for walking the way. Instituting incentives to use IT is not an answer.
They do not protect against the vulnerability, drain resources with unreliable
results and, instead of enabling better judgments and productivity, trivialize
knowledge work to ‘Give’ and ‘Take’.
The conventional wisdom
that a one-size-fits-all knowledge process is impossible has foiled IT’s past
attempts to upgrade the mechanism. Its current attempt is to change the work
norms with embedded tools. However, with dependence on the User to organize,
define purpose, share knowledge, imbibe learning and leverage IT, the new norms
shall increase the load on the old mechanism. Xerox (2001), at the forefront of
KM, exemplifies the impact. The restructuring time shrank and the leadership
was able to address personnel directly. The gain in ability was specific with
an energy burden. Personnel had to be trained and motivated to share
‘knowledge’, implying a process weakness to progress learning and mature action
on each event. Also, the new work norms required astute supervision to protect
natural sharing.
The Bmail concept manages
the knowledge worker instead of the knowledge processes. In principle, like FW
Taylor laid the foundations for the production assembly line, it identifies
repeatable knowledge work components for assembling knowledge processes. Its
smart interface uses norms and knowledge maps derived from the evolution of
teamwork to organize a categorized display of all work-in-process and
anticipate the next component on each event. Work processes may easily be
incorporated. Bmail harnesses IT to evolve, not change, the way of
communicating for a ‘seductive’ knowledge work experience offline and over the
intra/extranet. The organization acquires a reliable IT-conducted perpetual
mechanism to boost knowledge work productivity, create quiet thinking time,
improve response and induce a knowledge culture, i.e., dependable purposeful
free-flow with its creative destruction potential to pierce illusion, spark insights
and spur innovation. The leadership acquires autonomous means to galvanize
personnel for visionary growth. Chanakya noted in Arthashastra, his book on
statecraft written ~300 BC, that even a small rise in team-ability leads to enormous
gain.
Bmail seeks to offer an
irresistible knowledge mechanism for unifying and applying the knowledge of
people who may not see each other or interact at their convenience. It offers
this strength for vitalizing corporate life and building the future like
leading change or redefining purpose together with the structure to pursue it.
Changes in Bmail’s structure are capable of determining the organization’s
inherent capacities and behaviors like decision processing with the supply
chain or personnel participation level, etc. The leadership is liberated to ambition.
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About the Author
Raj Kumar holds a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute Of Technology at Kanpur, India, and a Post Graduate Degree from the Indian Institute Of Management at Ahmedabad, India. He can be contacted as follows:
Raj Kumar, Director, Aim Knowledge Management Systems Pvt. Ltd., Badhwar
Park, Colaba, Mumbai – 400005, India Tel/Fax:
+91-22-22024898; Email: rajk@waykm.com;
URL: www.waykm.com