Knowledge Management for the New Generation

 

The ‘new generation’ of IT services – now that is a tagline we hear very often in various forums, within a company as well as external. It sure sounds flashy, and the phrase even gives us some kind of a self-assurance for the future, although a sizeable bunch of listeners don’t usually get the full implications of the term.

All right, I am not about to start a lecture on the origin of the term or what the real implications are for the business, but I want to drive a little bit of thought on certain aspects you are probably familiar with. ‘New generation’ does include new technology, new service lines and new standards for quality, but what is perhaps most significant is that there is a considerable amount of new people – new faces at the workplace.

With new faces on the workforce come new duties for the people behind each organization. The most obvious, of course, is to ensure that the new recruits are brought up to speed in terms of technical expertise. But the more important challenge is to make sure they are a perfect fit to the culture of the organization. This extends to how we deal with clients, how we manage external relations and how we project the image of the organization in the public eye.

A new employee – whether a fresher or a lateral hire – would have a set process in his mind. To modify the process according to the organization’s attitude, one would need to depend on precedent – a history of what was done in a similar situation. To open that door, there is only one key – Knowledge Management. Whether that knowledge comes from a veteran’s memory or a classified approved document, depends on the maturity of Knowledge Management in the organization.

Life runs on Knowledge Management

When you drove up to office today, you didn’t just trust your instinct to tell you which turn to take or which intersection to take it at. You may have either depended on your knowledge of the routine, or gone by the signboards and markers. In the bigger picture, ever since the first explorers sailed back home after discovering new lands, how did their successors know what route to take on the next voyage? The maps and charts they painstakingly drew up would have provided guidance for the people who followed their paths. On the road, we were able to clearly demarcate the points and make it easier for travelers of future generations, although this wasn’t directly possible at sea. Perhaps we are looking at one of the first instances of effective Knowledge Management.

For a long time, Knowledge Management has been tied to the idea of “not re-inventing the wheel”. Naturally, people need to make mistakes to learn the best way to do things – remember Edison’s 999 ways of not making a good light bulb and one way to make a good one. But then, the next time anyone wanted to make a light bulb, he/she wouldn’t have to go through all the 999 mistakes to reach the 1000th method. If Edison – or any other inventor - has made a note of what is good and what is bad, the new inventor is able to safely steer through and reach his goal.

In most industries, and especially in the IT industry, a lot of energy often goes into repetitive efforts to solve the same problem over and over again. Where and how does this loss occur? Let’s take a detailed look at it in a future editorial, but for now just keep this in mind: You are spending energy to solve the problem. So why not document the result and save equal amounts of effort at multiple points in future?