Knowledge Management Report

...

In our case, we haven’t witnessed any double learning example on the field but it doesn’t mean there isn’t. The reason might be that there is weakness in the transfer of this knowledge to the organizational level. Indeed, tough people shares a lot, it may take time for a practice to be accepted by everybody if there is no formal system to assess how people do their job. Here, we can make a comparison with the SECI model. This step between the group and the organization is similar to combination phase of the knowledge conversion model. However, it is important to note that this phase represents a true challenge for many organization.

In addition, Argyris and Schrön describe some enablers and disablers for organizational learning. The reflexive attitude is not an automatism for most human. You have to teach people how to reason about their behaviour in new and more effective ways. But this is hard for many reasons. The main one is inspired by the theory of the strategic actor (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977): individuals could learn but they develop a defensive reasoning. When trying to explain their behaviour, individuals tend to suppress negative feelings, maximize “winning” and avoid “losing”. This defensive attitude is reinforced for high level professionals (and architects can be considered this way) because they have a strong intolerance for failures and have faced few failures in their life (they know less how to tackle them).

This last point may be the reason why we haven’t witnessed any form of review system at the end of a project (i.e. post mortem, feedback, etc.). High level professionals don’t like to face their mistakes. Nevertheless, the implementation of such system could help individuals to learn effectively from their failures and highlight their successes. And also favors the double loop learning process.

Now that we know a little more about how knowledge is created inside the company, we will try to define their knowledge strategy. Indeed, there isn’t any explicit one in the firm. The main goal of a Knowledge Strategy, as defined by Zack, is to understand which knowledge is strategic and why it is. We will try to do so by performing a gap analysis:

What firm must know

What firm must do (Opportunity-Threat)

- Ways to gather and update foreign market knowledge

- Ways to manage their knowledge

- Ways to provide effective feedback

- Ways to gather and update best and new practices on the market

- Develop knowledge about foreign norms, customer tastes, etc.

- Improve its organizational learning (feedbacks, double loop learning, etc.)

- Develop a network to help people to connect & share.

- Implement Community of practices

What firm knows

What firm can do (Strength-Weakness)

- Technical architecture expertise

- Deep knowledge about local customers

- A lot of languages

- Provide good plans (local customer satisfaction)

- Communicate in most european languages

- Organize private conferences in which an expert shares his learning about a particular subject

The goal of this analysis is not to be comprehensive but to show that there are some “gaps” between what the firm can do/know and what the firm must do/know. In our cases, it is clear that their corporate strategy (reminder : expanding on international levels) isn’t immediately beyond reach. We believe that a better knowledge management strategy could help them to achieve those objectives.

About the Knowledge Management Strategy, we observed that it is very people-oriented. In M.T. Hansen framework, we tend to be in the “personalisation” category (opposite to the codification category). Most knowledge is tacit (embedded in people’s head). People do not try to codify this knowledge but rather engage in dialogue to share it. The best way to manage knowledge in this case is to promote interactions between individuals. In the current state, Jim Clemes is a small company and people are relatively close. Face to face interaction is an easy and efficient way to connect. However, their long term goal is to expand on an international level. They will have to grow, either by recruiting more people in Luxembourg or by opening local offices in foreign countries. Anyway, it will become harder to connect in face to face interaction. This is why they need to develop a network that will help the workers to find the experts they need and to benefit from his knowledge. (See technology part of the pentagonal framework)

Besides, it is important to know on which part of the intellectual capital they must act. Intellectual capital is divided in three main parts : Human, Structural and “Relational” (customer, supplier, partner) capital.

- Human : everybody’s expertise is relatively well known inside the company (their competencies are evaluated each year and workers know who is good in which field). People have access to formations to build their knowledge and can benefit from other’s experience. However, it would be nice to think about implementing “Community of Practices” (See people part) to extract best practices.

- Structural : it is the weak part of Jim Clemes. Though a full knowledge repository may not be needed, they need to work on some kind of system to share knowledge easier. Also, they should develop a post-mortem/feedback procedure to increase their learning.

- Relational : they have a good knowledge about their partners and their customers. They know how to work along with all of them. But they may need to get out of their local box and deepen their knowledge about foreign market actors.

Now that we have defined a Knowledge Strategy and their knowledge management strategy, we can state that they are relatively aligned with the corporate strategy, in the sense that there is no contradiction between each other, that they go in the same direction. However we are far from perfection and this is why we made some suggestion to improve this alignment. The endeavor would surely benefit Jim Clemes in the long run.

b.