The ‘E-novate’ Case Study – A Knowledge Management Strategy

By alxkio On October 28, 2011 · Leave a Comment · In Case Study, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Strategies

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Introduction – Scenario

( The company, the scenario, the people and the names involved are imaginary. If any similarity is found it is not intended to be taken seriously )

E-novate is a small company owning around 80 employees, located in Europe, having business in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and Spain. Besides its employees being spread in those five countries, E-novate deals with a significant employee turnover rate since a big amount of the employees are needed on and off through the year. E-novate fails to achieve a successful capturing of the knowledge from its employees and maintaining the intellectual capital in the company.

In the scenario I am hired as a manager in the beginning in a group of five people, of them three engineers and 2 sales people. The two previous managers of the group failed to create a synergy among its members who are individually great talents but fail in working together and in communicating. The group is going to work on a project to be launched in Spain and Denmark.

The group members background is the following:

Engineers:

Nadja: one of the founders of E-novate, over 10 years experience

Tim: American, moved to Sweden in 2008(from California), since then he has been working at E-novate, recently divorced

Jonas: Relatively new graduate(2009), worked in Spain, has been in E-novate for 6 months

Sales:

Lynn: Swedish(från Göteborg), more than 8 years experience

Michael: Danish (Copenhagen), more than 8 years experience

Analysing E-novate

The two main characteristics concerning knowledge in E-novate are the great tangibility of knowledge as well as the fact that there is little if no ‘cooperation’ and sharing among the employees. E-novate is a company in which the knowledge is highly tangible. The fast tempo in which E-novate changes personnel, with letting employees go in a short period after they joined the company and hiring possibly new employees is creating a significantly fluid and dynamic environment concerning the knowledge in the organisation. This fact implies both advantages and disadvantages for E-novate. The employees that are occupied by it, in the period that they work for E-novate create a significant amount of knowledge. In addition, they bring with them new knowledge which is a knowledge transfer from E-novate’s external environment. This is a big deal for E-novate, which apparently isn’t taking advantage of this major advantage in terms of trying to retain the knowledge that flows into the company. From this comes out a big disadvantage for E-novate: the inability to maintain the knowledge that came into its hands. This lack of knowledge management added up to the fact that most of the employees stay there for a short time frame leads to a decent amount of knowledge loss with the turnover. Every decent knowledge manager has to recognise this fact and try to deal with it.

In addition, the employees of E-novate are spread in five different countries in Europe and there is no good cooperation between them. Examining specifically the group of the five people, we can notice that its is rather heterogeneous concerning the background of the people it includes. All the group members individually are respectively talented some of them having long experience. With no cohesion and good cooperation, nevertheless, the group can succeed little. Effort needs to be done to bring the members of the group closer together and inspire an ideal of sharing between them. Judging by this group, we can assume that the rest of the groups in the company follow the same line. Therefore, the effort done for the group can be generalised to the whole company as well.

The group of the 5 people is responsible for a project to be launched in Spain and Denmark. Among the group members we have 3 engineers and 2 sales people. The most obvious rational here is to transfer the knowledge from the engineers into the salesmen. The technical knowledge about the project that the engineers have will help the salesmen to promote the ‘product’ in the market. However, it is important as well to transfer knowledge from the salesmen back to the engineers as well. This knowledge will most probably consist of feedback from customers relevant with the project, which is important to be able to reach the engineers. More to that, two of the members of the project are familiar with the countries that the project is to be launched at. Specifically, Michael (sales) comes from Denmark (Copenhagen), and Jonas has worked in Spain (Madrid) before he was hired by E-novate. These two can provide useful knowledge to the rest of the group about the markets in the two countries. All the knowledge in the group has to be exploited.

A good start with managing the group in terms of knowledge will show the applicability of knowledge management in the rest of the organisation. Thus the strategy that is going to be used for the group must predict and allow application in the company overall.

Method – Application

Step 1: Specifying business strategy, apply a framework

The first step in creating a knowledge management strategy is to identify the company’s business strategy, it’s mission and goals, its strengths and weaknesses internally and its opportunities and threads externally. Knowledge is considered as a resource within an organisation and consequently it is important for the view of the company to be able to map the resources as well. A good and solid knowledge management strategy has to be aligned with the company’s business strategy if it is expected by it to provide a sustainable solution. At this scenario specific information in respect to E-novate’s strategy is not given, thus I will avoid this step in my analysis. I however suppose that it will be easy to arrange meetings with top management and interview them in respect of this aspect. Even though I will not analyse more on the strategy, I considered it very necessary to mention at this point.

Step 2: Identifying and analysing the knowledge in the group and the organisation respectively.

Knowledge in organisations resides in several sources within them and appear in different forms. Knowledge within an organisation can reside in individuals (employees), in processes and in technology. In our case we are emphasising in the knowledge that resides in individuals, and specifically the members of the group. Knowledge can appear in different forms. The most important categorisation of knowledge is perhaps explicit and tacit. Tacit and explicit knowledge have distinct characteristics and therefore need to be taken into account differently in order to be captured. This distinction is the most important in identifying the knowledge that an organisation holds. Tacit knowledge is extremely unique and tangible. It has a more personal character than explicit knowledge and it usually comes after experience that an individual has acquired through time. We are in the most of the situations not capable to describe and formalise. However, explicit knowledge is easier to handle with, in terms of articulating it, codifying, storing it and transferring it (Wikipedia 2011).

After we have made an explicit distinction of the knowledge types, we need to examine the knowledge that resides in the people of the group. The group as mentioned consists of 3 engineers and 2 salesmen. The engineers have technical knowledge about the project, both in the form of explicit knowledge, such as definitions and background theory that supports the project, as well as tacit knowledge that sources from their previous experience. The salesmen have both tacit and explicit knowledge as well. Both their tacit and explicit knowledge deals with how to deal with customers and how to satisfy their needs. This knowledge that already exists in the people of the group, and the new knowledge to be acquired through the involvement with the project have to be maintained in the company in a manner that will make it easy to share throughout the whole organisation and be reused in future projects.

Step 3: Building a knowledge sharing mentality, inspiring people to share what they know.

The next step is to push a mental turn in the company towards sharing the knowledge. People have many reasons not to want to share the knowledge they have and they are perhaps the most stonewalling factor that organisations cannot manage in a good way their intellectual capital. Thus inspiring and motivating the people to share their knowledge and setting an environment that supports knowledge management is very important to be taken into account in an early step. The main components that motivate people in sharing their knowledge are

Economic rewards

Time off rewards

Personal growth

Acknowledgement

Career advancement

It is important in order to succeed in the motivation of the people to share the knowledge they have to

find out what each one wants in return and try and give it to him. A very good framework to analyse what people may want is using the generations framework which divides the employees into 4 generations.

Examining each one of the persons of our group, we can draw these conclusions:

Nadja: Nadja has begun working about 10 years ago so that makes part of the generation ‘Gen X’. Gen ‘X’ can be motivated with economic and compensation rewards as well as with time off. However, Nadja is as well one of the founders of the company thus for her, convincing her merely of how important is sharing the knowledge in the company will be more than enough as a motivation to share.

Tim: We are not able to deduct in which of the generation groups Tim may belong, thus it is safe to assign him to Gen ‘X’ as well along with Nadja. A good motvation for Tim to share will be time off of the company. He comes from the States, thus going back to where he is from will probably be important for him being so far from there.

Jonas: Jonas is a recent graduate with him having merely 2,5 years experience in his job. Jonas belongs to Gen ‘Y’. Gen ‘Y’ in general is motivated with praise and with opportunities for personal gwth and broadening of his skills and experience. These components can be used to inspire and motivate Jonas to share his knowledge and be open in receiving new knowledge as well. As Jonas is a new mind, he probably has a lot to offer in terms of innovation to the company and has a lot to gain by sticking with people with more experience (such as Nadja and Tim)

Lynn & Michael: Both Lynn and Michael belong to Gen ‘X’ as well so time off and bonuses in salary will convince them to be open in sharing knowledge.

A reward system must be set in the group so there will be maintained a fair trade and the members of the group will be motivated. The reward, according to the analysis above will be time off and bonus in salary for every individual. Since there is not a good cohesion and cooperation in the group, it is important to enhance and motivate cooperation as well. Thus, a group reward will be specified, and if and only if all the members of the group succeed in meeting the expectancies of sharing (along with a measure to be able to take account if they have indeed succeeded). The reward system must be able to be generalised to the whole company after the project.

Step 4: Using tools and methods for the knowledge management in the group (and in the organisation respectively)

In order to be able to manage the knowledge, tools and methods have to be specified and their specific use and implementation must be documented and explained to the people. At this point we have to manage 2 kinds of knowledge: tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. In addition, managing the knowledge is driven in 2 directions: connecting people with information and knowledge and connecting people with people (IDeA 2008).

In terms of connecting people with information and knowledge, we use the method of knowledge banks. We will specifically create a wiki that will contain knowledge about the project. This knowledge will mainly be explicit knowledge about technologies, specifications. The engineers will be responsible of maintaining the wiki of the project. OWL will be used (Web Ontology Language) (w3c 2011) to formulate and codify the specific information about the project. OWL is a machine interpretable ontology language that can be compared to XML. From OWL specifications it is easy to automatically generate the wiki. The sales people of the group will be able to draw information needful to them ant time, anywhere.

In addition, Rapid Evidence Reviews will be used to codify knowledge at the very moment it appears through the project. This will help in codifying and thus retaining the tacit knowledge before it disappears. These reviews will be written by the engineers of the group. This knowledge will be helpful mostly in the rest of the engineers, however it is possible that it will help the salesmen as well.

The second direction is to connect people with people. The cohesiveness of the group, and the cooperation among the group members suffers, and along with it suffers the circulation of the knowledge as well. The first thing in order to connect the group members together, something usual in companies that are based in projects, is taking the whole group in a trip together. Thus the first thing I would do would be to plan a trip spending 3 days in Spain, then 3 days in Denmark and then back to Sweden. This will bring the people of the group closer, in a different environment than the one in the company that will allow them to build a stronger relationship between them.

Additional methods that will keep the group tightly united, besides the group rewards in cooperating in sharing the knowledge, is knowledge cafes. Once or twice in a weekly manner, the members of the group will get together in a relaxing coffee meeting where they will discuss about the evolution of the project from both sides, sales and engineering.

Further inspiration and pushing in socialising among the group will be done by me (the manager of the group) which are important in building everyone’s social network. Having good connections based on mutual trust in a group (and in the whole organisation) is crucial from the knowledge management’s point of view.

Step 4: Expanding from group to organisation

After a successful introduction of knowledge management in a group, the strategy can be extended to cover the whole organisation. Successful results in a group will convince management that investing on managing knowledge can gain a sustainable profit and advantage to the organisation. After all, knowledge is a resource, and as such increment in the amount of knowledge means expanding the capital of an organisation. Knowledge might be a costly resource, costing both money and time, however, since knowledge already exists in an organisation, and since its loss might cost more than it does to bring in in a reusable form, it is always worth in spending and investing in this subject.