Knowledge management has long been used to solve organizational knowledge loss and gaps. In recent years, social media tools have added firepower for organizations looking to address knowledge continuity issues.

In organizations concerned with innovation and knowledge-based products and services—often referred to as knowledge organizations—much of the knowledge required to innovate or maintain products resides in their employees’ heads. If and when these workers leave the company due to retirement, termination or voluntary turnover, their knowledge leaves with them. This phenomenon is known as knowledge loss, and the resulting “hole” in the organization’s knowledge base is referred to as a knowledge gap.

Knowledge loss doesn’t occur just due to turnover—a good deal of valuable information is lost because it’s not well-organized or classified. An employee who searches for a job-related asset and can’t find it within a reasonable amount of time may well assume that it has been permanently lost and give up, or re-create the information which diverts time resources from other critical tasks. Poorly organized resources often end up in a file system “black hole” or siloed into a database that isn’t well-known or accessible to those who need that knowledge.

(Listen as Jonathan Fuller offers more insights into KM during this Engineering360 webinar on demand.)

Trends in workforce mobility and connectivity to work worsen knowledge retention issues. Workers no longer expect to stay with the same organization for their entire career, and increasing turnover creates a chronic condition sometimes called corporate amnesia. Employees also are subject to radically changed expectations about connectivity and responsivity to work at all times, and must be able to access important knowledge and work-related materials regardless of location or device. Corporate amnesia and demand for connection threaten to cut off accessibility to knowledge, making it difficult to deliver on business goals.

Fruitless Search

Statistics highlight the severity of knowledge loss and unproductive searching. A 2014 IDC Research report found that knowledge workers spend a quarter of their working time searching for job-related information, but find what they’re looking for only 56% of the time. For an average knowledge organization employing 1,000 workers, this unproductive behavior results in losses that can be in the millions of dollars annually.

Retirements in most engineering sectors are predicted to reach a critical point within the next several years. The Center for Energy Workforce Development estimates that half of all employed electric power and energy engineers will be eligible for retirement by 2017. Additionally, a new engineer requires more than 8 years to become proficient enough to make a non-standard technical decision without mentorship, according to Schlumberger Business Consulting. Considering these figures, alongside the decades-long product lifecycles typical of large manufacturers, illustrates the potential for frequent gaps within an organization’s knowledge base.

Knowledge management, or KM, has been used to address knowledge loss and gaps for decades, but has become more prevalent as organizations deal with greater information and knowledge volume. KM overlaps with other disciplines—including business strategy, information technology, human resources management, organizational theory and library/information science—and as such lacks a standard definition. Most knowledge management activities, however, involve capturing, managing and leveraging knowledge assets for the organization’s benefit.

Knowledge Management Frameworks

The Bill Wolf quote “a light bulb in the socket is worth two in the pocket” provides an apt metaphor for the basis of knowledge management activities. In other words, having two light bulbs on hand is useless if there is no socket for one of them, at least if the goal is to light a room. A similar KM framework distinguishes between tacit and explicit knowledge, with tacit residing in the heads of colleagues and explicit being “out there” and usable in some way. This theory holds that knowledge management essentially involves moving tacit knowledge to explicit—providing a socket for the “unlit” tacit knowledge.

The knowledge spiral has endured as an effective model built on the tacit vs. explicit knowledge distinction. Source: author's construct.But subsequent research has argued that this model is too simplistic because knowledge rarely moves in a linear fashion. The fact that KM focuses only on exposing tacit knowledge is a popular misconception of the discipline. The SECI model and knowledge spiral, both introduced in 1995, have endured as effective models built on the tacit vs. explicit knowledge distinction. SECI holds that knowledge moves in a spiral from tacit through explicit and back again, so that it can be combined and re-combined to enable innovation and new knowledge.

Moving clockwise from the center of the spiral, socialization is tacit to tacit. This can be accomplished in simple ways like mentoring, observation and practicing tasks alone. Externalization involves getting tacit knowledge into writing or out into the open, whether through structured sharing, writing documentation or creating manuals. Combination involves putting these explicit knowledge sources together to create new knowledge and spur innovation. Finally, employees internalize the new explicit knowledge to form their own new tacit knowledge, starting the cycle over and extending the spiral.

Externalization is noted as the most difficult step but also the most important. In today’s matrixed, hierarchical, global organizations, it is difficult to connect experts on one level or in one segment to knowledge users on another.

An effective KM program is an interplay between content, containers and communities. Source: author's construct.A third model illustrates how an effective KM program is an interplay between content, containers and communities. Containers provide accessible homes for knowledge and are not blocked off or siloed, while the content that resides in the containers contains actual working knowledge, which is then shared and distributed through community. A fourth equally important concept is connection, the arrows that link each box, which is crucial for avoiding siloes and knowledge gaps.

Becoming a Learning Organization

Organizations wishing to use and retain knowledge and foster innovation must effect a cultural change to become a “learning organization.” The key to fielding a successful KM program is to modify the organization’s culture into one that promotes sharing, learning and the interconnection between the “three C” model and all employees and stakeholders.

KM programs often take a comprehensive knowledge inventory, organize that knowledge, and make it available to the entire organization. But years down the line, leaders review the program’s performance and are puzzled to learn that no one has been using the painstakingly externalized knowledge. Companies that are successful at KM take a broad, holistic, user centered view, making knowledge sharing easier and perhaps even fun for the entire organization.

The increase in the pace of business and and demand for innovation comes with a price: organizations need to continuously evolve to keep up. In a learning organization each and every employee must be able to tap into or share knowledge simply, with easy-to-use, familiar tools and methods—this is becoming more difficult in splintered, global companies.

KM Program Components

Knowledge management programs use common business strategies to manage the knowledge life cycle. Storytelling, after-action reviews, communities of practice, cross-project training and expert directories are widely used components. Good content management and organization is especially important. Some individuals within the library and information science field find it difficult to distinguish between the fields of information and content management and knowledge management, as poorly organized knowledge cannot be found, shared and used.

Simply implementing program components is rarely enough when it comes to successfully managing knowledge across an organization. Those organizations that are regarded as successful in KM must evolve an environment where free sharing of information is encouraged and rewarded—growing into a learning culture. Some real-world examples of culture change illustrate the creativity necessary to become a learning organization.

• A software and computing services firm with 55,000 employees in 60 countries was able to shift its culture by using novel, personnel-centered techniques. Hiring executives populated their workforce with knowledgeable employees by specifically hiring individuals with a track record of knowledge sharing, and gave their most valuable existing knowledge workers more exciting project work to keep them engaged and feeling valued. The company also identified executives as knowledge mentors and encouraged them to take part in intranet discussions, effectively leveling the playing field in a hierarchical organization.
• An aerospace and defense company offered cash and other incentives for participating in knowledge sharing, which spurred a successful program. This may not work in every organization, but it moves a knowledge worker from thinking “Why should I share knowledge?” to “If I receive incentives, why not share?”
• Successful KM programs have a solid understanding of how different departmental cultures view and handle knowledge. For example, employees in professional services or creative departments understand the value of their knowledge and often naturally create processes around that knowledge. But in fast-paced high-stakes areas like sales or marketing, knowledge’s value is sometimes brushed over in favor of immediate results. Understanding these distinctions is important to crafting a KM program across the board.

Social Tools for KM

Successful learning organizations promote connection by using simple tools familiar to most in the company, which has to occur between individuals in different offices, on different schedules and within different projects. Within the past few years, social networking tools have emerged as a solution to interconnecting and empowering the learning organization.

Among other advantages, social media use makes externalizing knowledge much simpler by offering tools for cross-organizational collaboration and knowledge sharing. Providing a range of social tools—blogs, instant messaging, social “liking” and sharing— can transform the knowledge cycle and encourage timely sharing in a geographically disparate organization.

Social networking has many perks that support the learning organization. First, its speed of response helps to keep up with the ever increasing pace of business plaguing most organizations. Using social tools to break down and disseminate information in digestible nuggets and saving full-form documentation for users who need context streamlines corporate communications. Social tools can also help manage organizational complexity by putting all players on an equal field, at least in terms of intranet discussions.

Listening and responding on external social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is used for brand management and swift handling of customer complaints and needs. Finally, social tools can organize content and knowledge sources, empowering employees to support their own findability and content organizations to prevent information loss.

Social media tools have emerged as a growing trend in successful KM programs. Cloud-based content storage and organization, for example, effectively mitigates knowledge loss resulting from the expectation for constant connectivity. Social tools can also be used to provide collaboration between inter-project or inter-office teams, contact between experts and knowledge users, and connection between employees, management and the organization as a whole.