Knowledge management in organizational culture

10. 04. 2024.

Various organizations nowadays are increasingly committed to preserving and managing intellectual capital, which represents significant value, in a forward-thinking manner. Management must anticipate staff turnover and aging. Succession planning and preserving organizational knowledge must be forethought to prevent operational disruptions within the organization caused by retiring employees.

In recent years, significant technological advancements have been observed in both professional and support areas of organizational operation. Despite this progress, it is essential to keep employees’ knowledge and expertise up to date, effectively and at a high standard, by introducing new methods and applications as necessary.

Knowledge-related problems and challenges that drive organisations to find solutions:

  • lack of awareness of the information they possess;
  • professional experience, knowledge, and work relationships become obsolete when the knowledge holder leaves the organization;
  • individuals simultaneously suffer from information overload and knowledge gaps;
  • difficulty in knowledge sharing leads to wasted time and money on re-solving tasks that were previously addressed;
  • information is scattered, disorganized, lacks structure, and does not focus on supporting organizational goals;
  • record keeping is often challenging without the presence of appropriate information.

Realm of knowledge: establishing knowledge management

The aim of knowledge management is to establish a framework and related organizational regulations to ensure that accumulated knowledge and future acquisitions within organizations are accessible to everyone with appropriate access rights, enabling contribution, and centralized management within the organization.

Tasks and projects of this nature may be initiated due to the accumulation of high-level knowledge and expertise in various organizations, which, however, is not adequately recorded and documented. Consequently, the loss of such difficult-to-collect knowledge due to employee turnover could require significant resources to replace (or in worse cases, may not be possible).

Establishing knowledge management can be accomplished through the following methodological steps.

Situation assessment:

Determining the organization’s maturity level in the field of knowledge management. It is necessary to define knowledge management processes and identify existing knowledge, which may be either tacit or formalized.

Defining knowledge management objectives:

Determining the organization’s knowledge management objectives in line with strategic goals. Objectives should be broken down into organizational units, and the necessary knowledge processes to achieve them should be established. Additionally, creating the organizational knowledge network and identifying key players and responsible organizational units are essential.

Knowledge storage:

Collecting data and procedures related to employees’ knowledge and organizational units’ knowledge assets. Establishing the necessary IT infrastructure for knowledge storage and determining solutions to support knowledge-sharing processes. It is necessary to summarize the organization’s employees’ knowledge/skills/expertise in a knowledge map.

Knowledge sharing:

Defining value-creating, knowledge-sharing processes. Formal (such as an electronic training system) and informal (such as regular newsletters, workshops, sharing experiences in group discussions, mentoring) knowledge-sharing processes need to be established.

Knowledge application:

Operating knowledge-sharing processes in practice and measuring the effectiveness.