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Knowledge Management
Introduction
If organisations are to learn from the collaborative experience of their people, they need to provide an environment where individuals are comfortable about communicating openly. Knowledge Management should therefore have at its heart the aim of minimising behavioural barriers that may be preventing organisations from getting the value they need from teamworking. This paper looks at the way in which organisations can encourage teams to create and share knowledge, and how technology can be used to overcome the barriers of physical separation.
Increasing
the Comfort Factor
In the main, behavioural barriers may be grouped into two
dimensions: The Level of Agreement about the team's
objectives and the Degree of Certainty with team roles.
If people are confused about their goals, have conflicting
views as to how they can be achieved, or are uncertain about
their roles, they become very careful about communicating.
Furthermore, if they find themselves in teams where they do not
know each other well, or meet infrequently, collaboration becomes
fraught with difficulty and suspicion.
These barriers apply across three broad categories of team
working:
-
Those who come from many backgrounds, who share a Community Interest which binds collaboration, but which is easily fractured.
- A Community of Professionals, where people with similar backgrounds understand the technical or academic framework that underpins how they work.
- A Community of Delivery, where people agree how they will work together to deliver time constrained, budgeted outputs.
Of these three groups, the first is fragile and quickly dissolves if there are differences of opinion. The groups remain stable only if they can reinforce each other by occupying common ground.
The second and third are more commonly found in project teams. The Community of Professionals translates into departments. The IT department contains people who are expert in programming, the Insurance Claims department has people who are experts in risk management. Sales, R&D and Customer Services all tend to function as vertical organisational silos. In time each develops their own particular culture and purpose to the point where they cannot easily work with people from other silos. How often have you heard people make derogatory remarks about colleagues from other functions? Yet the difference between them is not personal, but simply failure to agree, and uncertainty of roles because silo-specific ways of working have evolved.
By contrast, Communities of Delivery are more commonly known as cross functional, multi-disciplinary teams, often illustrated as horizontal parallel projects. Here groups of people with appropriate skills work in teams to deliver the mail, build a bridge, or deliver an information system. Often they are fraught with difficulty, and as much effort goes into maintaining the social connections of the team, as it does actually working to deliver outputs. A common objective, clear roles and an agreed set of values and behaviours are really the only means by which diverse interests can be reconciled and projects delivered successfully.
Creating this type of community is hard, which is why they tend to be done on an adhoc basis. Organisations are composed of many such teams with little connectivity between them resulting in a huge duplication of effort and loss of shared knowledge. Both types of teams limit the benefit to the organisation and provide little satisfaction to their members.
Creating Parallel Multi-disciplinary Projects
These behavioural difficulties are often exacerbated by the competition for budgets. Take, for example, the problems of an IT department which needs to meet annual income targets. They win a contract to supply services to a bridge building team which brings in a hefty fee for their department. During the course of the project, difficulties arise which make it necessary to find some money within budget for redesign. The IT contract has the only slack, but they are unwilling to release the funds because their department targets will be thrown into disarray. There is an impasse, time is lost, and the late delivery of the bridge will cost the company millions in compensation. Collaboration is working only to the point where self interest becomes more important.
To navigate this impasse, departments have to broaden the range of their expertise by directly employing those skills that they need, increasing competition between departments and further reducing the potential for collaboration. Entire organisations are built on an "I Win, You Lose" basis.
Increasing Competition Between Departments
For a knowledge based organisation this is a disaster. These barriers will limit the ability of people to work together to achieve an "I Win, You Win" situation. Value to the organisation is lost; job satisfaction is buried under stress.
To overcome these barriers, Communities of Professional Practice, the silos, need to be able to communicate with Communities of Delivery, the parallel projects, so that people can freely move from one to the other. Sharing knowledge and connecting the outputs of teams, one to the other, will enable people to learn faster, to create a depth of knowledge, and to gain competitive advantage for the organisation.
Creating a Knowledge Based Organisation
The first task has to be to develop a Community of Delivery that transcends departmental interests. We need to enable departments to build a collective purpose and an agreed culture if they are to start breaking down barriers that exist between them. We have to increase the comfort factor so that people will communicate openly and collaborate more effectively . . .
. . . and we have to be able to do it on a large enough scale to include people in different time zones and locations.
Until TeamWeb™, the alignment of large numbers of people around common organisational aims, objectives and culture was impossible. The existing range of technology for supporting virtual teams, such as videoconferencing and discussion databases, are limited by their lack of structure. TeamWeb™ provides support for the full range of virtual team communication. It removes the barriers to collaboration and enables large numbers of people to share knowledge in whatever technological environment they choose. It enables organisations to deploy an effective structure for the true creation and sharing of knowledge.
For more information please e-mail us or call Consulting on 44 (0) 20 7251-4646
© Copyright 1998, CEC Europe Limited
© Copyright 1998, Team Performance Limited