What is the starting point of Managing Knowledge?

Is it knowing what you know; about what you do?

And that might not seem as obvious a statement as it appears, indeed wasn’t it HP (Hewlett Packard) that famously said “If only we knew, everything that we know!”

If we start at the lowest level - The process!

This is a genuine example, because I know one of the individuals who did this. He worked in a Franchised Main Agent Car Dealership as a mechanic. Now Franchised dealerships receive instructions directly from the manufacturer regarding how to undertake the repairs and service of the vehicles.

So if we look at an example of a process associated with one of their cars; it doesn’t really matter which model of car it is, and we’ll look at the process for changing a camshaft drive belt.

The mechanic is given 4 ¼ hrs to change the belt. The process says that you must disconnect the engine mounts from both sides of the engine, remove both the drive-shafts, and lift the engine clear of the engine bay to give enough room to change the cam-belt, and if you follow the process, and everything goes exactly how it should it actually takes…..have a guess……..4 ½ hrs.

Herein lays the problem, as the mechanics receive a bonus if they can get the job done in less than the manufacturers ‘recommended’ time, and as you can see from the example, by following the Manufacturers process, the ‘recommended’ time cannot be achieved.

So what happens?, the Knowledge Workers; and by this I mean everyone, because we all do it, it’s what we do best and innovate, look for alternative ways to do things, improve, and modify the way the job is done.

So, back to the example of changing the Camshaft Drive Belt. I know that my friend, and one of his colleagues, worked out that if you disconnect the engine mount and drive-shaft on the offside only, and then raised the engine slightly and supported it on a trolley-jack, pushed the engine forward so it was diagonally across the engine bay, there was just enough room to remove the front cover, remove the Camshaft Drive Belt, fit a new belt, retention the belt and refit the cover. Then with only one drive-shaft and one engine mount to re-attach the job was complete.

So the process had been modified and knowledge created. The result?, well the time taken to do the job using the new-found knowledge was 3 ¼ hrs and this meant that a bonus payment equivalent to 1 hr was given to the mechanic. So now, rather than trying to avoid the Camshaft Drive Belt jobs, they were treated as a desirable job. So here we have an efficiency created by the process user to make it easier to do their job, but by doing so it also provides them with a self generated reward.

Now this sort of thing happens a lot. From my Quality Audit days, I know that there are companies where the written process says you do A – B – C, but when you audit the process they are doing A – B – D, and when you ask the process user why they are not using the so-called official way of doing it, they reply “because it’s easier this way”, or “it saves time”, or the “so-called official way doesn’t work”.  So, again, there is an improvement in the process driven by the workers ‘Knowledge’.

Now I believe that there is a need to capture this knowledge and share it, so that everyone becomes more efficient, and the organisation becomes more efficient.

We can even introduce the argument about Tacit and Explicit Knowledge here.  If the Knowledge of the process stays in the head of the individuals, then it remains Tacit. If we can capture this Knowledge and modify the so-called way of doing it then the ‘Knowledge’ becomes explicit….is it of any less value, no I don’t think so, can it be shared, yes, has it been captured…..yes! However, if the so called ‘owner’ of the Knowledge leaves the organisation; for whatever reason; and there are many…..the Tacit Knowledge is lost.

So at its basic level and perhaps the starting point of managing Knowledge is finding out whether you are actually doing what you think you are doing, and maybe knowing what you know about what you do is the starting point of Knowledge Management.