Knowledge management adopted(if not why) in Information Technology workplace settings

Knowledge Management

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Knowledge is a very essential resource that is valuable to an organization’s ability to continuous innovate and provide a basis for competitive advantage. Knowledge management is based on organizational core principles like shared vision and values, well-articulated business processes, shared knowledge inventory, be as a learning organization and knowledge driven. As stated by Langer (2018), “It is important to recognize that learning organizations, reflective practices, and communities of practice all participate in creating new organizational knowledge.” 

As per my work experience, knowledge management is very essential for an organization and I will share the success story that I experienced within my organization. I am working with an organization that processes huge volume of claims for different clients across USA. Within organization we have many applications, hardware and human resources involved to process those claims. Different client has different rules and regulations, different data feeds and different processes. These are very valuable knowledge for our organization to operate and continuously innovate. Most of this information are embodied with experienced person who worked on those processes for many years and there was no formal documentation that other people can refer. Last year our management started an initiative to document those processes. It took enormous effort and time to document both technical and operational processes. Technical documents were prepared by IT teams upon collaborating with internal IT teams. Operational documents prepared by collaboration with core business areas. During the documentation process everyone learned something new about the existing systems that they were not aware of, even after working many years with our organization. All this information was stored in SharePoint site so that everyone within organization can access. Now, an IT person who works on a business process can access the operation documents to understand the actual operation. The operation information now helping IT teams to suggest the process optimization and contribute toward the technology innovation. Since claims processing is very complex process and all the rules are documented now, so organization is no more dependent on only skilled individuals. New associate on-boarding is much easier and become productive sooner as the new resources can refer to the existing knowledge-base. 

 

References

Langer, A. M. (2018). Information Technology and Organizational Learning (3rd ed.). Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.