Page 348 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

tacit knowledge from the mindsets of employees, intensive discussions and dialogues in workgroup and teams are requested. They make the completing and critical part of knowledge, available to be implemented in KM in any strategy, directed to the knowledge of management and the processes of KT.
- Build a mechanism as a platform to share all contexts. If projects are complicated, employees from a variety of departments and teams become involved without a place to meet for discussion and decision making, collisions and blocking discussions. However, an easy accessible platform that promote and allows reflective, supportive and critical conversations and decision making among the involved participants is important. Without a platform for sharing the flow of information within the organisation the KT will be disconnected and disjointed from the essential data points.
- Start with collecting the already available knowledge in the organisation, to begin with the tangible subjects like project documentation and other reports, followed by assembling the fuzzy and tacit aspects of information, which reside and flows inside the organisation.
- Experience from the instalment of information supporting software systems like Data warehouses and decision support systems (DSS) shows that they promise a world but deliver limited value. Managers use rarely evaluated assumptions based on their held and shared believes to set the expectations regarding software support systems too high. In the organisation’s dynamic environment, the assumptions often do change.
- A well documented actual and past repository of data only do not contribute to the knowledge oriented projects and initiatives. The option available to test projections and assumptions of projects to be implemented will contribute additionally to the quality of decisions. An effective KM system will allow key executives to compare scenarios and to train with what-if projections, based on parameters and expected outcomes.
- The installed KM system should reduce the transfer of chunks of information from a recipient to other employees. It is expected that the distortion and noise gathered in transition, will possibly influence the interpretation by the next recipient. The least distortion, the better!
- Employees are motivated by incentives, and not by organisational tools, such as
a smart database or a fast intranet. The abilities to share knowledge will not
convince determined employees to share knowledge and information with
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