ORGANIZATIONAL PRACTICES OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

P.K. MATHAN RAJ*

JAISON SAMUEL*

Abstract:

Knowledge is defined as expertise and skills acquired by a person through

innovation and competence. It exists within every individual employee in the
organization. Organizational knowledge is the result of an integration of collective
thinking materialized in best practices, staff mental models and business process
management, and as much tacit knowledge control and management.

Knowledge Management (KM) practices is a combination of tools, methods,

and attitudes that enable organizations to discover customers’ unique needs and
deliver solutions that address those needs by mobilizing knowledge resources
from different communities of practices.

This paper discusses about the activities that mainly contribute to

knowledge management with special reference to TATA Steel and IDEO.

TATA Steel is the pioneer of the Knowledge Management in Asia and it is

one of Asia's Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises and is also the only steel
company in the world to receive the MAKE award. The shift in Knowledge
Management practices in TATA Steel started with the formation of Knowledge
repository and then moved to the Knowledge Communities and Knowledge
Management Index. Later, it linked performance evaluation to Knowledge
Management and used a balanced scorecard to monitor the performance of
individual employees, divisions, as well as the organization as a whole.

Traditional Knowledge Management approaches in the form of codification

strategy and the communities of practices are likely to be insufficient to support
companies to design unique and multilayered experiences to customers. This has
resulted in the emergence of the experience economy. Pine and Gilmore argue

* Final year MBA Students, Oscar Business School, Vellore.

that businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers, and that
memory itself becomes the product - the "experience". Experience economy is
considered as main underpinning for customer experience management.

Companies need to find ways to deliver unique, powerful and multilayered

experiences to the customers. This requires companies to shift their attention
from products to experiences which can also be mentioned as the shift from
nouns to verbs, to deal with multiple meanings of products, to recognize the
importance of connections and interactions among different resources and finally
to be relentlessly customer focused. These changes will definitely face the most of
the institutionalized management practices that have emerged in response to the
challenges of the industrial economy.

The paper thus discusses about the dynamic and reciprocal processes that
connect the two aspects of design – designing new solutions for the customer and
designing configurations of knowledge that are the essence of new KM practices
for the experience economy. The paper presents the example of IDEO a leading
firm known for its innovative product designs as well as its innovative design
process and management culture to explain experience economy. The innovative
products of IDEO are original Apple Mouse and the Palm Pilot V. IDEO began
helping its clients in organization design by using its methods for product design.
In this paper, we also discuss on how IDEO works with large hospitals that are
trying to refocus their energy to provide better patient service.

Finally, this paper suggests that the designing of interactions is a way of

going forward for the field of Knowledge Management in the experience
economy.