The Leading Edge - Spring 2010 - 7

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George Blomgren, director of business systems at a Midwest employers association, knows how knowledge management software can help and how it can frustrate. When he came on board at MRA a couple years ago, the organization was frustrated with its knowledgesharing software. Given the organization’s primary role to serve as a resource and collection site of helpful information for its members, MRA wanted a self-service system that could work for both its members and its employees. Blomgren says they wanted a platform that hosted a more Google-like, user friendly and robust search engine. MRA users would be most comfortable using software that followed the gold standard search engine. So MRA chose InMagic’s Presto Social program. MRA can customize the documents by adding comments as well as tagging them with key search words that their members or staff might use. Blomgren says the tagging feature also allows users to suggest additional key words for a document as well as opportunities to include potential misspellings that users might search. For example, is it HIPPA, HIPAA or HIPPAA? (It’s HIPAA—Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act.) In addition, Presto Social enables MRA to customize information by group (such as members and employees) and post custom content for each group. Blomgren says another feature that MRA appreciates is the ability to look at how people use the system. “We really love the ability to look back and see who’s accessing what type of information. It allows us to make more intelligent decisions and keep in touch with members.” MRA also can assign expiration dates to documents so they won’t show up in the system after that designated time. System managers, however, are reminded about the document expirations so they can decide whether to keep them live or allow them to expire. The documents remain in the system but don’t appear in search results. Knowledge management software programs are plentiful, from boxed versions to professionally managed systems. For no-budget knowledge management systems, Web-based tools such as wikis and social networking are especially useful at capturing discussions and allowing those discussions to be searched over time, Darr says. There are many ways for an organization to identify, store and transfer knowledge. The challenge is to identify and develop comThe Leading edge

plementary ways to the type of knowledge and culture an organization possesses.

Create communities
Creating communities of practice to share tacit knowledge is one important way to mitigate the knowledge loss associated with employees leaving, Darr says. A community of practice is different from most communities or interest groups because it tackles a specific task or problem. The community discusses and shares insights, approaches, methods and solutions to reach a common goal. The point is that if one member of the community of practice leaves the company, the other members can carry on. At General Electric, a multi-billion dollar global enterprise with a diverse set of businesses from lighting and appliances to aircraft engines and energy distribution, effectively sharing knowledge across functions and teams within the company, then sharing information geographically across the globe, are tremendous challenges, says Robert House, GE Consumer and Industrial HR manager. One vehicle that’s been tremendously successful is an “Action Work Out,” a cross-functional, teambased activity that runs over three to five days with the goal of improving a process. Improvements are made by observing what is happening and making quick, real-time changes to get results. “The involvement of crossfunctional team members who bring different perspectives and areas of expertise to the issue results in sharing of ideas and knowledge, and greater problem-solving capacity than a single person could provide,” House says.

Darr says both shadowing and mentoring techniques can be used to articulate or uncover tacit knowledge. “In some sense, capturing tacit knowledge about a job is like trying to write down an old family recipe by watching your grandmother make her beloved holiday cookies,” he says. The person doing the task is most helpful if she describes what she is doing each step of the way, turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The observer then records the doer’s actions. Mercurio says that shadowing and mentoring are the best methods because they provide a direct opportunity to share information between people through actions as well as words. “Once the observation is completed, a debriefing process should take place in order to determine what questions remain unanswered,” she says. “Assessing the learning experience or the interpretation of the learning experience is critical.”
Continued on page 8

is your exit strAtegy Working?

Check out page 8 for more details.

shadow and mentor
Job shadowing is how employees learn about a job by walking through the work day as a shadow to a competent worker. Employees with limited work experience in a given area can witness firsthand the work environment and occupational skills in practice. Mentoring can include peers sharing their experiences and learning from each other’s past successes and failures. A crucial distinction between shadowing, mentoring and other forms of training is that shadowing and mentoring transfer knowledge based on experience, from someone who has practiced the desired knowledge or skill.

The Leading Edge - Spring 2010

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