Kaplan, a major international consulting organisation, wanted to capture lessons from major projects. Often, the relevant knowledge may be held somewhere else in the organisation than within the team, meaning the team must engage in knowledge sourcing - defined as accessing the knowledge and expertise of other organisational members - to acquire needed knowledge. Below is the story of how Kaplan is doing it.

How is knowledge captured and codified in the Kaplan consulting organisation?

From a general scan of what similar companies were doing, their competitive intelligence led them to select the implementation of an after-action review in the form of a project postmortem. The after-action review was a new procedure, and it was initially piloted with a group of experienced consultants. Project managers who became experienced with the postmortem were subsequently asked to become resource people for those willing to learn and try it out. A new role of knowledge journalist was created; the idea was to appoint a neutral, objective person who had not been a member of the original project team to facilitate the postmortem process and capture the key learnings from the project. Finally, the post-mortem was added as a final step for all project managers before they could officially and formally deem a project to be completed. Besides, Kaplan views stories as a powerful means of discovering and transferring knowledge. They are very good for conveying complex messages simply. Storytelling is a unifying and defining component of all communities. Stories exist in all organisations; managed and purposeful storytelling provides a powerful mechanism for disclosing intellectual or knowledge assets in companies. It can also provide a nonintrusive, organic means of producing sustainable cultural change. Therefore, storytelling is strongly encouraged in the company. It is, of course, not enough to create rich environments where people can share. Kaplan provides lots of these environments: an online Knowledge Universe with a catalogue of best practices, a company e-learning, and a section of the public website Knowledge Street, which is devoted to promoting knowledge sharing. Also required are good ideas, leadership, and motivated people. A few years ago, Jack spent some time in a Kaplan customer service outside Sydney, studying how people used Eureka. The trouble was that the employees were not using it. Management, therefore, decided workers needed an incentive to change. To this end, they held a contest in which workers could win points (convertible into cash) each time they solved a customer problem, by whatever means. The winner was an eight-year veteran named Nick, with more than 900 points. Nick really knew his stuff, and everyone else knew this too. Nick never used the software. The runner-up, however, was a shock to everyone. Ann had been with the company only a few months, had no previous experience with copiers, and did not even have the software on her machine. Yet her 600 points doubled the score of the third-place winner. Her secret: she sat right across from Nick. She overheard him as he talked and persuaded him to show her the inner workings of copiers during lunch breaks. She asked other colleagues for tips, too.

What knowledge do they want to capture?

Kaplan understands that the collection of internal and external knowledge sharing can then be transmitted within (between employees) or outside (from company to client) the organisation. The Kaplan knowledge-sharing system is essentially an intranet covering both codified and personalised knowledge. The Sharing system consists of a global editor, contributors, a decision committee for its evolution, and about 25 managers from different departments who play the roles of resources support contributors in capturing project experiences and marketing know-how. These managers drive the development of reusable knowledge. They spend 50% of their time on this function and are supported by an 18-strong central team. Kaplan rates the taxonomy as being very important. They came up with a shared taxonomy for business processes. The incentive system is also quite interesting: The knowledge sharing systems shares are given for urgent responses, discussion group responses, objects published, reuse feedback, presentations, and spreadsheets. A total of 1,500 shares means an individual is invited to attend a conference. In the Kaplan E-learning environment, company policies, process documents, employee handbook, and research reports are published and shared with all employees. Monthly and weekly training is also provided. Besides that, the resources also share effective client communication and negotiation techniques with junior consultants during regular mentoring sessions. Sourced knowledge also provides an alternative lens through which prior knowledge and existing problems can be viewed so that teams can interpret and adapt the knowledge to generate entirely new solutions to solve existing problems.

QUESTIONS

1. What types of knowledge are mentioned in the case study? Provide some examples from the case study for each type of knowledge.

2 Analyse how the organisation uses the knowledge cycle in the case study and which knowledge model could be used to help organisations effectively manage and utilise their collective knowledge and expertise.

3. Design the best approaches to capture and codify the given knowledge in the case study. This section encompasses the process of capturing knowledge, involving the conversion of both tacit and explicit knowledge into a more structured and explicit form. This step includes identifying, collecting, and transforming information from various sources into a format that can be easily understood and shared.

4. What codification techniques would you use to archive the explicit knowledge?.

This question specifically focuses on codification, which involves organising and structuring explicit knowledge into a more systematic and organised format. In this context, it emphasises the aspect of archiving and structuring explicit knowledge for easy retrieval and use within an organisation.

The codification of explicit knowledge can be achieved through various techniques, such as cognitive mapping, decision trees, knowledge taxonomies, and task analysis. USE THIS TECHNIQUE FOR THIS QUESTION