Executive summary
Knowledge management is a new way in which an organization can have a chance to encourage their employees to share knowledge. The experience and expertise that the various employees have in an organization now has a way in which it can be preserved and shared in within an organization. This has been an issue which has been difficult to undertake. Knowledge management is becoming an important function of enhancing productivity in an organization. This is because every little experience is made use of. Knowledge that is found in an organization is preserved. Knowledge management plan is a systematic approach that is taken to tap the knowledge that is used by employees for the benefits of these employees. This report will look at how Microsoft has undertaken knowledge management in their operations. Microsoft Corporation is the world leading software manufacturer. Although this is the case, there are some issues that are faced by this corporation that regards the way employees perceive knowledge management so that knowledge management is not fully adopted.
Introduction
There are different notions that are brought to fore when knowledge management is mentioned to many people. When knowledge management is brought in a business setting, it brings different definition for many people. This paper will try and discuss the following issues:
The effects that are brought about by knowledge management;
The difference between knowledge management and information management;
The various types of knowledge management;
The chain of knowledge and the role it plays when they are used to measure the success of knowledge practices; and
The applications that is associated with knowledge management.
Knowledge management can be defined as the leveraging of collective wisdom to increase responsiveness and innovation. From this definition, there three critical points that can be got from it. One of these points is the fact that knowledge is a collective entity and it exists as a connection. Another point to note is the fact that knowledge is a catalyst. This means that whenever knowledge is applied to an environmental condition, there is always some form of reaction from these conditions. If something does not precipitate action of any kind, then it cannot be referred to as knowledge. Some other practitioners have defined it as existing only in application. The third fact that can be retrieved from the definition is the fact that knowledge is very much useful in environments which have not been encountered. Knowledge is very much useful when it is used to solve problems where there has not been any solution of any kind being offered before. Knowledge work best in novel situations. This paper will look at the knowledge management plan for Microsoft Corporation.
Case study: Microsoft Corporation
Company background
The company for whom this report is being prepared is that of Microsoft Corporation which is a software giant based in California, US. The company is known for its Microsoft Office applications suite which is used worldwide. The vast amount of information and the wide coverage of their products need to have a proper management of knowledge for this company. This paper will look at the plan in which the company can follow to develop their knowledge management.
Initial prototype
The first prototype that was developed for the company was for one of the departments, Business Department. This is because this department used to receive a lot of requests from clients requesting for proposals that were used before. It was hard to have a prompt reply to these requests; this discouraged and embarrassed the requesters for these services. This prompted the Business Development department to request the information technology department to come up with a repository system which would make it possible for other departments to look for documents and whatever else they would like to have; there will be no need to request the help of the Business Development department. The Business Development wanted to carry out the searches using the various criteria like the name of the client, size of the deal, the industry they were in including the status of the proposals. Also integrated in the new information system were the property pages so that the metadata could be included.
The Business Development was also in need of a system which could encourage collaboration. This would enable the people working in a given area to have a reliable and efficient communication system where they would monitor the proposals that are active. This area of collaboration was translated to a place where all other documents are stored. This would replace the shared hard drivers and would therefore take their position. The objective was to have a functionality which would be out of the box as much as possible so as to be like the knowledge management systems as much as possible.
For the databases and the search functionality to be enhanced, Wireframes was created so that it could handle the static prototypes. This would also help to enhance the pages that were used for data entries. The initial plan was to have 100 proposals being handled. A consultant was hired to ensure that the software was customized. The risk was lowered by hiring a person who had a great expertise in this field. The result of the prototype was a very important aspect as this would serve to implement the knowledge management solution that would be implemented in the company.
Success of the prototype
The suggested prototype was approved as the department was given a go-ahead in the implementation of the prototype. This would therefore see that the prototype would bring fruition to the company and not to the department alone. There were numerous recommendation and new ways of brining in further improvements so that the complexity of the system would be reduced; this was so because of the fact that users who took their metadata to the company’s meta-data found the system to be cumbersome. This simplicity was achieved by creating an interface which was similar to spreadsheet that would enable people to change the metadata many projects at once. Another improvement is that there was an easier way of uploading the documents automatically. There was also a suggestion to integrate it with most applications that were commonly used for word processing. There were also suggestions that the data be organized in a taxonomic way.
Before the year 1999, Microsoft Corporate had not implemented any form of knowledge management. It was in the year 1999 that they started putting the pieces together and coming together with third-party companies to put a knowledge management plan. According to Microsoft, knowledge management is the part of the firm’s Digital Nervous System plan that has a relation with people. According to the company, it also entails the process of making use of the assets and experience in the company into knowledge. The most important applications to knowledge management are the project management, issue tracking planning of business and its analysis, and management of employees and training.
Knowledge management system customization: Business process reengineering
After the Business Development team was given a go-ahead with the plan of knowledge management, they had several hurdles that they had to overcome, some technical, while others regarded business side. This therefore means that they had to understand the requirements and what the company needs before everything else started. This is what is undertaken by architects, after all.
They went ahead and came up with an information architecture which would guide them in setting up the implementation so that there would be efficient organization of information so as to make good sense to the company. The company is organized in a matrix organization, which is both business verticals which include telecommunications, financial, automotive, and functional groups which include sales, consulting and development. This therefore meant that each area was to be given a metadata. Also to the information architecture, the team was tasked with the management of the complete information life cycle which include capturing, organizing, and archiving documents, proposals and the entire collection of information that was of paramount importance to the company.
Issues that needed to be addressed
One of the issues that needed to be addressed in Microsoft Company is that of competitive and secretive area; where employees and departments were competing so that the employees in these departments were not willing to share information and knowledge. There were therefore need to address these issues. Some of the solutions that were alimented included giving incentives to colleagues so that they would share information freely. This was achieved by appointing a point person in each department so that they would be concerned with how data would be shared.
Due to this, there have been a lot of changes in the process of business in various sectors even in the corporate sector alone. The
Customization of technology
After the information architecture was modeled to the right shape, there was the implementation part which was embarked on. There was a flexible classification system of documents which enabled easy search and quick way of navigation to their particular areas of interests. An example is that the automotive training was found to be associated with both the automotive and the training. There was need to integrate the legacy system which was already in existence with the knowledge sharing system of the organization. There was also a need to ensure that there was minimal service delivery interruption as much as possible. This was made possible by letting each department to plan for their own migration plans. All legacy systems were integrated one after the other.
There was also a need to include other documents apart from proposals alone. These included such documents like project plans, documents that are used for technical-architecture, or design specifications, and others. After integrating all these documents, there was a need to tackle the issues that relate to search. The search system was developed and configured to search in not only the repository of the documents, but also in other documents that were found in other departments in other departments like the wikis, and the intranets until all the documents were ,migrated to the knowledge management systems.
Challenges that were experienced
One of the problems that were experienced in the plan of the knowledge management in Microsoft was the issue of security. There are other customer data that are sensitive and cannot be shared. There was therefore a need to ensure that SSO is integrated to the entitlement systems that was used in Microsoft. There was the use of security model and the company and the Development department made use of this. Each department was to have their own security person to handle the security.
Another challenge that was experienced in the company was that of change and resistance to change. Most people in the departments were not ready to accept the move of information to other sectors. There was therefore the need to have an important functionality so that the data that are saved in the local disk are transferred to the new repository.
Conclusion
From the discussions above, it is clear that Microsoft Company, though a big company has not fully adopted knowledge management plan. There are issues that still need to be addressed. It is also clear that the issues that are seen in the paper regard those of people and management issues and not technical issues. People are not willing to share knowledge in the organization. This is a practice which has been there and practiced by many people for a long time. Some employees still do not understand the sharing of information in an organization. There is therefore a need to ensure that good training is undertaken. There is only one technical challenge that is seen in the company which is the many kinds of documents that need to be taken into consideration.
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