Literature Survey
Knowledge as an asset is gaining more and more recognition as we progress towards a more competitive and open market. Firms want to capture the knowledge that the workers have, to save costs, propel growth and fertilize cross learning.
Mckinsey Consultants Susanne Hauschild, Thomas Licht, and Wolfram Stein, (Mckinsey Quarterly, Number1 2001), compared fifteen financially successful firms against fifteen less successful companies. They found that the more successful companies build a corporate environment that ensures continual application, distribution, and creation of knowledge. Most of the successful companies had incentives to reward the knowledge workers. Distribution was achieved through strategic staffing and job-rotation so as to capture the tacit knowledge within a firm.
In the article entitled “Is knowledge Management the future of HR”[1], the author describes how the loss of talented personnel can lead to considerable knowledge erosion. The author is also of the opinion that interview processes should be modified to identify more accurately the prospective employee who can help maximize collaboration. Therefore the article concludes the need for a comprehensive interviewing and retention strategy.
Margaret Barchan quotes[2], the example of a Swedish company (Celemi), measuring the knowledge within a firm indirectly by assessing performances across several dimensions. The growth is measured in percentage terms to arrive at a net percentage change, which is taken to stand for the change in the knowledge held within the firm.
The literature survey indicates that there has been a move towards identifying HR policies as the key drivers of the KM-initiative; however there has been little effort towards establishing a concrete measure for the success of the KM-initiative by using HR-policies as a basis.
Hypothesis
The paper
Bibliography: 1. “Best practices and beyond: knowledge strategies,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 1, 1998. 2. Cope, Mick. Leading the organization to learn. The Financial Pitman Publishing, 1981. 317 pp. 3. Day, Jonathan; and Wendler, Jim; “The New Economics of Organization,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 1, 1998. p. 16-21. 4. Hauschild, Sussane; Licht, Thomas; and Stein, Wolfram. “Creating a knowledge culture,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 1, 2000. p.74-82. 5. KPMG Knowledge Management Research Report, 2000. 6. KPMG Knowledge Management Research Report, 1998.