Introduction
Workers at Derife are completely dependent on data created and published by their colleagues. This proposal offers aspects of knowledge management as a solution to meet Derife’s strong need for information that can help to improve the implementation of projects and the running of the organization.
An online newsletter created and curated by the employees of Derife can be a non-obstructive, low cost, and highly effective way of sharing personal information that can influence the daily running of projects in the organization.
When combined with the present software for gathering published reports and availing them to project teams and management, the newsletter will be an informal addition that allows the transfer of tacit knowledge from the domain of individuals to the collective domain of the organization.
This proposal report addresses the aspects of the work carried out by the project team dealing with the settlement of refugees from the Horn of Africa. The team is new to the organization and does not have enough knowledge about its history, norms, and traditions, or subtle cultural aspects that can influence work performance. All that is available in the central repository is formalized knowledge about the projects done by the previous teams, codes of conduct, and other professional requirements and guidelines. These are top-down instructions that every employee needs to handle. They do not provide specific “knowing” experience that an employee would obtain from another employee as part of the apprenticeship.
Features of the proposal
This proposal to Derife seeks to compel the company to agree to implement the knowledge management initiative to cater to sharing personal experiences, suggestions, reviews, challenges, and other aspects of work performance.
Upon acceptance, the project will permit communication across all the directions of the organization’s hierarchy. Its informal nature will help the users capture knowledge that would, otherwise, be left out when formal reports and discussion forums are used. At the same time, it will not interfere with the present system for sharing explicit knowledge within the firm, which is provided by the installed software handling project reports and their dissemination.
The proposed intervention does not restrict input or output to a given structure. It can take captured knowledge in various multimedia forms like audio, video, text, and images. It will also integrate with the available technology platforms, such that Derife or any of its employees working in the Horn of Africa refugee settlement project can continue using their tablets, smartphones, desktop computers, and laptops connected to the Internet and company’s intranet to make additions or extract knowledge.
In addition to the basic input and output, there will be oversight ability for the management, which can capture information about the difficulties that employees face with any aspect of their jobs or the organization or external factors. From the monitoring options, the management will be able to listen to the thoughts of individual employees expressed directly or as metaphors, something that is now left out of the present knowledge management facilities at Derife.
The following are the elements that will need to be put in place to ensure that the proposal works for Derife. First, there will be the need to do preliminary studies on each employee assigned to the Horn of Africa project to monitor information that they are dealing with, both in explicit and tacit forms. This will entail real-time follow-up to their daily work activities and correspondence with colleagues about projects, as well as communication with the management. After that, there will be enough information to set up the newsletter facility online with its various social sharing features that will only be accessible to the employees of Derife.
It is possible that even with the option to share using the proposed unit, employees can still use other means inaccessible to the management. To discourage this behavior, the proposed unit will be informal and integrate all other known aspects of social sharing so that there are no noticeable differences and hindrances for the employees. The emphasis is on integrating with the existing communication channels, both the formal and the informal ones.
However, the unit will also use protocols and behavioral interventions that are independent of the technology in use, rather than make the whole initiative seem like another need to buy a software program. Its implementation will require employees to embrace new codes of conduct and modify their knowledge sharing beliefs, with the end goal being that other employees should be able to know what an employee already knows without having to stop what they are doing and going to seek the information.
New belief systems, once in place, will make both the management and the employees see each other as part of a community, where the unifying factor is to discern what one is doing and why one is doing, both at the individual level and at the collective level.
Derife should allow its employees to be contributors to an internal newsletter, where they express their work-related opinions, irrespective of their relevance to a given project. There should be a mandatory contribution threshold for all employees within the newsletter available online but only accessible to the employees and the general manager. They can then raise discussions about contributions by other workers. In the process, they can learn more about themselves, their management, their work, and any other aspect that helps them to know what they are doing and why they are doing it.
The aim of having a common avenue for sharing thoughts, in addition to the present central repository for project reports, is to ensure that personal knowledge held by an individual employee becomes available to the rest of the workers (Wallace, 2007). It can then be a basis for informing their decisions concerning their jobs. The newsletter can make use of different forms of sharing knowledge, such as puzzles, notes, stories, news, and case studies.
Even though individual employees may think that sharing knowledge is good, the current setting of Derife only allows them to share knowledge formally. This arrangement only captures the measurable and formal information about projects. However, the reality is that employees rely on tacit knowledge in dealing with job-related bureaucracies, and they have no way of capturing the information to reflect in their reports.
General Managers may insist that the organization already has software to manage knowledge and it is meeting the performance benchmarks presented as conditions for aid by donors. However, Derife should see the need to come up with ways to allow the employees to share what they know with their colleagues and with their manager or board of directors. The main reason for going with the proposal is that it does not call for investments that can derail the organization from its core mandate of settling refugees.
Concluding remarks
Although the management can consider employees as knowledge workers, this remains an untapped resource if there is no reliance on knowledge possessed by a worker in fulfilling the objectives of the organization. Working knowledge only serves as a bank that is only used to interpret the findings and to seek solutions to problems encountered when settling refugees. This emphasizes the need to implement our proposed knowledge management unit that encompasses cultural and activity code changes, as well as the provision of a platform for collecting and disseminating personal knowledge informally.
Reference
Wallace, D. P. (2007). Knowledge management. London, UK: Libraries Unlimited.