knowledge is the master key for career success

“Any investment in knowledge pays the best interest “----. Benjamin

Twenty first century, is of knowledge society dealing with knowledge economy across vast global digital village. We are witnessing dramatic changes in business scenario, global alliances, acquisitions /mergers, where technology is taking away routine jobs and creating new and more efficient jobs but needing new skills. In this fast changing global business scenario, disruptive political atmosphere of uncertainty where technology is outpacing business rules and practices, knowledge is considered vital asset for survival and growth of organisations and professionals. Creation, management and sharing of knowledge by all stakeholders is the real power to stay as business leader. Likewise, a professional who continuously stays updated in his/her skill set, is the most needed and respected person by the management as well as by the team. Therefore growth and success of an organisation are intimately linked to its knowledge base.  Like CEO, CFO, CTO, CIO, a new important and highly paid position of Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) has come up.  His/her role is to develop Knowledge Management (KM) culture and tools/techniques so that all employees get aligned to the KM and participate most willingly and easily in creation, using and sharing of their knowledge.

Gaining knowledge, sharing and updating it are the basic ingredients for any success at any level. Till last decade, trend was “Power lies in holding of knowledge” but with rapid advances in IT and internet facilities, power lies in “Knowledge Sharing”. Knowledge is the intellectual property of the organisation, created and maintained by its professionals.  This resource must be available to all stakeholders at all times, irrespective of any movement /non availability of people. Therefore knowledge should be built progressively and well organised to be utilised by all employees. 

In today’s business, like a strong lock needs multiple keys to open it; you too need multiple skills to open the doors for your success in your chosen career. Knowledge cannot be stolen and it only grows when shared. Even if others copy your idea, you are still ahead of them as a leader, since others are followers. Good knowledge of the subject (domain), rules, regulations and business practices of the organisation, law and policies of the government and emerging technologies can help you to be more confident, good decision maker. You can lead your team by personal performance and dealing more effectively with customers, vendors and business partners. 

 Knowledge of emerging technologies and best business practices will enhance your competence and overall productivity. You may be a  dean/professor in a university/college or a manager/ team leader in any product/service industry or any other professional in a company related to construction, manufacturing, transportation, real estate, IT/software, media, design, and finance or trading; you cannot afford to stay static with your basic degree /certification. To gain knowledge and stay updated, you need to   find time for participation in workshops, seminars/conferences, research work or go on technical visits to other industries/countries. Although it is the responsibility of every CEO and his/her CKO/ HR team to plan and schedule training and up-skilling of their employees, yet you too must be on the lookout for various upcoming seminars, conferences, symposiums, workshops, tech-fairs, on-line courses and seek management’s permission to participate in those events. If you are a project manager or a Head of Department (HOD) in an organisation / institution, you must facilitate and recommend your team members to participate in such events. Knowledge gained and literature collected by participating in such events must be shared within the department or team for cumulative gain of the organisation. The knowledge gained by all employees is the intellectual assets of the organisation and by sharing these resources; you can save in time, effort and cost in completion of any assigned task. Such gains for your team /organisation will provide acceleration to your success and stability in your career.

Scope. The scope of this article is to broadly cover:

·         Organisational knowledge sharing as strategic and vital asset at the corporate level.

·         Individual Knowledge gaining and sharing for career growth by any young processionals of any field, working in a medium to large size industry/organisation.

Some basic steps for knowledge gaining and sharing are covered in succeeding paragraphs.

Knowledge is power.  It is well established that real business power is not in holding the knowledge but in sharing it.  Knowledge about resources, capabilities and limitations of own organisation and those of competitors is most essential for strategic planning, decision making and future growth. Lack of knowledge at any corporate level will be a big handicap for developing/ maintaining alliances or competing in the emerging global market. Therefore any upcoming organisation must have its Knowledge Management System (KMS) and insist on knowledge creation and sharing among all stakeholders. At individual level, lack of knowledge will make you hesitant to speak in public and even during any meeting / discussion.  Therefore you need to quickly develop new knowledge /skills and move toward excellence. If you have good aptitude for a subject/skill, you can quickly absorb instruction/process and also have positive attitude, you can quickly gain required knowledge/ skills. It is true that some may be born with good aptitude / memory, while others may have to put an extra effort to grasp the subject/instructions.

Data, Information, Knowledge .

·         Data. It  relates to  observations, measurements ,  facts  or business/finance transactions  which are collected /stored in form of  figures , text , codes, symbols, images or sound and held as data bank.

·         Information. It is an organised, structured, interpreted and summarised data. Data when processed as per rules, regulations, constrains and business practices and appropriately organised on suitable medium like computer,  it becomes information. Right information must reach the right person in right time to aid good decision making and appropriate response to emerging situation.

·         Knowledge. Information is component of knowledge but not the knowledge. When information is suitably indexed, efficiently stored and facilitated for quick retrieval and use by all stake holders, it is knowledge. While individual knowledge must continuously grow for personal career success, organisational knowledge must be well structured and interconnected though media like internet/leased lines and shared among all entities / stakeholders.

Why knowledge more important today?  Indeed knowledge in some form had been there in most organisations, either in the mind/brain of subject experts /individuals or written down  on paper or recorded on big storage of computer systems. It was more of information system serving as MIS / HRM or Database for Decision Support System (DSS).  Some organisations have been using data warehouses and data mining for reusing available intellectual assets. During emerging digital economies, organisations need knowledge in more structured and indexed form for easy access and reuse by all stakeholders. Drivers for leveraging knowledge in emerging business scenario are:

·         Pace of change in IT. Technologies which are rapidly changing and have greatly impacted the business world are Cloud computing, Big Data, Internet, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

·         Globalisation.  Corporate are transacting in just one global village which has no physical boundaries or time zones or currency restriction. It is highly competitive loaded with uncertainty.

·         Virtual working.  An efficient KMS can facilitate employees to do remote logging into their corporate database and work from their home/other locations.

·         Expectations. Today’s customers and business partners expect lot more than their formal requirement.

·         Faster growth.  To attain and sustain faster growth, business alliances are based on level of knowledge usability.

 What is Knowledge?  There are many good definitions of knowledge but  there is no final one definition, as it depends on the context of the organisation or individual. Some common components of knowledge are:

·         Government laws, rules, regulations, policies and incentives.

·         Transportation networks and route navigation.

·         Health care data related to patients, diseases, and hospitals.

·         Legal documents and judgments by various courts.

·         Land data related to forest, water-bodies, agriculture land,   government/ reserved  land, waste land and  crops.

·         Survey general data, related to  terrain digital maps and aerial images,

·         Rules, regulations, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Instructions of the organization.

·         Project reports and lessons learnt from past projects.

·         Customers, Channel partner and business partner’s potential data.

·         Vendor / sub-contractor’s competence and reliability data,

·         Agreements and commitments with alliance partners.

·         Feasibility reports of Projects.

·         Analysis reports and design drawings /documents of various projects/products.

·         Market trends and public expectations.

·         Cyber security, secrecy and privacy of data.

·         Domain knowledge of the area of your career- business, engineering, journalism, health care. Sale/marketing HR, law, education, manufacturing, construction, designs and so on.

·         Strength and limitations of your team members – Domain, technology, hands-on experience.

·         Knowledge of Software packages / tools for enhancing productivity in your area of work. It could include Programming languages ( Java, C++, Python, Algol , Prolog , DBMS(Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL ), Cloud computing, Big Data (Hadoop , Ruby, Pig) and so on.

·         Animation, Designing, Manufacturing and CNC machine programs.

·         Filming and Digital photography for Mass communication.

·         Quality standards for testing and quality control.

·         Digital marketing- Content writing, web advertising, branding and networking.

·          Engineering drawings using CAD, CAM and process sheets.

Organisational Knowledge Management System (KMS) .

Most of the progressive organisations have been having MIS, DSS and distributed database systems but only a few had formally organised their KMS. The speed of transactions, frequent changes in business requirements, rapid changes in technologies and ever growing complexity lead to uncertainty in the business landscape. This necessitates restructuring the organisation and its information flow to make it responsive to the global competition. Top management must transform the whole organisation and excel in quality, commitment, innovations, delivery process and performance. This can be achieved by formulating a sound KM policy and using domain knowledge, incentivising knowledge workforce and judiciously deploying IT resources. All employees must reuse available resources and not reinvent the wheel. Reuse of available assets saves in time, cost and effort. In addition, it improves the quality with lesser time needed for testing and validation/verification of a product.

Developing corporate KMS . Organisational knowledge consists of 5WH (What, Why, Where, When, Who and How). It requires full commitment and participation by the top management to create a separate department/centre responsible for KMS. It must be recognised that KMS is different than Information System.  A medium/large organisation must have well qualified and experienced persons who have good domain knowledge and good working knowledge of IT and inspired to develop KMS. KMS will draw lot of knowledge from individual’s expertise.

Knowledge by the individual

After you join a company/organization, there will be so much to learn on-the-job for which you must have right aptitude and positive attitude to take maximum advantage of the opportunity.  In addition, there are large number of on-line free / paid courses offered by COURSERA, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Future-learning and by lead universities like Stanford, Wharton, Princeton,  Carnegie Foundation, Michigan, MIT in USA , IIT’s in India and many others academies and universities  across the world . MOOC and COURSERA are the most popular sources and many countries have adopted or adapted  these for  similar/near similar versions in their own languages .You can search the web and pick the right on-line course for you from https://www.coursera.org,   https://www.mooc-list.com/,  http://www.futurelearning.org/.

·         Sharing of knowledge. Knowledge is multiplication factor to enhance your productivity, synergy and respect among participants.  If one team knows two skills and other team knows five skills, collectively both the teams will gain additional expertise which is more than the arithmetic total of 2+5 skills. On the other hand, keeping everything close to your chest shows your complex or fear; and this will lead to retardation in your professional growth. If as a professor or research scholar, you are doing research work / innovation on some new product/process, sharing of your approach with others will help you to take advantage of other’s experience and have higher take off, instead of re-inventing the wheel. A good old saying is ever true- “Power is gained by sharing knowledge and not by hoarding it”.

·         Knowledge of customs and culture.  It is necessary to be aware of customs, cultures and traditions of team members, when working in international team. You should cheerfully mingle among team members and celebrate their religious festivals /national days.

·         Every career is a long and tough journey. A service carrier is a long journey with many challenges where you are to respond quickly and appropriately. It is not a short run or walk that you can do alone and leisurely. A race could be undertaken alone but for a journey you need partnership and reciprocal support. There will be simple as well as difficult situations to overcome by using own plus other’s expertise. Take help and give help is the real mantra to stay on track during a long journey.

·         An approach to increase knowledge sharing. As a manager/team leader you must establish a system to manage the flow of knowledge across a team, a group and an organization. Knowledge management is the process of improving an organisation’s performance through designing and implementing systems or tools for creation and sharing of knowledge. Through good knowledge management, companies can develop better products, retain employees and improve customer satisfaction.  Some action points are:

·         Support employees to take time off from their work to acquire new knowledge.

Various workshops, conferences or seminars, are the ways that you and your team can acquire new knowledge. The CEO and HOD/ managers need to plan at the start of the year, a training schedule for all employees to take time off to learn new knowledge/ skills. According to a research, 70% of workers claim that training and development policy of the company is the most important support for their career growth. Therefore, when employees are granted the opportunity to go for training, they will become happier workers. You can get your employees trained, through online training courses which give them flexibility to pick and choose what and when they want to learn. The company must invest on employee’s training and should not expect them to do it on their own time and expense. Happy and satisfied employees after completing their on-line courses and /or   face-to-face (f2f) training through workshops, seminars, conferences, will come back fully recharged and find better ways of doing their tasks.

·         Facilitate interaction among employees.  Most companies are doing away with traditional work cubicles in favour of an open space layout to increase opportunities for co-workers to interact throughout the day. The open environment ensures that people are aware of what is going on in the office and they can ask questions or exchange ideas rather than keeping  those to themselves.

·         Brain-storming / Brain-sketching sessions. Provide opportunities for the employees to share knowledge by organizing mini brainstorming/ brain sketching sessions during team meetings. You could also create an online portal for employees to submit suggestions and sharing their knowledge any time.

·         Incentivize knowledge sharing.  The CEO, HOD, project managers should institutionalize incentive for knowledge gaining and sharing. The incentive could be monetary or non-monetary.

·         Having an open-door policy. This is a small step for founders/owners of the company, but a huge leap of faith for employees. They will get assured that the founder /CEO are approachable always and encourage employees to share their knowledge/ experience, ideas or information.

Learning from past projects/events . Learning from past events, correcting the present process and planning for the future is a proven approach for enduring success.   Knowledge sharing may involve audits or reviews of projects, once they are completed, followed by sharing insights gained from the review. The team may reflect on following questions:

·         What was the objective/target  of the project– Customer Requirement (CR)?

·         What happened during implementation indicating, both success and failure? -  Did your team meet CR fully or no?

·         What were the problems and how did team handle those?

·         Any suggestions for future?

·   Digital Indexing Library. The organization / institution should have Digital Library for storing information of reusable assets .It should also have very effective indexing and search software for easy access to knowledge related to the need of a team or individual professional. This helps in reusability of available resources /sharing past knowledge.

Knowledge Sharing is Career Caring.

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It is good to know how much you know and equally important to let others know how much you know.

It is also important to know how much you don’t know but it is more important to know from where/whom to know what you don’t know.

Then don’t wait but plan to reach the source of knowledge and learn what you did not know. When you know what you did not know, you are knowledgeable and start sharing with others.

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Challenges in establishing KMS .  Setting up KMS is considered the most challenging initiative for any organisation. It is not an easy journey as it requires complete transformation of work culture, restructuring of the origination and new approach to deal with complexity of data and use of software tools. Some of the major challenges are:

·         Central Database.  Most departments like their own library and do not put their best foot forward for central initiative. It is important to have highly motivated and committed workforce who captures various ideas, innovations, articles, designs, project reports, proceedings of seminars/discussions, customer/vendor feedback and maintain central knowledge database.

·         Consistency and reliability. KMC needs  a number of efficient professionals who are proficient in KM software tools. There should be no duplicates or inconsistent contents. Information must be reliable to make decisions.

·         Easy to retrieve required information. Data structure, indexing/clustering of database and query language should be user friendly. By typing in simple tags/keywords, you should be able to find what you need.

·         Culture Building. Top management must be firm to bring cultural change in the organisation to willingly crate and use/reuse available knowledge assets. This will ensure their full engagement, participation, and quality of interaction. Organisational KMS portal/website is most potent approach for members to exchange ideas, comments and build on them regardless of their location within country or abroad. Once your KMS website is live, you must engage with users by answering their queries in a timely manner and recognizing / gratifying contributions by the stakeholders.

·         Ego of self-recognition. A very common attitude among workforce is not to look at available knowledge created by others/predecessors and instead start afresh and build new product to claim their indispensability. This ego needs to be firmly curbed.

·         Identifying Subject Matter Experts (SME) .  As your KMS grows, you will like to identify SMEs and capture their knowledge. SMEs may be your own workforce or outside users of your website/portal. Organisation must facilitate collaboration and ideation among geographically dispersed team members. 

·         Incentivise people to share their knowledge.  People like helping others by sharing their expertise provided they see something in it for them. Therefore it is important for the top management/CKO to give immediate incentive to those who create and reuse knowledge assets. Organisational KMS portal/website is most potent approach for members to exchange ideas, comments and build on them regardless of their location.

·         Emerging Trends in KMS. Knowledge is power, and when properly harnessed. Knowledge has to be pulled out of organisation’s documentation, project reports, user manuals, guidelines, lists, databases, memos, and files.  It also includes what is in the minds of team members, as the expertise. Technology has had a tremendous impact on knowledge management (KM), inspiring the development of robust software platforms to leverage KM strategies. Knowledge management software continues to evolve in response to new demands and challenges. Some of the trends making knowledge as vital asset are given below:

·         Social Media Impact. Social media is fast changing the way we interact / network and do our business. People are already using LinkedIn, Facebook, Whatsapp , Instagram , Google+ and Twitter to promote their business, products and services by connecting with larger audiences. Social networking sites are easy to use and much cost efficient tools for marketing, trading and communicating.

·         Ease of Search. Fast and easy search of required information mainly depends on efficient indexing/clustering of data.  As indexing and searching techniques continues to mature, users will be able to retrieve files and documents more speedily and thus increase their productivity.

·         Easy to use collaboration tools.  Inter-connecting your team members can be a challenge, especially if you have staff working remotely within own country or abroad. Fortunately, Knowledge Base Systems (KBS) / software tools are becoming more collaborative, allowing individuals to work on common document and interact in real-time.

·         Mobile Technologies. Using smartphones or tablets has become a primary means of accessing the Web for both personal and business purpose. Mobile devices are light weight, easy to carry, use less battery power and also save in money and time. Thus, mobile technology and KM software are becoming inseparable. Employees/customers and vendors can access to an organization's KMS while they're on the move.         

·         Photo/images are replacing text.  Already product catalogues are available in digital form with embedded image alongside. An image is much faster and easier to comprehend than long textual description.

·         Integrated Approach. Social intranet software eliminates the need to log into several different applications. Team members can work from an integrated location that allows for all processes to be handled in one convenient mode.

·         User Interaction.  Every organisation looks for team members who are willing to contribute to their companies by sharing their ideas/expertise.

·         User Interface (UI).  Organisations need experts to develop an efficient and user friendly UI that makes it easy to navigate, input data or retrieve require information.

·         Holistic Approach Future KMS will be more holistic to include vendors, clients and customers.

·         Consistency. To ensure data integrity and consistency knowledge database should be updated on line and automatically. This will improve productivity.

·         Customisation is essential. We still do not have KM software “one size fits all". Therefore appropriate customization is essential for the success of KMS.

·         Customer support. Customer support is crucial for evolving an efficient KMS. Since your knowledge base software houses your product and service documentation, it's the perfect platform for integration of customer services with it.

·         Fault tolerance. Regardless of how well-designed a KMS may be, bugs and other issues will occasionally arise. Knowledge management software developers have already started to incorporate features to generate fault report tickets quickly track error log and provide customer support.

Conclusion.   The master key for business growth and career success is knowledge acquiring organising and sharing among stakeholders.  Fortunately, knowledge software is rapidly becoming more accessible, functional and affordable. Software Development Agencies (SDAs) are already integrating social intranet software with KM features for evolving more powerful business strategy and information assets. Whenever employees, customers or vendors encounter bugs or difficulty in extracting required information, they will be able to instantly open a ticket and get required system support. This keeps KMS at top performance while supporting / encouraging   KMS users.

Dr. Sarbjit Singh , Director , www.knowledgeshareindia.com

Former,  Executive Director. Apeejay College of Engineering. Gurgaon , Haryana, India

To know more, you may visit   www.amazon.in  or www.amazon.com   and type in my name – sarbjit singh   in the search window to access my two books:

11.    A2Z 26 steps for assured success.

22.    Career challenges during global uncertainty