Relationship of KM with other functions in an organization

Asked by Shahnawaz Khan

Hi Shahnawaz,

Great question! I am in full agreement to the last sentence you have written on Knowledge Management being a cross-functional discipline and needs to focused separately and with due importance. The fact that KM has a lot of integral points of coordination with other functions does make the judgement of whether it is to be aligned or viewed separately a difficult proposition to organizations. Let us look at Knowledge Management in stages: The first stage is ensuring creation of repositories, classification of artifacts for ease of people looking for information and therefore many look at Information Technology as one place where it should reside. The second stage mainly focuses on Knowledge sharing - creation of COI's - Communities of Interest and COP's Communities of Practices, Competency Development et al, which essentially means that Learning & Development plays a key focus and importance. So Training, Research and HR are possible places of alignment for few organizations. Stage 3 and 4 becomes more critical where in there is the "Re-Use of Knowledge that is captured and Virtual Teaming, respectively. Since all these require processes to ensure everything runs smooth, a natural way of looking at it is alignment with Quality, which most organizations follow. Ideally, to me, this should be viewed separately and given its due importance looking at the facts that Competency development, Processes for ensuring smooth functioning, Tools for enabling Information Mining, Storage and reuse, virtual team work, et al, are all critical components of KM, it is good to partner with other functions and work independently as a function towards building a good flow of information and subject matter experts within the organization.

Regards,

Sujatha