1.List the Knowledge Management initiatives adopted by HP.
2.Explain the impact of adopting Knowledge Management practices on HP’s success.
3.Conduct a brief search about Lotus notes and explain how it is useful in establishing a knowledge base. What is the importance of having a knowledge base in knowledge management?
4.Why do you think training review never took off? What could have Karney done to make it work?
5.What are the incentives that Karney used to promote the knowledge bases? What was the effect of those incentives?
6.Karney declared that there is a risk with the knowledge base. What was it and how did he propose to overcome it?
7.Why do you think the knowledge management with the PPO customers did not succeed?
8.The PPO knowledge management group is currently working on three projects. List these three projects; predict some risks that would face the implementation of these projects and how to overcome them from a knowledge management perspective?
1.Hewlett-Packard is an immensely successful knowledge intensive company. The company’s knowledge regarding products, markets and customers is the largest source of competitive benefit. The company also follows a decentralised structure of organisation and mode of operations. Knowledge management efforts of HP have proliferated. HP’s three most notable knowledge management efforts have been the “Trainers’ Trading Post”, the “Connex” guide to Internal experts and “HP Network News” a source for the HP dealers. Importance is given to building awareness and on sharing of lessons from several projects which are under the pipeline.
The Trainer’s Trading Post consists of educating the HP employees. There are over two thousand trainers spread all across the company and work to impart knowledge amongst the workers of the organisation. These trainers operate in small groups. It is a Lotus-notes based forum to facilitate thousands of educators and trainers of HP and help in sharing ideas.
Connex is a short form for “connection to experts”. The Connex guide is basically a help for knowledgeable and wise people within the laboratories of the HP Company. A new product generation supporting group prototyped “Knowledge Links”. However the design being overly ambitious, the system was not built. HP Network News however was hugely successful
2.Knowledge management is extremely important for the success of a company. The overload of data is responsible for the increasing importance of knowledge management (Holtshouse, 2013). Knowledge is considered as an asset to the company but requires labour as well as money for its effective management. Different approaches to knowledge management aim to create, diffuse, store as well as apply knowledge which is either new or existing. Knowledge management facilitates decision making capabilities. It also helps on building learning organisations by making the routines of learning and also stimulates innovation and cultural change (Hislop, 2016).
HP rose to success leaving behind its competitors, due to the successful management of knowledge. The knowledge management helped HP reap several benefits for example speed and velocity like faster response to clients, colleagues as well as the faster delivery of services. It also lead to increased velocity of the sales cycle. It also leads to consistent delivery of services, reduced risk and higher customer satisfaction (Fayolle, 2014). The knowledge development also led to faster transfer of best practice, continuous improvement of services as well as utilization of the customer knowledge to solve the business problems of the customer. Thus it can be said that HP has facilitated from the activities regarding knowledge maangement of the organisation (Assouroko et al. 2014.).
3.Lotus notes is a combination of document creator and indexer, database manager and generator as well as a messaging platform, which permits the information to be distributed between structured and unstructured array.
The importance of using lotus notes is that it facilitates knowledge management and information in the particular cases. Lotus notes can be retrieved by users as well as accessed by them irrespective of time and location. Lotus notes finds application in a variety of fields including publishing, maintaining, sharing, searching and creating information. It helps in the maintenance of an organisational memory which is computer based. It also helps in full text search capability as well as document indexer. Lotus notes is required at several stages of the knowledge base (Haimes, 2015).
Having a knowledge base is extremely important in case of knowledge management as it helps in faster and better decision making and also helps to find the necessary resources and relevant information. It also helps in reusing ideas, documents as well as expertise, facilitates avoiding the same mistakes twice as well as communicating important information quickly and widely. The stimulation of innovation and growth is also possible in case of knowledge base also makes scarce expertise widely available (Pemsel and Wiewiora, 2013).
Karney instituted three different knowledge bases for use by the educators. “Training review” was a collection of “Consumer reports” which comprised evaluations of training resources. It was unfortunate however that the training review did not take off. The concerned educators were reluctant to give opinions online about the worth of external providers or source materials. Also there was not any sort of reward structure for participation. Despite the innovative tactics adopted by Karney, the review did not take off. Prospective users were also given free Lotus Notes licences and rewards were also available for any individual who achieved a milestone in terms of submission (Smith, 2014). Despite countless attempts by Karney, with the help of free email and voice mail exhortations, he felt the requirement to include fresh contributions.
Karney should have instituted the concepts of positive responses and also employed more people for the task of review of the knowledge bases. Focus should also have been given on the knowledge sharing activities as well as utilisation of knowledge management as a strategic group for the company. The members of training review should have been asked to be more involved. Thus more planning should have been put into the training review (Fayolle, 2014).
5.Karney adopted several new tactics to facilitate knowledge base promotion. During the establishment of a new knowledge base, Karney gave out 3000 free airline miles for the fifty readers who were the first. He also gave out the prize of five hundred miles for any individual who submitted a transmission. After this, promotions also involved the offer of miles for contributions, for responses to the available questions and for questions as well. Despite two thirds of the educator community having a posting, and also more than one third having submitted comment or posting themselves. Despite several attempts Karney also understood the need for fresh contributions. He also did not want the database to be in trouble.
Incentives help in the contribution of assets to the company as it is bound to increase the interest among the employees. They also help in knowledge sharing. The better the incentives, the better will be the contribution by the employees. It will also lead to increased performance and attainment of goals and objectives. However in case of HP it did not lead to increased success of the knowledge bases and the hence Karney was extremely dejected (Fayolle, 2014).
6.The current approach of HP puts emphasis on the building of awareness as well as the development of common vocabulary as well as discusses the framework building to workshops is subtle. The managers look forward to the different frameworks of implementation. Knowledge base needs resolving risks as well understanding the causes to avoid them in the future. The risks are due to several barriers in content, procedures and routines, in organisation procedures as well as selection problems. Technological problems are also there (Institute, 2016).
The solution proposed was to employ an efficient team, with proper capabilities of management as well as understanding in order to ascertain the problems. The people need to understand the intricacies of the organisational structure and to support, formalize as well as simplify the routines and procedures (Von Krogh, 2012).
7.The knowledge management articles with the PPO customers failed to work because the aim of understanding the knowledge and available information and summarizing it across the PPO did not however, work as the goal. This was because it was overly ambitious and ultimately the system was never built. Thus there was no proper connection of the customers and the company representatives. Besides this the company HP is a decentralised company and hence there is the decentralisation of information. The knowledge management activities implementation did not work.
It can be said safely that there was a lack of proper motivation and due to this launching of a tool was not useful at all. Several challenges where faced with the accuracy of data as well. Effective interpretation of the knowledge is also important for the effective running of the organisation. Apart from the tools, technological aids and databases, the sharing and success of knowledge management comes from the inter-relationships of the people as well (Zhuge, 2012).
8.Currently, the PPO knowledge management group is working on three projects. The first involves, “competitor information for HP’s Components group”. The second aims at creating a Web-based interface to two types of research information including both primary and secondary information. The third system is involved with managing the international marketing intelligence. All the projects are developed in collaboration with PPO groups as well as PGIS groups. Examples of PPO groups include Product Marketing and Change Management. The Product Generation Management systems do not aim at managing knowledge by itself, but facilitate the structuring process as well as process of disseminating knowledge with the help of information technology.
Web- based interfaces or browser based applications have several problems. It is due to the possibility of upgrades of these interfaces that the company applications do not work with the new versions. The management of international management intelligence is extremely noteworthy as well as requires extremely dependable employees to keep the confidentiality of the information intact.
It is the duty of the authorities to put the focus on the knowledge control and the correct distribution of opportunities.
References:
Institute, P., 2016. Requirements Management. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.
Fayolle, A., 2014. Handbook of research on entrepreneurship. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Pub. Ltd.
Hislop, D., 2016. Knowledge management in organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zhuge, H., 2012. Knowledge grid. Singapore: World Scientific.
Smith, R., 2014. The effective change manager’s handbook. London: Kogan Page.
Holtshouse, D.K., 2013. Information technology for knowledge management. Springer Science & Business Media.
Assouroko, I., Ducellier, G., Boutinaud, P. and Eynard, B., 2014. International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, 7(1), pp.54-74.Knowledge management and reuse in collaborative product development–a semantic relationship management-based approach.
Pemsel, S. and Wiewiora, A., 2013. International Journal of Project Management Project management office a knowledge broker in project-based organisations.
Von Krogh, G., 2012. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 21(2), pp.154-164.How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda.
Haimes, Y.Y., 2015. Risk modeling, assessment, and management. John Wiley & Sons.
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