A story is shared about an employee who resigned from an organization after serving for decades, taking with him critical skills and knowledge gained during his career. After his departure, several key work processes were paralyzed.
The Management spent a fortune training and equipping the replacement staff in order to stabilize operations. It is cases like these that elucidate the importance of knowledge management (KM) in an organization and is the example I narrate requested to explain my work as a practitioner in this field.
KM entails the collection, maintenance, and sharing of organizational knowledge. The Public sector in particular has lost a lot of knowledge through employee departures, mostly due to inadequate succession structures, the lack of KM practices and outright failure to appreciate its benefits.
The Public Service Commission (PSC) in 2009 issued a circular reviewing upward the mandatory retirement age in order to cushion the Service from the loss of employees with critical skills, especially those in technical areas and in whom the Government had invested heavily in capacity building.
Ministries, Departments and Agencies were, therefore, required to provide mechanisms for succession management.
A trove of knowledge flows within the Public sector daily but there is little or no accountability about its deployment to improve service delivery to the citizens. More attention should be on present and future knowledge needs, how key information should be captured, stored, managed, disseminated or reused.
Knowledge and skills within organizations is lost in various ways including retirement, resignation, transfers, lack of documentation of project reports or weak mechanisms for learning and sharing among co-workers.
It is fallaciously assumed that senior or older members of staff hold the most amount of critical information. Possession and acquisition of knowledge has no boundaries, at least not in terms of age of the individual.
It is necessary, therefore, to create systems where knowledge is harnessed from all employees and disseminated across the entire organization.
The demand for efficient service delivery by the Public sector has increased, resulting in the need for practices to create, organize, share and store knowledge, as it plays a critical role in ensuring continuity of processes.
These interventions ensure efficiency and productivity, minimize duplication of efforts, and improve access to resources necessary to generate new knowledge, encourage creation of innovative systems and, when adapted by the Public sector, lead to improved service delivery and accountability.
In the long run, there is need for contextual understanding of knowledge management practices and systems in order for Public servants to be able to fully appreciate what might work best in their MDAs.
At the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK), we have adopted and prioritized knowledge management in order to address the aforementioned concerns.
However, given that KM is somewhat an emerging discipline, institutions should expect to face some challenges setting up the units, including, lack of incentives for the knowledge owners, misalignment of KM practices with the organization’s priorities and technological inadequacies.
The CAK has set up systems that support knowledge storage and sharing which has led to skill improvement, capture and storage of institutional memory, increased intellectual capital, and easier access and retrieval of information.
Further, we prioritized knowledge management activities in our strategic planning as well as harnessed ICT systems to facilitate storage and retrieval of knowledge, thereby ensuring long-term access to key data, across functions, even when staff exits happen.
Public agencies are now adopting to knowledge management as a response to an increasingly global environment, decreasing training budgets and the need for business continuity as a solution to cope with the increasing pressure on the Government to improve efficiency in service delivery. Consequently, effective and inclusive knowledge management strategies and tools can provide an important impetus for change.
KM also can plays an important role in ensuring that the current Public sector work practices pivots from secrecy to openness, ensures proper use of available infrastructure, adapts to a reduction in training and capacity building costs, and facilitates innovation.
Cognizant of this, it is imperative that the Public sector proactively engages personnel trained in KM and prioritize it within the institutions. Further, there is need to develop a curriculum in this field in order to ensure that the professionals in this sector are suitably equipped to adopt to the changing work environment.
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