Knowledge Transfer

The concept of Knowledge Management is getting a growing concern from the present business publishers. However this can be used to achieve success within an organization. Knowledge management explains how to control the knowledge which is enclosed in the organizational systems and heads of the organizational employees. It also reckons application of advanced information technology to identify the impact of the existing knowledge in creating new knowledge.

Knowledge Transfer is a mechanism which helps to transfer productive ideas of one party in an organization to another party to those who need that information to take decisions. Even though transferring knowledge is difficult, the importance of Knowledge Transfer has increased in the recent past years due to several reasons. The rise in the level of knowledge included in the assets of the organizations has been contributed a lot towards the growing importance of Knowledge Transfer. The transformation of organizational control methods from hierarchical organizational structure to decentralized organizational structures has allowed more involvement and creativity from the frontline employees and has increased the importance of effective knowledge transfer. The improvements in the information technology such as Internet, Intranet and Lotus Notes have been opened up new paths to transfer knowledge.

In order to solve the problem of knowledge transfer, an organization needs to obtain the support from organizational structures and policies. Furthermore it is essential to provide set of policies regarding acquisition and creation of knowledge in order to develop an effective knowledge transfer in an organization.

When considering the process of knowledge transfer it can be explained under five specific stages as idea generation, sharing, evaluation, distribution and adoption.

When looking at the first stage which is idea generation, a large amount of literature can be founded regarding the methods of encouraging the creativity of people. According to the studies of Robert Sutton, several questions need to be asked in order to evaluate the group ability to become creative. Evaluator needs to question regarding the level of variety of the knowledge lies within the group, group's attitude on learning, the ability to come out new ideas, whether group hierarchy allow innovation and finally whether the group involves in continuous research.

Sharing knowledge means disclosure of ideas in order to assess the value of them. Therefore in practice normally idea sharing is integrated with evaluation and distribution. Distribution of ideas can be used only after the ideas are evaluated.

In order to share information two criteria are needed to be fulfilled. As the first criteria, the ideas need to be in an understandable format which enables others to clarify easily. Because distribution becomes much easier if the knowledge can be made into a formal or explicit manner. Therefore most of the skills and ideas can be converted into a codified or written format. But informal or tacit knowledge requires special methods to share them such as face to face contact and learning through observations. However these types of methods are more time concentrated and highly sensational and these are often used by the Apprenticeships. Szulanski (1996), has identified that the characteristics of knowledge and the failure to clarify the information by the receiver are the most important factors which restrict a good knowledge transfer.

To share the ideas properly employees are also be ready to share the ideas. This can be viewed as the second criteria that need to be met to encourage a good sharing. Idea sharing can be happened in various, overrun levels with definite interest. For an example sharing can be happened between work groups, between departments, between business units, between organizations as well as between workers and a workgroup. According to Szulanski (1996) emphasized that when the relationship between the sender and the receiver is more isolated or problematic it leads to a poor knowledge transfer in the organization.

When the organization comes to the idea evaluation it requires to develop a critical appraisal of the ideas before distribution to select the most suited ideas to the organization. Under the appraisal it needs to look at the suitability and the practicability of the ideas regarding the past experiences as well as the future. Other than that employees are also required to have capability and need to be provided with incentives and proper structures to carry out the validation studies. For an example at Xerox, competent technicians are used to assess new ideas. After the evaluation, the selected ideas are included in to a best practices database to facilitate learning. A good idea distribution addresses the issue of providing the knowledge to the intended users who use the given knowledge to take the decisions effectively. Even though a large amount of information is better than less information, organization needs to be careful not to overload information. For an example, even though the internet has huge amount of information it is difficult to find the relevant information. Therefore organizations need to be careful with the distribution of the knowledge in the area of giving relevant information to the target receiver.

Even after the ideas are successfully delivered to the right users it might not be applied in the organization as expected. Scholars have developed theories to find the reasons behind this idleness. Therefore they have found out that lack of capability which was also known as the absorptive capacity in the literature, poor structures with inflexible operating procedures and insufficient incentives are playing a major role for the inactivity of the employees.

Therefore through a proper training, organizational structure, incentives, and technology managers could be able to promote the knowledge transfer. Employees need to train on how to detect problems and to think beyond the boundaries to create novel concepts. In the training, organization is also required to give information regarding the nature of the business and its environment in order to assure that the employees are generating proper ideas. Employees are required to be trained on how to assess new concepts and how to sense the problems before it happens by using statistics. Therefore they should be provided a training program with a sound background on statistics. However it should be combined with solving real issues in the organization rather than traditional classroom training. Apart from that employees are also required to develop ability to work as a team. However to achieve the maximum output employees need to be aware with the situations that can use their training as well as they need to be educated with the languages they used to express their ideas especially with technical jargon. Furthermore they should be educated on the application of technology to pursue novel ideas. A conventional program can be used to teach how to discover issues, organize them, identify main causes, recognize attainable solutions, implement and supervise on the results.

The lack of integration can be viewed as one of the main weaknesses behind the prevailing training programs. The training should be helped to generate new ideas as well as it should be integrated with the evaluation and distribution stages to have an effective training in enhancing innovation.

Incentives are another aspect that needs to be considered in encouraging an effective knowledge transfer. In order to create an environment which facilitate creation of new ideas the management should provide support through their organizational policies. They should not use productivity enhancement generated from new concepts to threaten the jobs of the employees. They should also provide compensations for the employees as recognition to their innovative ideas as well as the acknowledgment should also be awarded to the employees who are actually devoted to create new ideas.

If the group incentives are giving and the employees are working in a single location there is a tendency to share knowledge with each other to improve group performance. Because group incentives are depends on the group performance. However when the employees are situated in different locations with lack of goal congruence higher level of incentives is required to achieve goal congruence. Therefore monetary as well as non-monetary compensations such as respect are needed to be awarded to the employees in order to improve the level of knowledge sharing within the organization. This can also help to create an organizational culture which allows, encourage and respect sharing information within the organization.

Incentives can be used not only to improve knowledge but also to improve evaluation and distribution of information. For that purpose, divisions that are engage in generating knowledge for the benefit of other divisions need to be rewarded adequately. Head office of an organization could not be able to directly evaluate or supervise the effectiveness of knowledge transfer in the organization. At the same time they could not even assess or assure whether the knowledge is shared or not. However divisions which create knowledge have to face several difficulties in creating meaningful information and communicating them to other divisions. They have the responsibility to generate new ideas, publish them in the organizational computer network and provide support to others who uses the knowledge in implementing the concepts. When publishing in the computer network they have to be more careful with completeness of the information and they have to prevent technical jargon and to provide supporting key words to improve the quality of the information. Therefore knowledge generating divisions need to compensate for their effort to achieve a better knowledge transfer.

The way of paying the new ideas is also creates new issues. If the incentives are awarded based on the number of ideas it can affect the quality of the ideas where much emphasis will be given to the quantity than the quality of the idea. The other alternative is to reward based on the quality of the concept which is a more complicated method. Even though this provides a better rewarding system this comes with a premium due to the cost of evaluation. The other option is a bonus system which provides bonuses based on the results of the knowledge users. In this method the divisions that use ideas from the idea creating divisions get the opportunity to select them to internal awards based on the support they receive from knowledge creators in adopting new ideas. This will helps to develop a good relationship between idea creators and idea implementers.

Normally effective ideas have the chance to be implemented. At some instances effective ideas could also be rejected due to some emotional reasons. Because sometimes adopters would not like to accept other ideas than their own ideas and also they would not like to acknowledge the relevance of the ideas generated by the others. Since incentives are provided only for the performers the adopters would not like to accept that the others could perform better. This can also leads to reject effective new ideas generated by the others.

However these types of issues can be overcome through disclosing how organizations become successful through adopting new ideas. At the same time a mechanism needed to be developed to reward and recognize people who use the new ideas.