Ethical Issues Associated With Knowledge Management In The Service Sector The role of knowledge management is immense with regard to identifying customer preferences, best practices, reducing turnaround time and efficient ways of mitigating errors.
By Dr. Kirti Sharma •
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Service industry has its own peculiarities because the product is not tangible, cannot be stocked which means it works on 'just in time' model. Not surprising that the 4 Ps of marketing changed to 6 Ps when they were tested for the service sector. In business, there is not much scope for making mistakes thus organizations prefer to rely on the customer feedbacks which gives an opportunity to improve performance. The role of knowledge management (KM) is immense with regard to identifying customer preferences, best practices, reducing turnaround time and efficient ways of mitigating errors. While informal KM exists in all organizations, its impact is non-quantifiable, organizations are usually interested in the results of formal KM practices such as knowledge sharing within the organization.
Effectiveness of any KM initiative in the organization does not depend only on the quality of infrastructure but also on the willingness of the management and the employees to make it successful. Rightly said by an expert "tacit knowledge is unarticulated and elusive; let alone capable of being transferred through electronic systems". What this means is that the best IT infrastructure cannot extract all the knowledge which the human mind possesses. Let us understand with an example in the healthcare sector. A doctor's knowledge about how to treat a patient will undeniably improve as he handles more and more cases over his professional span but his willingness to share that knowledge with his interns will vary upon his intention to share and the recipient's ability to absorb. Thus 'to share or not', 'when to share' and 'how much to share' get determined by the behavioral aspects often driven by the cultural ecosystem in the organization.
Numerous studies were conducted in India to gauge why knowledge sharing is not done by the employees. The findings were astounding: people deliberately do not disclose knowledge, some perceive it to be adverse to job security, some feel that the KM strategies are poor hence no point sharing, since there is no formal sharing platform, it is difficult to share, learning focus is missing, they assume it is inappropriate to apply old rules to new situations, maybe inter-departmental interactions are enough, useful knowledge is ignored while 'noise' is valued, ecosystem is not conducive to knowledge sharing and organization may not be interested in 'knowledge re-use'.
KM's life blood is knowledge sharing. The knowledge base of the organisation is one of the key by-products of the knowledge-management effort. Not sharing knowledge can be unconducive to growth of KM. However, the dichotomy lies in the fact that knowledge sharing in some situations is also perceived as unethical, if not illegal. Employees at times fear that sharing proprietary information, may be a breach of contract/NDA. This at times proves to be a barrier to the knowledge sharing process. Some employees take pretext of this directive which is a deterrent for successful KM. Encouraging employees to engage in knowledge sharing is imperative for KM's growth.
Top level management plays an important role in making an organization KM application friendly. The initiatives from the management do not have to be only in terms of budget sanctioning or creating a department to this effect. It also involves suitably conveying to one and all that the leadership team is particular about a knowledge sharing culture and is ready to put in the extra effort to make it a success. Incorporating this in the mission statement would further put emphasis on the employees to take it all the more seriously.
Once updated in the mission statement, there are few ways to encourage knowledge sharing within groups. Assigning mentors to new hires/trainees from amongst the senior practitioners to share their learning. This paves way for expert experience sharing as well. Another way to achieve it is by discussing successful work methods in formal meetings which can be documented for future reference. From an employee learning point of view, job rotation is also an effective tool wherein employees get to learn about new jobs and apply the erstwhile knowledge to implement them.
The culture of the organization always flows from the top to the bottom. If the management reinforces the culture of knowledge sharing, incentivizes people who engage in knowledge dissemination and make it a 'must-to-do', the employees imbibe the same. During COVID-19 when most of the people were working from remote locations, some organizations scheduled regular online sessions for people to attend and share their experiences with each other. The meetings were recorded so documentation was taken care of. However, the conversion of unstructured information as knowledge in the standard operating processes is what completes the loop. Technology has been a foe and friend. If the knowledge created by technological systems is harnessed, it becomes wisdom but if it is not, it becomes clutter. Organizations must work towards capturing knowledge.
