What’s Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge ?

WHAT’S YOUR STRATEGY FOR MANAGING KNOWLEDGE ?

1) About the authors

This article was written by three authors, Morten T.Hansen, Nitin Noria and Thomas Tierney. I guess that they have a really interesting point of view on what they are dealing with in the article because of their high professional position. Being a professor at a school such as Harvard or being the worldwide managing director of a company such as Bain requires a high level of experience. That is why, I’m quite confident in the advice they are providing.

It is interesting to notice that they have different experiences as two of them are professors and the other one is the managing director of a company. It proves a certain objectivity in their ideas and allows to mix theory and practice.

2) Key points

The authors show that to manage Knowledge Management, two main strategies can be used by companies. The first one is called the Codification Strategy and consists in codifying and store Knowledge in a database whereas the second one is called the Personalization Strategy which consists in the transmission of knowledge through contact with experts.

Both strategies can provide interesting advantages such as time saving (which engenders cost saving) provided that it reflect the company’s competitive strategy.

As the Codification Strategy provides a standard solution for similar problems, it is more adapted to companies offering Standardized products to their clients. In an other hand, companies choosing to give a highly customized solution to their clients should adopt the Personalized Strategy as problems should be solved in a different way for each client.

The choice of the strategy should also depends on if the company’s product is mature or innovative. If the product is already known, the company can reuse model following a codification strategy but if the product has to be invented, a personalized strategy will be more adapted. Another thing that the manager need to check before choosing either one or the other knowledge management strategy is how do people from the company need the knowledge to be transmitted in order to solve their problem. If they need it to be explicit, we’ll prefer to put knowledge on a codified document, but if should be tacit, it is better that