& Editorial

Culture, Knowledge Management andKnowledge Transfer

In the past three months I have been in Chinatwice. My principal reason for being in China wasto run workshops on EBusiness. However, it alsogave me a chance to think about both KnowledgeManagement in general and Knowledge Transferin particular. Given that in my view EBusiness andKnowledge Management go hand-in-hand mypresentations inevitably generated questionsabout Knowledge Management. One of the moststimulating questions that I was asked related tohow organizations have to change to take fulladvantage of Knowledge Management. A seem-ingly straightforward question – well hardlyespecially given the cultural context!

For organizations to take Knowledge Manage-ment seriously they must take their employeesseriously. The key ‘people’ elements in KM are theindividual and the group. However, it is no goodvaluing one without valuing the other. If we focuson the individual first. Individuals must bemanaged and manage themselves to maximizetheir value – not just to the organization butgenerally. One of the keys to an understanding ofthe Knowledge Economy is that organizationsneed to find ways to provide the appropriatesupport to enable individuals to increase their ownvalue. Organizations have to consider how tomake themselves valuable to the individualemployees rather than the other way around.Organizations can provide an individual withincreased value by providing him or her with aworking environment that provides other talentedindividuals to work with – this is often asignificant attraction. The group is the mechanismfor augmenting the value of the individual and hisor her interest in and satisfaction with theorganization.

The above inevitably seems to be a paeon to theindividual – it has decided echoes of Adam Smith.Where does this type of philosophy fit with mostorganizations either in the West or in Asia? My gutreaction is that there are organizations where theyhave developed a culture that supports theindividual in this way but that these organizations

are pretty rare either in the West or in Asia. Mostorganizations may pay lip service to the value ofone (the individual) but more often than not theyare more prepared to treat their customers asindividuals while ignoring the need to do the samefor their employees.

Let me take this analysis a little further. Does theindividually-oriented model I have proposedabove apply to all organizations – would it beappropriate in all situations? I have a strongfeeling that the answer to this question is ‘no’.There would seem to be a large number oforganizations where there is still a need forroutinization, still a need to focus more on howwork is best divided up and then coordinated.Where there is relatively little scope for indivi-duality in the performance of each job. Theproblem is that many organizations are in a stateof flux – organizations that faced technologies andcompetitive environments where this was routini-zation and stability were the order of the day (andthe year!) are suddenly facing very turbulentenvironments where the old solutions no longerwork. Innovation becomes the key. Individualskills and knowledge increasingly become thekey to competitive advantage and indeed futuresurvival!

Changing from one type of organization toanother is very difficult even in our culture.Often we are reminded that the change is mostdifficult in the middle of the organization. Middlemanagers often have knowledge that is verydetailed but specific to a particular way of runningthe organization. This knowledge has beenobtained through long years of hard work –learning on the job. Some of the knowledge willstill be applicable in the new organization whileother knowledge will be obsolete. This realizationis difficult enough for middle managers to take butwhat is worse is that strategies for gaining newknowledge have to change too. Knowledge has tobe continually evaluated and questioned. Newways of doing and managing must be developed,learned and committed to. This is not easy to

Knowledge and Process Management Volume 8 Number 1 pp 1–2 (2001)

Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

achieve. Further, many of the proponents ofchange management seem to think that once thechange has taken place that’s it – however, whatwe are often doing is preparing people for a life ofcontinuous change.

Where does my experience of China fit into allthis? Well, I would hardly present myself as aChina expert after two short visits. However, oneof the problems of the Chinese economy andChinese society is that they are undergoing anumber of revolutionary changes simultaneously.China is trying to bring its major industries andtransportation infrastructure up to the degree oforganization and coordination that has character-ized our own industrial and transportation infra-structure for the last 30 years. But the target isshifting – our own traditional industries arechanging and morphing into much differentorganizational types. At the same time our societyis changing – we are, for the most part, muchwealthier than before, we recognize the impor-tance of upgrading our knowledge on a regularbasis and knowledge is often seen as the key toadvancement. Further, the Internet revolution haschanged the attitude of many towards technologyand its transformative power.

China has an enormous need for knowledge butthis knowledge needs to be relevant to theirparticular situation – it is fairly clear that in manycases we cannot simply take our knowledge and‘transfer’ it directly to China. There is a need totransform our knowledge in many ways to make itapplicable. There is also a need to investigatevalue systems and how they interact withknowledge and the value of knowledge. It is nogood building sophisticated Customer Relation-ship Management (CRM) systems to captureknowledge of the customer and the customerrelationship if organizations and their employeesdo not value customers and the customer relation-ship very highly.

I hope I will have the opportunity over the nextfew years to investigate how knowledge transferbetween different cultures can be done (if it can bedone) in the areas of EBusiness and KnowledgeManagement. I would also be delighted to receiveguidance from all quarters – more than anythingI am increasingly aware of Socrates’ wisdomabout true knowledge residing in the recognitionof what one does not know rather than what oneknows.

Rather nicely this brings me to a paper that acolleague and I have been working on – actuallymy colleague has done the bulk of the work and Ihave added a few limited comments. The paperlooks at generic problems with knowledge trans-fer. We have been concerned for some time thatmany of the problems of knowledge transfer havebeen essentially assumed away. To the extent thatwe now have very powerful, integrated applica-tion platforms, such as Enterprise Resource Plan-ning (ERP) systems, it is assumed that we canencode all the knowledge that is relevant torunning an organization and make it availableunambiguously to everyone in the organizationand, indeed, many people outside the organizationtoo.

We are concerned with this view for a numberof reasons. In the first place knowledge only hasvalue if it is applied – thus the agency ofindividuals is key – people must be able to usethe knowledge – just because it is encoded in someway in a database or system does not guaranteethis – indeed, it may make this less likely as thesystems become increasingly more complex andintegrated. Second, there are, in our opinion,considerable problems with the notion of comple-teness. How do we know that we have encoded allthe relevant knowledge? How do we spot caseswhere something is missing? Finally, how do weensure that the knowledge is continually validatedand, where appropriate, updated.

Much of the above work is likely to seem veryabstract to those of you who live with thesetechnologies on a day-to-day basis but we firmlybelieve that we are concerned with problems thathave practical consequences. In our limited experi-ence the many situations where people have to find‘work arounds’, ignore system suggestions, orwhere the systems simply fail suggest to us thatthere is something going on that is worth investi-gating! If you would like a copy of our paper pleasecontact me directly at:wensley@mgmt.utoronto.caand I will be delighted to e-mail you a copy.

Professor Anthony Wensley

Associate Professor of Information Systems,University of Toronto, 105, St. George Street,

Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3E6, Canada

EDITORIAL Knowledge and Process Management

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