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COVID-19 has undoubtedly changed the nature of work on a global scale, with many organisations transitioning into remote work. Access to commonly shared knowledge allows for smoother remote collaboration across locations and time zones. In this era of heightened virtual engagement, the virtualisation of work processes has meant that knowledge management systems are becoming more crucial than ever. The current pandemic has revealed digital weak-points as organisations re-evaluate their capacity to share critical knowledge within and amongst organisations.
Maintaining the wealth of knowledge created by development practitioners in a manner that is formalised, accessible and usable for all members of an organisation is a complex task. The fragmented nature in which reports, presentations and the like are stored often means that information is lost. Much of the information and insights is kept implicit and is often only shared informally. This is a particularly prevalent problem in high-turnover environments. As volunteers and staff members leave, so does their knowledge. This affects the overall performance of organisations and projects. Much time is spent on re-communicating what was previously done and potentially repeating past mistakes, by failing to harness experience and expertise. In contexts of high employee and volunteer turnover, knowledge management allows for smoother succession planning and onboarding. Often, organisations do not have systems or processes in place to capture and share tacit knowledge. A big task and challenge of knowledge acquisition thus entails making tacit knowledge explicit. Explicit knowledge then becomes usable beyond the individual for the whole organisation when needed.
Knowledge management allows for a genealogical tracking of project developments, enabling a better understanding of decisions made. This in turn facilitates a range of possibilities. For instance, creative forms of evaluative reporting, allowing for storytelling modes of project outcome reporting. By understanding how, when and why decisions were taken, one may be able to better identify why certain approaches worked and others did not. Investing in such learnings allows for practitioners to capture and understand the value that they create. Furthermore, regular assessment and use of M&E data creates feedback loops that may help improve project outputs through an iterative approach.
The need for knowledge management goes beyond the boundaries of individual organisations. Within respective development sectors, the lack of a coherent picture of the field is often stated as a key constraint with regards to learning from each other. Moving beyond organisation borders, ICT tools enable the sharing of knowledge within and across sectors.
Sounds good; does it work?
Making do with what is available – Many non-profit organisations and development programmes operate with limited resources and may not have the budgets available to invest in elaborate custom IT systems. This calls for a creative low-cost approach towards storing and retrieving organisational knowledge – bricolage style. Commonly known file hosting services offer either free accounts or reasonably priced business packages. These allow not only for the sharing of reports, presentations and so on, but also enable collaborative editing of documents online. Sounds obvious, but it may save you from endlessly long email threads as numerous versions of the same report get sent back and forth. A more elaborate overview of the various knowledge management approaches can be found here.
Prioritising sharing – All too often knowledge management is considered a specialist area rather than a fundamental tenet of the organisation. Knowledge management should be viewed as essential to the organisation’s functioning and associated processes should be embedded in daily routines. The quality of the knowledge management system depends on the efforts made to maintain it. This requires continuous commitment to knowledge capture. However, practitioners often wear many hats and it can be daunting and tedious to take time out of an already busy day to feed a shared database with documents, reports and the like. Fostering internal commitment to learning and using respective tools and platforms becomes an important task. This requires establishing routines and finding creative ways of working knowledge capture into the work week. Co-creation is crucial, allowing for staff members to determine how to incorporate knowledge management routines, rather than these being imposed from the top-down. Furthermore, highlighting the importance of an explicit knowledge management strategy is key to getting buy in. Practitioners need to see how and why maintaining institutional knowledge translates into better value for the organisation as well as project outcomes.
This post is written by Marianne Liyayi. Find out more about the authors of this blog.
References
Annkissam. (2014). Knowledge Management is like Sorting Socks: KM for Nonprofit Organizations. Retrieved from KM Institute: http://nonprofitknowledgemanagement.com/sites/default/files/KM-Readiness-White-Paper.pdf
Clark, L. (2012). Knowledge Management Impact Challenge case story overview. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 8(1), 13-29.
Cullom, C., & Cullom, R. S. (2011). Knowledge Management for Nonprofits: A Strategy for Organizational Sustainability. Communications of the IIMA, 11(2), 13-24.
Grad, C., & Ejembi, E. (2020, July 29). How Knowledge Management Helps Make Remote Work, Work. Retrieved from KM Institute: https://www.kminstitute.org/blog/how-knowledge-management-helps-make-remote-work-work
Heeks, R. (2017). Understanding ICT4D. In R. Heeks, Information and Communication Technology for Developemnt (pp. 1-32). Taylor & Francis Group.
Hourigan, A. (2014, October 14). Why Knowledge Management in Nonprofit Companies? Retrieved from http://www.ngopulse.org/article/2015/10/14/why-knowledge-management-nonprofit-companies
Nonprofit KM. (N/A). KM Approaches – Strategies for Nonprofit KM. Retrieved from http://nonprofitknowledgemanagement.com/approaches
Young, S. (2012). The value of learning: understanding and measuring the impact of KM in international development. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 8(1), 2-12.
