Difference between revisions of "Knowledge management"
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Revision as of 12:47, 7 April 2014
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Contents
Definition
Knowledge management is Coordinated, integrated, systemic practices and activities which enable and promote effective knowledge processes and ensure adequate knowledge assets as needed to achieve organizational goals. (Last published: an integrated, systematic approach to identifying, acquiring, transforming, developing, disseminating, using, sharing, and preserving knowledge, relevant to achieving specified objectives)
Summary
Knowledge management is by now well established and widely adopted, and documented in a vast body of literature. The IAEA defines Knowledge Management as an integrated and systematic approach for identifying, acquiring, transforming, developing, disseminating, using, and preserving the knowledge that is critical to an individual or organization in achieving specified objectives The KM model adopted contains three primary elements: people, processes and technology.
Description
Knowledge Management emerged as a scientific discipline in the earlier 1990s. Since then, a vast body of literature with fundamental textbooks as well as a large number of Internet links covering a broad range of thoughts on the KM discipline including manifold practical experiences have been established. An overview on many relevant aspects of general (not organization or domain specific) Knowledge Management may be found in Wikipedia.
The IAEA defines knowledge management as: “an integrated and systematic approach for identifying, acquiring, transforming, developing, disseminating, using, and preserving the knowledge that is critical to an individual or organization in achieving specified objectives”.
The knowledge management approach in business is prompted by the combination of three primary elements — people, processes, and technology — operating within a culture that recognizes the importance of knowledge to the success and safety of all (see Fig. 1). These three elements are shortly characterized as:
- KM focuses on people and the organizational culture required to stimulate and nurture the sharing and use of knowledge, on processes or methods to find, create, capture and share knowledge, and on the technologyneeded to store and make knowledge accessible and to allow people to work together without being together
- KM focuses on processes or methods which find, create, capture and share knowledge. Established operational processes are essential to safely operating and maintaining nuclear facilities. KM must be integrated into business processes such as strategic planning, analysis and decision making, implementation of plans, and evaluation of results
- KM focuses on technology to store and make knowledge accessible, which allows people to work together irrespective of location or time. Thus, technology is an important enabler to the success of KM
People
Processes
Technology
Organizational culture
Description 1
Common perspectives on knowledge preservation
Different KP processes can be readily identified within most organizations. Non-experts in the field can usually relate to and understand these, whether or not their organization has any formalized KP strategy or programme in place. Most people have a perspective of KP based on the business or work systems and processes (and their inherent knowledge process needs) that they work with and with which are familiar. Some examples include:
- The archival perspective: this view of KP is based on objectives and processes associated with traditional digital or paper based documents or records of archival and storage processes and systems (such as library and records services in many organizations);
- Business process re-engineering (BPR) and the transaction theory perspective: this view of KP emphasizes on-line information systems (also referred to as OMS) such as enterprise application software (EAS),enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, information systems (IS), information and communications technology (ICT), and information management systems (IMS) collectively. These systems enable integrated work flow and cross-functional processes in organizations and support institutional memory by capturing and preserving the transactional history of work flow and business processes within a firm;
- Human resource and organizational learning perspective: this view of KP focuses on those programmes, processes, and initiatives within a firm that ensure human resource capability is maintained and core competencies are sustained (such as formal training programmes and supporting methods, processes, and technology that facilitate tacit knowledge retention via knowledge transfer and sharing mechanisms);
- Project based perspective: this view of KP focuses on the processes and tools needed to ensure adequate capture of design detail and rationale, project records and documentation, and to safely preserve this information in a repository that will be accessible (and hopefully maintainable) in the future. Most project groups focused on design and engineering use this view. The knowledge preserved will be important and utilized throughout the life cycle of a facility;
- Production process data perspective: this view of KP focuses on operational history data (e.g. data collected from real time monitoring and control systems, system health monitoring data, laboratory information systems, on-line monitoring systems, statistical process control systems, etc.) and is used to support information and knowledge needed for sustained equipment or production reliability, economics and safety;
- Design basis information maintenance perspective: this view of KP focuses on the ongoing maintenance and configuration management of design data, requirements, constraints, assumptions and rationale, change history, etc., as changes are required to maintain a plant (such as maintenance of design manuals, drawings, licensing submittals, safety requirements, safety cases, equipment qualification records, etc.).
It is not uncommon for individuals within an organization that has not implemented any coordinated, company wide KP policies and programmes to view KP quite differently (and sometimes quite narrowly), depending upon which of these processes primarily involve them, and the associated perspectives.
Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation
Description 2
Within the KM context, it is obvious that nuclear KP plays a vital role. Preserving existing nuclear knowledge, specialist expertise, and in general preventing the loss of vital technical and historical information is starting to be recognized as strategically important to the nuclear industry, in particular for nuclear facilities. As such, the development of KP approaches and tools based on innovative approaches, including the use of modern information technology, are becoming a necessity.
The IAEA has formalized the definition of knowledge preservation to state (see Refs [1, 13]): “a process of maintaining an organizational system of knowledge and capabilities that preserves and stores perceptions, actions and experiences over time and secures the possibility of recall for the future.”
In this report, KP is viewed as including the processes required to capture, understand, archive, retrieve and protect explicit and tacit knowledge and to maintain accessibility and readability of it as technology evolves for as long as the knowledge remains useful. KP can be seen as a process of maintaining an organizational system of knowledge and capabilities that preserves and stores perceptions, actions and experiences over time and secures the possibility of recall for the future. The preservation of knowledge is an important phase within the KM cycle, from creation to implementation (see Fig. 1). KP, as a component of KM, plays an important role in supporting the entire management system, which ensures the effectiveness of industrial business processes. The main factors and driving forces of such a management system are human resources, organizational structure and responsibilities, IT, leadership, and cooperative culture.
Organizations that intentionally manage their experiences for them to be available for the future have to master three basic processes of knowledge management:
- Select from the large number of organizational events, persons or experts and processes only those worth preserving;
- Store their experience in a suitable form;
- Ensure the setting up and operation of organizational memory.
The preservation of tacit knowledge assumes the maintenance of core competencies, specialized expertise, and experience within an organization or industry. This is often referred to as knowledge retention and focuses on the human aspects of KM. The preservation of explicit knowledge, on the other hand, by definition assumes a knowledge repository or organizational memory system (OMS). A knowledge repository is a place to store and from which to retrieve explicit knowledge. A set of file folders are an example of a low technology knowledge repository. A high technology knowledge repository might be an OMS in the form of a database. Thus, KP underlies all aspects of KM, including the creation or generation of new knowledge (e.g. capturing knowledge as it is produced).
Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation
Description 3
The preservation of knowledge is an important building block within the knowledge management field. Organizations that intentionally manage their experiences for them to be available for the future have to master three basic processes of knowledge management:
- select, from the large number of organizational events, persons or experts and processes, only those that are worth preserving;
- store their experience in a suitable form;
- ensure the setting up and operation of the organizational memory.
Source: Planning and Execution of Knowledge Management Assist Missions for Nuclear Organizations
Description 4
Challenges of preservation
Organizations that do not pay attention to KP may face negative consequences (such as suffering losses or even worse, bankruptcy) if critical knowledge required by an organization is not preserved. In the case of the nuclear industry, if critical knowledge associated with regulation, construction, design, maintenance, operation and decommissioning is not preserved it can lead to incidents, accidents and other significant events. An example is the Okiluto-3 EPR NPP currently being constructed in Finland. The project experienced construction and welding problems because critical knowledge associated with methods and quality assurance had been lost among local contractors in Finland. This resulted in delays in construction.
One of the questions being raised concerning the 'nuclear renaissance' is the availability of critical knowledge required to forge large pressure vessels and steam generators. Recent surveys of suppliers indicate this capability has been lost in many countries because there was a long period of time in which no new reactors were built. It is believed that organizations which pay attention to KP and make it a part of their objectives tend to keep a competitive edge. This is likely the reason that more mature organizations are now concerned about the preservation of institutional memory. An underlying benefit of KP is that it helps to improve work processes and therefore aids in transforming a regular organization into a ‘learning organization’.
Depending on an organization’s level of KM maturity (i.e. the phase of development in KM processes), it may need to embark on KP as a means of preserving critical knowledge to secure its future.
Primary objective of KM
At first, the primary objective of an organization is to preserve its most explicit knowledge in archival form. As an organization matures, the preservation of implicit and tacit knowledge will become more dominant, leading to preservation of process knowledge (work flow).
Main objective of KM
The main objective of all KP efforts is to develop a KP mechanism in which knowledge is being preserved as it is created. In this way all types of knowledge — including explicit, implicit and tacit — will be captured. In order to achieve this, different methods and tools must be employed.
First, the nuclear industry is a maturing industry within which recent high attrition rates have highlighted the vulnerability of nuclear organizations (In the context of this report, a nuclear organization is any organization the primary activities of which are directly related to nuclear energy and/or nuclear material, such as NPP fuel fabrication and/or reprocessing, nuclear research and/or research reactor facilities, radioactive waste management organizations, etc.) to the loss of critical tacit knowledge, indicating that measures aimed at knowledge retention are needed. There is concern in the industry over the ‘pipeline’, or supply, of new and adequately skilled workers due to a lack of university level programmes specifically targeting nuclear knowledge and skills. There is also the recognition that it takes many years of on-the-job training to build the competencies and expertise needed to perform in many positions within the nuclear industry. Second, many ageing nuclear facilities will soon require either refurbishing or decommissioning, and this need will arise at the same time that new projects are being planned and launched, creating a high demand for specialized nuclear skills. Third, there is recognition that licensing basis information, including design basis information, and plant configuration information is critical to the continued safe and economic operation of many nuclear facilities (meaning such material must be kept up to date, accurate and correct). Finally, there is a keen awareness that other industries are doing more in the area of KP and have thus been benefiting from these initiatives and best practices.
Nuclear facilities and institutes constitute a particularly challenging environment from a KP perspective. Some of the issues faced by the nuclear industry include:
- A complex technology base and infrastructure (i.e. both from a design basis perspective and from an operations and management perspective);
- Lengthy technology and facility life cycles;
- Regulatory requirement that change over time;
- Highly capital intensive assets;
- A reliance on multidisciplinary technologies and expertise;
- Competing operational objectives involving safety, economics, and production;
- Potentially high hazards that must be systematically managed to remain demonstrably and tolerably low risks;
- The ongoing need for coordination of complex physical and human systems.
Furthermore, stringent requirements for safety, environmental qualification, nuclear quality assurance, nuclear security and non-proliferation safeguards, as well as equipment/design configuration management must be met, all within the context of a regulated industry environment.
For example, KP in nuclear facilities is complicated by the need to maintain knowledge over many decades and thus ensure the safety of longer term nuclear waste fuel management facilities. Another example is the need to establish and respect creative and flexible intellectual property license arrangements that allow owner–operators, design organizations, multilateral research organizations, and technical support organizations to innovate and share technical information on reactor designs (which are highly proprietary). Existing designs must be maintained, modified and adapted over time to ensure reliability and safety, to extend equipment life, or to introduce improvements offered by new technology. Thus proprietary designs and design information must be shared amongst these parties and must evolve over time. This involves legal issues regarding knowledge utilization, transfer and generation. Finally, everything is further complicated by the threat of cyber attacks. Knowledge flows or stores must also address the increased need for security. For these reasons, the role of KP within the nuclear industry is both particularly important and particularly challenging and underscores the need for an improved KP strategy. Nuclear KP is relevant to all nuclear organizations and supporting bodies (nuclear power plants, nuclear research institutes, research reactors, nuclear programmes and research in universities, nuclear regulators, nuclear design organizations, and nuclear support service organizations).
Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation
References
[1] INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY, Knowledge Management for Nuclear Industry Operating Organizations, IAEA-TECDOC-1510, IAEA, Vienna (2006).
[13] INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY, Nuclear Knowledge Management Glossary, IAEA, Vienna (2005).
Related articles
Assessment of preservation tools
Implementation of preservation tools
Assessment of preservation tools
Tacit knowledge preservation at the institute of nuclear research, Romania
Explicit knowledge preservation at the EC Joint Research Centre, Petten
Life cycle of knowledge management
Tacit and explicit knowledge preservation at United Technical College and Kozloduy NPP, Bulgaria
