Knowledge Maturing Activities and Practices Fostering Organisational Learning: Results of an Empirical Study

Andreas Kaschig, Ronald Maier, Alexander Sandow, MariangelaLazoi, Sally-Anne Barnes, Jenny Bimrose, Claire Bradley, Alan Brown, Christine Kunzmann, Athanasios Mazarakis, Andreas Schmidt
Knowledge Maturing Activities and Practices Fostering Organisational Learning: Results of an Empirical Study
ECTEL 2010September 30, 2010 Barcelona
http://mature-ip.eu

Outline
Background
Knowledgematuring
Elicitationofknowledgematuringactivities
Goals ofthestudy
Results
General overview
Importance, support, andsuccess
Clustering
Narratives
Conclusions

Whatisknowledgematuring?

Background
KnowledgeMaturingActivities
activities of individuals or groups that contribute to the development of knowledge within the organisation.
Basis:
Prior work on knowledgeactivities
Ethnographicallyinformedstudies in thefirstyearof MATURE
Usecasedefinitionprocessof MATURE
First validation in a small-scalestudywithintheassociatepartnernetworkof MATURE

KnowledgeMaturingActivities
Reflect on and refine work practices or processes
Create and co-develop digital resources
Share and release digital resources
Restrict access and protect digital resources
Find people with particular knowledgeorexpertise
Communicatewithpeople
Assess, verify and rate information
Find relevant digital resources
Embed information at individual or organisational level
Keep up-to-datewithorganisationrelatedknowledge
Familiariseoneselfwithnewinformation
Reorganise information at individual or organisational level

Study Design
Goals (extract):
Whichknowledgematuringactivitiesshouldbesupported in a prioritizedway?
Whichbarriersandproblemsassociatedwiththoseactivities do exist?
Method: Combined quantitative and qualitative study
Interviews withcompanies (mainly) in Europe
Closedquestionswith 7-point Likertscale, e.g.,
Perceivedimportance, support, andsuccess in thecompany
Associated and additional open questions, collecting narratives fromtheinterviewees
In total interviewslastedbetween 30 and 120 minutes
Presentationcoversonlythepart on knowledgematuringactivities

Resultsofthe Study

How many companies

Background Information

How interviewees assessed KM activities

What is important: Portfolio analysis
7. Create and co-develop digital resources
8. Share and release digital resources
9. Restrict access and protect digital resources
10. Find people with particular knowledge or expertise
11. Communicate with people
12. Assess, verify and rate information
1. Find relevant digital resources
2. Embed information at individual or organisational level
3. Keep up-to-date with organisation-related knowledge
4. Familiarise oneself with new information
5. Reorganise information at individual or organisational level
6. Reflect on and refine work practices or processes

Cluster analysis
best performing maturers
people- and awareness-oriented maturers
hesitant formalists
distribution of organisations with respect to size, sector and knowledge intensity is fairly balanced between the clusters

Restrictaccessandprotect
most controversial KM activity
two types of answers can be distinguished:
statements whether and why the organisation restricts access and
statements about personal opinion whether restricting access is beneficial to knowledge maturing.

Restrict & protectaccess: organizational
Some have very few restrictions (related to an open organisational culture), whilst others are giving high priority to restricting access:
legal requirements
channel the knowledge through the correct users and to avoid dissipating it
protecting their own competitive advantage
Important is the nature of their competetive advantage:people, marketing, process knowledge

Restrict & protectaccess: individual
Trust as a prerequisite.
“There are individuals who will share only in a limited way if they can trust that not everyone can see it.”
“So if you restrict access, it is also good for knowledge exchange, not for those who don't have access, but for those who have access. Otherwise you wouldn't share anything if you couldn't restrict it to certain persons”.
Information channelling/avoidance of overload.
“Knowledge is not something that has to be always distributed. With this activity the knowledge is channelled to therightusers.”

Restrict & protectaccess: individual (II)
Obstructing people’s access to knowledge which they view as a prerequisite for knowledge maturing to happen.
“nonsense”
“The access rights are pretty strict, my drive cannot be seen by my colleagues, I find that unbelievable.”
“We are destroying knowledge in this area”

Further narratives collected
E.g., medical engineering company
Market leader due to its production process knowledge
Need toprotectitscompetetiveadvantage
Anonymizationofcustomers, accessprotection
But: still foster an open innovationclimate
Creatingawarenessofprotectionandinnovationneeds
Difficulttoimplementprocessinnovations
Long cycles due tocertification
High budgetfor an experimentationteam

Conclusions

Conclusions
Most importantfor Professional TEL tofocus on:
Reflect on andrefineworkpractices
Find people with particular knowledge orexpertise
Success in sharingofresourcesandcommunicationismaindifferentiatingfactorof „bestperformers“ cluster
A differentiatedperspectiveisneeded on
Restrict & protectaccess
Nosignificant national culturaldifferences
slightdifferenceswithrespectto professional culture
considerableimpactoforganizationalculture

Outlook & Contact
Open forassociate
partners!
MATURE IP – http://mature-ip.eu
Identifyingandovercomingbarrierstoknowledgematuring in organizations
Summaryofrepresentativestudy: http://mature-ip.eu/results/representative-study
Andreas Schmidt
Department Manager
Scientific CoordinatorMATURE
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies
andreas.schmidt@fzi.de
http://andreas.schmidt.name

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Knowledge Maturing Activities and Practices Fostering Organisational Learning: Results of an Empirical Study

by Andreas Schmidt on Sep 30, 2010

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