Information_Management

KNOWLEDGE SHARING ACTIVTY IN VANITY LTD Julian Alberto Castano Jiménez - 12531354 Information Management - Westminster Business School Abstract This paper discusses the effectiveness of the Information System (IS) emphasising in the use of intranet as a facilitator of knowledge sharing in all levels of a company in the UK. The paper highlights the role of IT as a group who steers the leadership of information management strategy supported by other departments such estates and finance in order to achieve the main corporate strategy which is customer service delivery, this paper argues the importance to align these sources and recipients in the process of the company. Keywords Intranet, knowledge management, Knowledge sharing. Introduction As the Human Beings evolve, the companies do too. Therefore, the service industry has experienced considerable change over the years thanks to technology innovation. This new era has carried new communication technologies and different ways to collect, to process and to use the vast volume of information that is exchanged on day-to-day bases internally and externally in every company. Information volumes are increasing steadily. As it keeps growing, so do the challenges of managing the information and trying to find value in it. Such challenges are: (i) Relevancy; (ii) Accessibility; (iii) Legality; (iv) Security, (v) Value (Chaffey & Wood, 2005). In some companies the process of collecting data, transforming these data into information is not taken seriously and underused as a business tool. In order to survive in these pressures of global competition environment, companies must shift the way they set enterprise strategies not only focussing on profits but setting a strategy to help them to manage the flow of information and knowledge management. The paper approach, therefore, provides an insight of the IS to evaluate its effectiveness in facilitating Knowledge Sharing (KS) across all levels in a company in UK to accomplish its corporate strategy which is mainly focused on customer service delivery. Vanity backgroun Vanity has an horizontal structure, employs 42 people conformed by a Chairman, a managing director, three line managers with their respective teams (Estates.), Finance, Legal, Reception and IT department. The three line managers are divided in 3 regions (Central, small blocks and north) and are directly related to the finance department. The paper analysis will be focused mainly on the relation among IT, Finance and Estates department. The main business of Vanity is to provide residential block management services throughout London, Greater London, Essex, Hertfordshire and Kent. The company has a dedicated Property Services Team ensuring that urgent repairs are dealt with the same day. In recent years Vanity has been characterized for its development and growth thanks to a comprehensive range of property solutions, its effort to provide five stars customer service supported by IT self-developed solutions such as one stop shop that covers almost 60% of the client’s demands and its intranet that helps Estates, Finance and reception to solve more specialized queries from clients. And its commitment to invest in people as one of its mission statements mention “to invest in the right people who are committed to provide the best service”. Knowledge Management (Knowledge Sharing) Knowledge management is one the hottest subject of the day as Marshall (1997) states “is about harnessing the intellectual capital of an organisation, recognising that knowledge, not simply information, is the primary asset to an organisation”. Throughout history knowledge has played a vital role in developing the society. Science and technology have used previous knowledge to innovate and hence, to create new knowledge. The knowledge loop represents an emergent continuum and in this new era “the information age” with massive volumes of information that organisations must cope, managers need to find methods to disseminate this information and convert it into knowledge in order to add value to their companies by differentiating goods and services from competitors. And to create a competitive advantage in the market they act. Knowledge sharing is an important activity within KM and in organisations it evokes to exchange information, expertise and intellectual skills among members of the staff to create organisation memory. The lack of a Knowledge management system guided by IT in many cases fails to extract and codify employees’ knowledge into explicit knowledge to share among others. Popper (1992) says “Tacit knowledge is knowledge which cannot be communicated, understood or used without the knowing subject”. Also, there is a fact that some employees are not willing to share their knowledge fearing that others could take advantage of it increasing their personal performance when the performance appraisal is assessed individually. Reward and incentives to create a KS culture will be covered later in the paper. IT role in KM is crucial but Dash (1998) argues that “successful KM requires a skilful blend of people, business processes and IT”. This process can be traumatic as Szulanski’s (1996) study shows that the major barriers to knowledge transfer are the lack of absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990) of the knowledge recipient, the nature of the knowledge transferred and the relationship among the source and the recipient. Elayne Coakes (2003) refers to the source (i.e., system users) who communicates the system requirements to the recipient (i.e., system developers). There could be drawbacks when IT led knowledge management strategy because they take for granted that all knowledge in the organisation can be codified and share it. Nonaka (1995) introduces two definitions of knowledge: tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge as the two main types of human knowledge. KMS pretends to extract knowledge from people (users) in which is embedded, distributed and utilised. This intangible asset (i.e., tacit) can be harmful for the company if it is not extracted from key employees because they can leave the organisation with the knowledge that resides in their minds. Nevertheless, tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge will typically be of more value to an organisation (Grant, 1996; Hall, 1993). At some point, companies could face contingencies because some knowledge that IT can codify is not useful and important, therefore, spend vast amount of money trying to develop IT tools which bring little benefits. Gardner (1998) states that attempts to codify tacit knowledge only produce knowledge which is: (i) Useless; (ii) Difficult to verify; (iii) Trivial; (iv) Redundant; (v) Irrelevant to a wider audience; (vi) Politically naïve; And (vii) inaccurate. There is another term used that describes the barriers that companies can face in the KM process which is stickiness (Von Hippel, 1994; Zsulanski, 2000). Here arises an important fact that managers must take into account which is recruitment and selection. The degree of stickiness in a knowledge transfer process is also determined by the characteristics of the source and the recipient (Elayne Coakes, 2003). It means that users and developers must have certain features in order to make the process smoother and more accurate. Also it implies experience and good relationship from both sides. KM is directly related to enterprise effectiveness with which the extracted knowledge enables the members of the organization to face with day-to-day situations and effectively envision and create their future. Within KM process rewards and incentives are key aspects at promoting a knowledge-sharing culture. The knowledge shares realise that their time and energy that are taken to share knowledge must be exchanged with valuable return (Cohen, 1998). Analysis Vanity throughout its existence has evoked to develop technological tools to connect all level of the company to facilitate knowledge sharing and hence, provide high standards of customer service. IT as a recipient always add value to the process not just disseminating the meaning of the information, also grounding all the activities and interactions that occur among the departments. Amidon (1997) quoted “it must not focus on collecting and disseminating information, but rather on creating a mechanism for practitioners to reach out to others practitioners”. To Vanity its goods are the information converted into knowledge that is provided to its clients at the right time on the right moment. It is achieved through a well designed process based on a Knowledge management strategy in which IT leadership is fundamental. Bath (2001) quoted no matter how sophisticated technology becomes, the knowledge to develop and to make business decisions resides in the minds of humans, therefore, KM must be aligned to Human resource management (HRM). Recruitment and selection is the first filter to hire competent people who will bring higher scope at developing the company strategies in general. Vanity has a strong human resource policy with training and development as a key factor. One the business strategy is focused on the development of the employees by investing on their training on a monthly basis. It enables the source and the recipient to play an active role in the KMS. Among the features of the intranet which will be described later, is e-learning. It encourages employees to learn on their own and as community sharing involved experiences. Cisco systems (2003) describes e-learning as a content delivery in multiple formats, management of the learning experience, and a networked community of students, content developers, and experts. The e-learning process in Vanity is followed by a reward system to employees that generate ideas to improve either the process of the business in general or the functionality of the intranet with the premise that most of the information systems in Vanity are self-developed. The company has invested a considerable amount of resources at developing its information systems which consist of a financial package (Propersys) that storage all clients financial data, contractors transactions and, estates and units definition. This application is the heart of the company. A constraint in the KM process comes up in this context down to this application is only used by finance department. Although some information is transferred to the intranet to be available to other users, still there is a strong dependency to finance when estates department needs reliable information because the scope of the information on intranet is not enough precise either to solve a client query or take an accurate decision such as an arrears report. The drawback described above happens in opposite direction, when finance requires information from estates department that is not available in propersys but is on intranet where the financial officer has limit access. Intranet is another tool available to all members of the organisation with some restrictions depending of the department. It is the main tool for estates department that monitors the operation of them and highlight the problems. The majority of the information deposited in it comes from propersys. Having said that, a major problem arises which is to determine where to find precise and reliable information to share knowledge, in this case, among finance and estates departments to deliver a high standard of customer service. In spite of have good tools to share knowledge, these have not been well directed. There is no a centralisation to storage the information and make it accessible to everyone. Also, there is a lack of autonomy from the members of the staff to utilise information. According to the theory mentioned above and analysis of the organisation in KM, IT at certain point, has not fully achieved the extraction of tacit knowledge that resides on estates manager’s minds to translate into the information system developed in order to facilitate the free flow of knowledge that members of the staff need to achieve a greater customer service. The development of a KMS is a complex fact that managers, employees and IT need to keep reinforcing despite failures. Scarbrough (1996) said “the introduction of tools to formalise knowledge capture and sharing may both introduce rigidities into the system and place a greater reliance on old habits that then makes processes of knowledge creation more difficult”. Apart from the tools mentioned above, Vanity has different applications that help clients, contractors and government to communicate and interact by their own without phone calls to the company. Those are, Vanity panel which is a web-based application that allow contractors to upload their invoices to be paid in real time. Then contractors can follow in which stage the invoices are such as pending, authorized or paid. This tool has reduced markedly contractor’s queries making the process of the company more efficient. Cosec is an extranet that compiles information and requirements from the government institution (Companies house) that regulates the property management industry in which Vanity participates. Vanity’s income comes from the commission that is charged to the sites managed. In the last moths, IT has developed an application to make the invoicing process more efficient integrating propersys (managed site’s money) with Sage (Vanity’s income) which is a financial tool that is used internally to manage vanity’s business. Having said that, Vanity has to bill the sites for its services and at the same time pay itself those invoices billed. In the past this process was time consuming and was a double effort because one person needed to create the invoices in sage and then send a physical report to finance to pay those invoices acting independently, even though they were in the same business base. So, the feature is an intranet link in which a person creates the invoice in this intranet invoice tool and then exports the data to sage and propersys respectively avoiding double work. According to the theory reviewed and analysis made, this is an outcome of knowledge management process in which both the source and the recipient worked jointly to improve business process and hence, better performance. Conclusion The analysis carried out within Vanity demonstrates the strong support that technology and information systems bring to the enterprise. Whether Vanity’s Knowledge management and Knowledge sharing practices have developed a better business performance is an assumption that just time will clarify. But what can be said is that customer service has improved markedly with the trust that they deposit on the business. This KM process is endless because as soon as the company achieve certain standard of quality another constrain comes up and so on. What is notorious in Vanity is the manager’s commitment to developed better business application to increase business performance. Regardless weaknesses and lack of independency at taking decisions in finance and estates department, Vanity is going in the right path to become a well-known and leading company in the property management industry. Recommendation Vanity possesses a high technological structure with different tools that are designed according to the business strategies. However, there is a lack of integration among these applications, becoming in many cases hard to manipulate with ease. One major recommendation that comes up during the evaluation of the IS in vanity is the centralization of the storage and source of the information. There are many applications that act independently so the idea is to create a main application that adds in propersys, intranet, sage, cosec and Vanity panel. References , Chaffey D & Wood S (2005) Business information management, England, FT Prentice Hall Checkland, Peter (1998) Information, systems and information systems: making sense of the field, Chichester, John Wiley & son Coakes, Elayne (2003) Knowledge Management (Electronic Resource): current issues and challenges, Hershey, PA Idea Group Publishing Ralph Stairs & George Reynolds (2006) Fundamentals of Information Systems Third Edition, United States, Thomson Harry Scarbrough and Jacky Swan (1999) Case studies in knowledge management, London, Institute of personnel and development Jashapara, Ashok (2004) Kowledge Management – An integrated approach, England, Prentice Hall