Knowledge Management as a tool to Overcome Skill – Set Deficiency

Abstract

Today organizations face brutal economic times. Performance in few areas of a firm’s operations can spell success or failure. These areas, called critical success factors (CSF’s), vary from one firm to another, but tend to follow certain patterns based on industry. One of the critical success factors is cross-training.

From a positive view point, recession actually means a new beginning, a fresh start from a break. The CEOs who feel the pressure from all sides to do more with less, can take this time to be a perfect opportunity to make the pitch for one more alternative: an enterprise knowledge management (EKM) tool.

Knowledge Management is managing; dealing, with an abstract conceptual know-how, a very subtle framework of experiences, instances, circumstantial and spatial incidences of workforce. The challenge in these recessionary trends in global scenario is “How to create the flow from Tacit Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge.” While creating this transition, there should not be any leakages as far as proper communication is concerned. It has been seen that, the transition from tacit to explicit is quite a delicate one as it includes feelings, emotions, values, spatial experiences, circumstances, i.e. added experiential learning. The aim is to contribute to knowledge management sector’s succession planning for information management of staff by identifying the skills and to find out whether a skills gap exists among the cadre of staff currently working at various levels in diverse service roles, and, if a skills gap does exist, to identify the nature of that gap.