This thing I like to call knowledge management (KM for short) reminds me of another time in my career where having certain skills and experience didn’t seem to make the “big leagues” of professions. Yet, what I learned then seems all too appropriate for what I’m doing today in KM. So much so that I submitted a presentation to KMWorld on the subject, and I’ll be facilitating a discussion there on Wednesday afternoon. Turning the Wayback Machine to the latter half of the ‘70s would find me at a very prestigious engineering-only school (today known as Kettering University) where mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and chemical engineering ruled as the BMOC. Throw in the arcane major of industrial engineering (IE) and its even poorer cousin industrial administration, and you would see me there at the bottom of the food chain.
Yet, the courses, strategies, and techniques taught to me and my oft-derided brethren—time efficiency, operational effectiveness, systems design—have in many ways ensured that I ended up in KM (take that, you Chem E guys). I believe that’s because any industrial engineering approach has two important components that help it to meet its objectives:
- Reusing systems and methods in a consistent manner; and
- letting the people closest to the work help design the improvements.
To illustrate the first point, we go back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, arguably considered the father of industrial engineering. Using time and motion studies Taylor standardized the way work was done in his day, taking the “craft” out of work, and making it scientifically repeatable. In the same way, KM hopes to provide an environment of efficiency and consistency, something we usually refer to as being “in the flow of work.”
Letting the people impacted by the work create the efficiencies and effectiveness only came later in the IE portfolio as trained IEs began to recognize that the repetitiveness of modern day manufacturing was seen by an operator eight hours a day, five days a week, for years on end and not only during a brief study by IEs with stopwatches and clipboards. My favorite recollection of such an employee-led improvement came as a story from a manufacturing plant manager. In his organization, there were no “professional IEs.” Rather, the work team themselves were responsible for the process improvements. In one case, after the day shift was over, the work team took a towmotor and moved several pieces of equipment around the plant floor for more efficiency. That’s also one of the goals of KM: to create an environment of engagement and participation such that the knowledge sharing becomes organic around the organization.
Throw in my other experience in project management, quality management, and operational excellence, and you have a coincidental but highly useful background to have fun in KM!