What types of competencies should be present in a good KM team? What is the contribution of each skill set?
Creating a knowledge management team is not restricted to giving a specific group of people certain information and assigning them with the corresponding roles in the information processing and distribution. Each of the group members must have a certain set of competencies that define him/her as a professional and allow for the better overall performance of the team. The following are the most often required qualities of a typical KM-team member:
- time management skills (allow to arrange the working process efficiently and obtain results faster);
- being knowledgeable and able to learn new information fast (helps increase the speed of the production process);
- using appropriate learning techniques for distilling and learning key information quickly (allows for absorbing more facts within shorter amounts of time);
- the skills that help gather information and process it in order to drive the conclusions that will help make management decisions;
- the skills on information networking that help reach people who have specific knowledge (help obtain the required information faster);
- the skills that help search for trustworthy resources (allow for using verified information and, therefore, for more precise calculations of the supposed income);
- the skills in IT to record and disseminate the information efficiently;
- the skills in solving problems by using teamwork (help boost the use of knowledge sharing system and, therefore, more efficient distribution of the information within the company);
- communication skills that help lead an open dialogue (allows to solve the problems constructively and avoid possible conflicts within the team);
- the ability to be innovative and flexible (helps find original and effective solutions to the emerging problems);
- the ability to learn from past mistakes (helps avoid making the same mistakes in the future).
As Dalkir (2005) claims, taking these simple postulates as guidelines will help one improve the knowledge sharing system within the company and, thus, improve the efficiency of the team’s performance.
List some of the major types of organizations that offer KM positions and discuss why they need these KM skills.
There are several types of organizations requiring the services of a KM specialist to make sure that the process of knowledge management goes smoothly within the company. Splitting the entire variety of these organizations into several groups, one will come to the conclusion that there are basically three types of such organizations, namely, the ones that deal with:
- creating information content;
- providing information delivery;
- improving information technologies.
Below, there are several examples for each of the above-mentioned types of knowledge management organizations:
Using the key principles of the KM theory, the given companies manage the information that they have at their disposal either to create new content or to make efficient use of the already existing one. It is necessary to mention that each of the three aforementioned types of companies is a logical continuation of the previously mentioned one. Thus, one can observe the repeated information cycle within the society, which presupposes that the old facts are used as a basis for creating new content.
Reference List
Dalkir, K. (2005). Knowledge management in theory and practice. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Butterworth–Heinemann.