Three months ago, i returned to Nigeria, to partake of the widely acclaimed Niger Delta Amnesty Programme. Truth be told when i got on the team, i had an impression of it being another futile effort of trying to fill a basket with water.
During my first weeks, i discovered the power of a right thinking and ever advancing team members, i also discovered the "invisible" power chains that came to play in such programmes as this, especially in Nigeria
On the amnesty,........ Hmmm. At first it looked "unworkable" if i might say, during the planning phase lots of issues came to the fore front and strategies to counter them were developed, meetings were had and loads of research conducted. From all these, i discovered that like our African elders say "A pure heart is worth more than pure clothes" the heart of the government is in the right place concerning the Amnesty Programme.
As expected of people who have been failed again and again, there were reservations from the participants and expectations of certain failure of the programme. We worked hard, worked long, worked deep and we worked strong to identify the interests of the participants, sieve corrupt vendors from truthful ones, plan and implement strategies and coordinate resources. Three months in, i can boldly proclaim "The course was just"
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Saturday 28 March 2009
VOSAPA Inc. (group course work)
1. INTRODUCTION
VOSAPA inc. is UK’s leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, this year we are planning to open 430 retail outlets will be connected with 7 different warehouses. We hire 4500 knowledge workers. This structure of the company of strongly decentralized. There are five divisions: sales & customer service, Information System, Finance, Strategy and planning. As we are an emerging organization, our aim can be rephrased as our challenges. Our challenges are to break into the market in short time and to capture 20% of market share within 2 year.
1.1. Research Methodology and Problems Faced by other Companies
As we are competing with companies such as Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U and others, in order to snatch up part of their market share and to become a leader in the UK market within 5 years., we did researches in different phone retail companies, on different aspects to indentify the gaps in the market, which we will using to gain for our company competitive advantage. Our research was based on findings from:
1. Interviewing costumers and employees
2. Observing their interactions within these organization;
3. Analyzing the company’s marketing strategies.
From our research, we have identified the main issues that we have to work on in order to become the leading company in UK:
• From the research, we found out that staff turn-over and employment of under qualified people are some of the main problems encountered within the company especially in the sales department and customer care centers, where the attrition rate is much higher compared to other departments. The reason we have found out for this is the lack of policies that make the staff give something back to the company after they have been properly trained and unjustified incentives within the companies and a poor and ‘set up’ arrangement in the recruitment process. According to the changes in the market, lack of efficient employees cause customer dissatisfaction, which leads to business failure. Moreover, it takes a lot of time for the untrained staff to deal with technical processes that are core to the sales department e.g. sale of phones with special features , which eventually costs lots of money for organization.
• A wide communication gap within the organization this affects the coordination and interaction within departments, this in turn results in delay in processes and the turn out of substandard services, which in the long run results business failures. This can be categorized as two and they are internal and external to the organization
According to the research, customer queries regarding the product and services take a lot more time to be attended to because, there is minimal or no communication between the front end departments and the warehouse. It even gets worse, where the customer service staff doesn’t know who should deal with the queries, This results in dissatisfied customers.
Further more, communication between these companies and their suppliers also lacks, because many of these companies still have outdated phones in stock and on the shelves and do not know the current trends in the market. A better communication system with our suppliers will solve this problem.
• From our research, most of these mobile phone retail companies require about 6 to 8 months to bringing new products to the market, One of the ways in which organizations gain competitive advantage over the competition is first mover advantage where the early movers into the market gets a larger market share than late movers. especially so in this customer oriented market. The project team who implements the launch of new product into the market deal with some logistics issue which are internal as well as external,. This may include identifying the customer needs, and the changes that are required meet these needs and how to inculcate them within our organization. Also, the identification of the vendors and the external partners, whose services are necessary to have this edge must be carefully selected
1.2. How These Business Problems Are Knowledge Problem
We consider these as knowledge problem because these business problems that we have considered all point towards the knowledge gaps with organizations. In order for companies to know what the customer needs are and what changes they have to make in their system to fulfill customer needs there has to be some interaction and action based on those interactions. No one knows what information either within the company or outside might be beneficial for their business and to overcome this problem, some kind of knowledge sharing is required within our organization.
Furthermore, the high staff turn over is also a knowledge problem because of a lack of good working environment and incentives, which causes employees to leave the firm early, also there are no policies that enforce the transfer of whatever knowledge any staff has to be shared and incorporated within their daily duties.. So by giving the good working environment and a knowledge sharing culture and the proper training, our employees can be nourished to the advantage of the organization.
Co-ordination within the different departments is the backbone of good information flow from one department to another. There are no arrangements made by the organization that encourages communication within departments and levels. This results in the lack of co-ordination which will in turn mean that the same problems faced by someone will be repeated to another and the solution is someplace within the organization but is not common knowledge. This will result in increase in the response time.
Knowledge is an important concern for VOSAPA. We spend large amount of resources on training and identifying the market & customer needs. The leadership of VOSAPA wants to make the company a high performance organization and believes that knowledge management plays a significant role. We believe that the future market belong to those who gather the right knowledge about the customer’s needs and address these needs on time. We also believe that sharing and utilizing knowledge better and faster than our competitors will help us to capture the market, which the one of the main goals of our company.
We are aiming to provide the best environment and opportunities for knowledge creation and encouragement of knowledge transfer for our employees, so that they will be fully aware of changing customer requirements and be innovative in bringing new ideas that will improve the company`s processes, ,facilitate and satisfy the customers in the best possible way, Capture and share their experience with other colleagues during job activities, help in supporting decision making and organizational learning and use knowledge management activities in their job routines because we believe that one satisfied customer is the key to our business success
2. SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS PROBLEM :STAFF TURNOVER AND UNDER QUALIFIED EMPLOYEES
Best management of people breeds easier managed processes hence we can easily achieve competitive advantage. Emphasis is based on recruitment, sustainment and evolution of qualified workers because of the globalization of the market. Companies have realized that human resources have changed more and more from a cost factor to success factor. In a discussion with the HR manager of RMS ltd, Nigeria, Mr. Samuel, he stressed the important role of properly managed staff in an organization, they hold up processes of the organization, and represent the humane side of business. A well managed working force, achieves more than a well paid staff.
Knowledge management system is required in VOSAPA in order to ensure that the mistakes encountered in the processes and operations of early entrants into the market can be countered upon to produce better services for our customers.
We will resolve the problem of under qualified staff by improving our recruitment process. Our research reveals that, certain companies use a set up strategy to employ people. For example, the person who knows someone in a company can leak out answers to interview questions, which in turn helps the person to pass the interview without being proficient in what he is being tested for. This strategy leads to employment to the wrong people because they know someone instead having skills and passion to work for a company.
2.1. Advance Recruitment Process
By introducing detailed recruitment process, which is strictly adhered to, each department requests a number of staff. Our organization has the BizExpress web portal used to connect external partners which are register with our company, each company is represent as separate entity in BizExpress and have their secure area, which contains instant email client and repository of document shared with each other only authorized person could access these information. In serving in recruitment process BizExpress connect with designated recruitment agencies with who we share the knowledge of the profile (this profile includes academic criteria, skills, experience etc) for the job and all its remunerations, while they search through their database and shortlist people for us.
The shortlisted are then invited for a written test, which is conducted in-house, the questions and results of the test are stored for future reference, we also conduct real life scenarios where the applicant’s skills are observed and tested. Further short listings are done at this stage. A group test project is given to the remaining applicants where their team work, leadership skill and knowledge sharing capabilities are observed and documented; short listing is done at this stage. Finally, an interview is conducted for the few remaining applicants where the final selection is made. Every step of this recruitment process is properly documented and stored. And all these documents used for this recruitment process are stored in knowledge repository, which is known as ‘knowmore’. To improve recruitment processes and protect it against any leak, community of practice is introduced within the organization, where new ideas of applicant selections is analyzed, improved upon and implemented in order to employ the best people for our organization. For this kind of innovations ‘eXpress’ can be used as a platform and our discussion forums are also plays an important role.
2.2. Better Incentive System
To decrease staff turnover and increase collaboration, incentive system is introduced, where staffs are given the option of becoming partners in the organization when they are innovative, active and supportive. According to Tracey Killen (Director of Personnel, John Lewis), being an employer of distinction helps define the culture, encapsulating the balance between rights and responsibilities which is central to being a partner, and bringing about outstanding levels of partner commitment which provide us with a competitive advantage. The amount of motivation given to the employees through good incentives creates a good environment to work towards their personal goals, which eventually helps to achieve the organizational goals.
Our reward system is based on appraisal from team leaders, where team leaders recommend staff of the month with reasons and at the end of the year the staff of each month is recognized and rewarded. The appraisal of the employee can be identified on the basis of the discussion forum and the topics they were covering in the forum. But going through the forum topic is not the only metric used for the recognition of the employee. We are also observing the performance of our employees on the daily basis to monitor their actions. The ideas put forwarded by the employees is taken into count which are useful for the organization and it is implemented for profitable solutions. Recognition is used as an encouragement to other staff members to be more active within our company and encourage them to aim for our company’s shares. Once employees become partners of the company, they take more responsibilities and treat the business as their own.
3. SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS PROBLEM :LACK OF CO-ORDINATION WITHIN ORGANIZATION:
One of our business problems, which coincide with our KM problem, is lack of co-ordination within the departments, and within the organization and with our suppliers.
3.1. Introducing Happy hours in Organization
To improve the staff coordination in overall organization we introduce policies for regular activities to be organized for staff to interact in order to share knowledge and relax in an “out of office” setting. Happy hours are arranged every month and last Friday of the month has been set aside for a social gathering among staffs. There are quarterly weekend retreats organized for senior management in order for them to relax and brainstorm on new ideas. This kind of social gathering is possible via a good working environment, which is supported by the open culture characteristics of the virtual online community, which is used by our organization. In addition, we promote team members socialization outside of the working hours, organize trips, picnics, competitions between branches, so that employees could built a strong team. We also use the Second Life as a fun way of interacting and learning new things.
3.2. Open Environment
Secondly we also operate an open environment in which there are no managers or directors, but team leaders and team members, and no subordinates or assistants but all team players. According to Portier (2008), large organizations have a problem of innovating because they work with cross-functional teams that have not broken down the layers. So, to overcome this problem we promote open environment so that every team leader is more approachable and they can enforce decisions more effectively, and are open to any innovative suggestions. All these will directly or indirectly helping the implementation of the KM and eventually it helps in resolving the business problem of staff turnover which we have mentioned in the beginning. Because of the open space environment in the infrastructure, the hierarchies haven’t got much importance in our organization.
To improve the synchronization with each team we have introduce policies within each department as well
3.3. Ameliorate Coordination in Finance department
In the finance department, professionals are responsible for accounting, audit and company’s budget. Our finance department supports our organization on a day-to-day basis to assist in the delivery of the business plan, also supports in securing financial balance, which includes the determination and establishment of financial balance, and to advise the company on strategic and operational matters relating to finance. Inadequate trained professionals cannot cope up with daily procedures also they are not capable to take best decisions that contribute the whole business. Creating and developing a knowledge management system, we are willing to deliver these duties as efficiently as possible to the highest professional standards.
We introduce the environment of sharing of knowledge among our professionals to get the best services and competitive advantage in the mobile market. An open culture was implemented to solve the problems, through brainstorming sessions which is organized biweekly in the finance department. Continuous brainstorming sessions relies on person-to-person contact to encourage experience sharing and knowledge. This strategy facilitates a controlled approach for information retrieval by letting the staff arrive at deeper insights of problems they need to solve. By adopting these sessions, our organization will be able to think-out-of-the-box and invent new or specialized ways of solving things for themselves or their customers.
3.4. To improve Coordination in Sales Department
This is one of the main concern in all the big retail companies, in which the sales people are working as individuals, they don’t share their knowledge in order to gain personal competitive advantage among others, to gain more sales, which means more commissions. Some people in sales staff, feel left out, because their colleagues are stealing their costumers, leaving them empty handed. Usually these people leave the company after few months. Only way is to progress staff satisfaction in sale department. According to Kimiz (2005), knowledge is a property and ownership is very important. As a result, hoarding of knowledge often leads to negative consequences such as empire building, reinvention of the wheel, feelings of isolation, and resistance to ideas from outside organization (Kimiz, 2005¬). Hence to improve knowledge sharing and coordination among employees we introduce pay system: basic salary plus team commissions, which are split equally. Every branch has their team, so every sales person share their knowledge within the team, give advice and support each other in order to work effectively, to raise as much sales as they can and to provide the best customer service in order not to lose the sale in the future.
To promote knowledge sharing between branches we introduce the company’s partnership system. Area managers can follow what is happening in our social network eXpress, who is saying what, to whom. People promoting their ideas and knowledge within our social network to other branches, following their posts and commenting on the forum are introduced to company’s partnership scheme; the rights to company’s shares reward these people. Therefore, to become entitle to company’s shares employees have to prove active involvement in business.
3.5. IT support for Business problem
Our organization is using IT as a tool to support the knowledge management system. As mentioned above our organization is using a web portal service known as eXpress, which is a social networking community within our organization. Our aim is to provide a open and friendly environment within our organization. Every person in our organization is supposed to have profile in this site. The profile may contain personal and professional experiences of each employee, even posting of videos, music and photos are also allowed through eXpress. If a new employee is hired by our organization, it will be easy for him/her to identify himself as a member of the organization from the start itself, even though he/she is under training by HR department in the beginning. Being social in nature, it’s easy to interact with the other people. Hence the new employee can initiate his job without any hitch.
‘xEpress’ also has a discussion forum, which deals with different topics, which may be general or it may be of problems within the organization. Discussion forum helps the employees to find out some frequently asked questions and the answers to them. Nowadays discussion forums have got a great power within them, because of the exchange of views; there is a possibility of evolving a better solution every time and its get better and better. Nobody can be an expertise in everything, everybody have got their own specific interest, experience. The time to get the answer to a specific question in a social networking site is very small. This will enhance the coordination within the team as each team have their own separate forum and they can make discussion thread “viewed to public”, which could help other to get knowledge about their work, thus it will improve the knowledge sharing .if there is a project which consist of teams from different department, we will make a discussion forum with will contain all the document and communication happen during this project.
Happy hours, open culture, incentive system and brain storming sessions are also employed to boost the co-ordination within every team in the department. The imperfection in the knowledge sharing is reduced by applying the IT support in different department, which supports in different way in each department.
4. SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS PROBLEM :PRODUCT TO MARKET:
In the current competitive world for any organization to be successful all its departments has to function at its best in order to achieve the organizational goals. One of the key department that has to work very efficiently is the warehouse department. And we need good co-ordination between the members of the warehouse department and other departments especially sales department where market intelligence is introduced to enhance services. We have got many large and medium sized warehouses spread all around the country. The director the whole warehouse department has to be highly skilled with sound knowledge about technologies and with good managerial skills. In order to manage the whole department and fulfil all the office and store needs on time and to achieve this, the director of warehouse has to communicate with the other departments (there is a two-way communication from warehouse to human resource, finance, sales and IT departments), also with suppliers outside organization.
4.1. Improvement in Warehouse Department
Warehouse department has many teams, who are responsible for new products, deliveries, client – tracking, distribution and goods storage. Every team has to interact and find the best solution for a problem. To solve this through the IT support we are using discussion forums as a tool to boost the interaction and getting the optimized solution, which will in turn support the business goal. . Other big companies face the problem of lack of adequately trained staff especially in procurement and delivering processes, which is very important to run a successful business. This will directly impact the procurement process within our organization, which leads to slow business process.
As buyers teams of warehouse attend exhibitions and conferences, they interact with other organizations and suppliers outside the company. All these kind of information can be put in our online community to know what are the events around the organization. It is very crucial to encourage warehouse department constantly interact with other teams, and suppliers because they provide the information regarding future market trends (colour, brand names, shape etc.). In addition, they gain a lot of knowledge about the new technologies that going to be used in next generation handsets. Teams will have meetings every week with all the managers of the warehouse and these meeting logs should be made available to all in eXpress web portal.
By detailed procurement process, which is assigned to warehouse department plays an important role in launching the new product within short time, to get the maximum benefit for our organization. Our organization has the BizExpress, which is our business networking web portal used to connect external partners like vendors, suppliers and different logistic company which are registered with our company. Each company has got a separate and secured space in BizExpress. The communication is very important in the case of organization, because everything relies on the way we used to commute. Any kind of transaction which are gone through our partners are stored as minutes of log, which is stored in our document repository, ‘knowmore’.
4.2. Market Intelligence
As sales people constantly communicate with customers, they can identify their needs, and expectations also evaluate their opinions about new trends, competitor’s activities and their mistakes in order to gain competitive advantage. Our sales people are encouraged to interview the costumers for market intelligence. According to E. Naylor (2008), sales force can help to put the pieces of the marketing puzzle together as they talk to customers every day. Sales people can help to answer so many questions in order to achieve company’s competitive edge; E. Naylor (2008) identifies few of them: shape product or service development; invest in research and development initiatives or acquisition candidates; enter new markets and geographies; uncover product or service opportunities; divest losing products or services (Naylor, 2008).
By holding staff meetings our sales people get trainings to solve customer’s problems and close deals, also sales people are induced to broaden their interviewing skills in order to examine the needs of marketplace and identify opportunities for selling company’s products and services. It helps to gain the feedback on how the company and its products are perceived in the marketplace. By interviewing customers, sales people can get information about activities of our competitors and get their opinion about latest products and services. All the acquired information is shared in our cell staff meetings where discovered information and best ideas are sent to regional managers, who are responsible for new marketing and promotions strategies, which are approved by general manager.
4.2. IT implementation of Business Problem “Product to Market”
Nowadays every business enterprise is using the new technologies to attract more customers and at the same time to increase the revenue by increasing the speed of information flow. Web technology is evolving with the users to become a new standard to satisfy the user itself. In the case of web2.0, it cannot be considered as new technology, but it’s a new service of the web itself. Since the capability to implement these kind of new technologies is based on the previous technology (Paul Anderson, 2007).
As mentioned above our organization supports open space environment in the infrastructure. The hierarchies haven’t got much important in our organization. To do that in IT level, we created a web portal service known as Express, which is a social networking community within our organization. Our aim is to provide a socially open space within our organization. Every person in our organization is supposed to have profile in this site. The profile may consists personal and professional experiences, at the same time about the family about their friend’s etc.Even posting of videos, music and photos are also possible through Express. If a new employee is hired by our organization, it will be easy for him/her to identify himself as a member of the organization from the start itself, even though he/she is under training. They can get the information about the employees of the same department, which they are supposed to work. Being social nature of the network, it’s easy to gel with the other people. Hence the new employee can initiate his job without any hitch.
Until now we discussed about the social nature of our networking site, ’Express’. Now we will discuss the business aspect of our organization, within the boundaries of social networking site. Within our company, a well-tuned online social network can boost the company's collective knowledge and effectiveness of the employee. Eventually it increases the connection within the employees, results in good bonding between them, which creates a nice environment to work with. Connecting with scenario on an individual level builds faith and integrity. Being in a good working environment will definitely enhance the effectiveness of the people and they will work towards the goal of the company. The main problem of many of the organization is the lack of good working environment. By giving the open space within the infrastructure, and in the virtual network, can improve the culture so that there will be a less attrition rate. An online social network and knowledge area can reinforce organization's interaction between the different parts. Online social networks alert people to the things that crash when someone’s got a good idea but doesn't know the affect on the other department, or how their idea affects other's plans or resources. In these kinds of cases timely communication is very important, as everybody knows “time is money”. So just waiting for the next meeting in the weekend will result in worsening the problem .Online networking sites within our organization can act as an alert in these situations. The alertness of our social network site is improving the co-ordination within the team. It rectifies the problem mentioned in the beginning, which directly resolve the business problem mentioned above.
‘eXpress’ also have a discussion forum, which talks about the different topics, which may be general or it may be of problems within the organization. Discussion forum helps the employees to find out some frequently asked questions and the answers to them. Nowadays discussion forums have got a great power within them, because of the exchange of views; there is a possibility of evolving a better solution every time and its get better and better. Nobody can be an expertise in everything, everybody have got their own specific interest, experience. The time to get the answer to a specific question in a social networking site is very small. But there is limitation, to know “who knows what”. Being in an online network it’s easy to identify the person with expertise in a specific field. Then the next question which we arise is why somebody would share the answer. The reason of answering, being in a productive relationship within the social network, we feel favorable to answer the question and ability to answer the question multiplies spontaneously because of the culture within our organization. There is another option, if somebody needs quick solution it can be classified into “quick request”. Because of the 24/7 nature of the site service, we can get the solution as early as possible. This kind of technique is used by one of the global provider of telecommunication solutions (Rosen, 2002). In this discussion forum we are using tagging, which is supposed to be a web 2.0 technology. In the forum, if anyone is discussing about the specific area, that person can add the title as a tag, so it will be added to the tag cloud. So the high intensity topic of the discussion forum can be easily found out by anybody, and reach there by clicking it. Being operated on the basis of employee ID and the password, we don’t have to worry about information leakage or exposing the solution to the others, which is very important in the case of an emerging organization. The quiet people who might never have something to contribute in a face to face meeting are capable of composing their message as thought or as a write up in their own time, which eventually becomes the best suggestion to the organization. In most cases the high level management is considered to take the decisions, and the suggestion given by the middle level employee can be used for a long term goal.
People finder is an application which is used under our web portal service to gather the information about those who are expertise in some specific field. The problem with most of the organization is, people don’t know those people who are capable of solving the questions which is posted in the discussion forum. This is basically a directory of the details of the people, which contains the email id, address, field of interest etc. So according to the topic we can find the people in our organization easily. In the case of HR department if we need a recruitment, then we can find the best recruitment agency which supplies the efficient people, which eventually enhance the selection of the right people, leads to the reducing the staff turnover.
‘Knowmore’ is a knowledge sharing repository in our social networking site. Because of the accessibility of every member from different departments, it contains the global knowledge. Here no one is consumer, but everybody is a contributor. Our primary concern is to grab the local information and make them global. ’Knowmore’ contains the tacit and explicit knowledge of the people who are working in different departments in our organization. The information may be of different types such as business environment, functional and technical solution components, and project documents. More than organizational documents, it includes the professional experiences of solving the problem. It basically acts as a database, which includes every document used for a project; it may be an advertising campaign, global rights document or even details of the competitors. So that it can be used by any employee who needs a reference from the past experience. An organization runs simply on the basis of conversation. Almost all the time the conversation is less structured and hardly recorded. So the important conversation is also stored as minutes. Web based conversation such as web conferences, video chat, graphs, charts, diagrams used in the meeting can be stored here to further reference. An example of this kind of service is ‘sharenet’ (Rosen, 2002).Whenever an employee uses the material from this repository and which rewards the progress, the employee can give the feedback, how much useful was the document for his work. In a sense every contribution is ‘commentable’ by the whole community of employees. The topics can be arranged on the basis of a category, subject and keyword just by tagging it. So that every member of the organization feels to be a participant, and there will be free flow of information. This will encourage the employee to be an active participant in the organization, and it feels good for them. Here no one was sharing the knowledge with the organization, but with the people itself. But an important thing to remember about repositories is that they get value by being used as references for new process, rather than being archivable information. The concept of the repository is a living system which co-evolves with the existing ideas to become the innovations to the future.
Intranet within our organization is a useful connecting link between every department. It will improve the way of communication more efficiently within our organization. Almost every organization is using the intranet within them. Educational institutions also applying this to increase the information flow within the staff and also within the students. Common e-mail system is used in our organization to disseminate the information more efficiently. It may be of new projects, events, workshops, symposium, holiday trip and agenda for the next industrial year etc. Mexpress is an instant messaging service used in our intranet, same as yahoo messenger, google talk. Most of the people use the instant messaging service in the internet, because of the nature of liveliness of conversation. It’s much more effective than making a phone call or mail in the internet. We cannot fully rely on Mexpress, because of the nature of the confidentiality of certain things which is possible only through the mails. It provides the real time information flow, which eventually reduces the response time, and increases the throughput of the employee. But there might be a question of productiveness of the employee using these kinds of technologies within the infrastructure. As everybody knows the interactive discussions have got more liveliness and it increases the response time. That is one of the reasons of high use of chatting software in the web.
Because of the different application within our organization, it may be a difficult to get along with these technologies suddenly. As a fresh employee we will provide a free tour to know about the application when he/she get into the organization. It will be useful for the person in the first, although the application used in our organization is not difficult to understand, it’s just a web environment within our organization, which is familiar to web world outside.
Appropriate Training is an essential for an employee in an organization. In the past training is to be done in specific time at the starting of the job, as an event. But now training is “in time”, where training is completed when the trainee actually needs to apply the new information or expertise. Rather than an event, it’s a continuous training throughout the span as an employee. The main concern of every organization is getting the best employee to work with. The ability of retaining the employees is a difficult job, but creating a powerful community within our organization will reduce this risk. Online social communities provide the close relationship which is essential in the organization being there for the organization, which in term decreases the staff turnover.
5. SUCCESS INDICATION
To us in VOSAPA our concentration is on people as an asset in gaining competitive advantage. After applying all the solutions we have proffered, we expect an improvement in the culture of our organization where every employee acts and participates as a partner and stakeholder. Our employees with the freedom to self manage we give them, have shown more initiative in creating solutions to problems and disseminating these solutions company-wide.
Our culture will become one of trust, openness and tolerances of error with the aim of encouraging the employees to take part in innovation of ideas ,and best practices. We also expect more innovative ideas from our staff in order them to be rewarded which should in turn better the organization, when employees outdo themselves to improve the overall process of the organization.
Communication is enhanced with the open structure, so we have begun to see employees and management sit together to discuss and even belong to communities of practice. IT has been used as a tool to support knowledge management in VOSAPA, we estimate that it will improve information flow and quick communication because technologies creates values by decreasing expenses and time and its also very convenient in the organization processes.
Conclusively, with the knowledge management system implemented in VOSAPA, we are a continuously learning organization which is crucial in this dynamic environment.
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VOSAPA inc. is UK’s leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, this year we are planning to open 430 retail outlets will be connected with 7 different warehouses. We hire 4500 knowledge workers. This structure of the company of strongly decentralized. There are five divisions: sales & customer service, Information System, Finance, Strategy and planning. As we are an emerging organization, our aim can be rephrased as our challenges. Our challenges are to break into the market in short time and to capture 20% of market share within 2 year.
1.1. Research Methodology and Problems Faced by other Companies
As we are competing with companies such as Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U and others, in order to snatch up part of their market share and to become a leader in the UK market within 5 years., we did researches in different phone retail companies, on different aspects to indentify the gaps in the market, which we will using to gain for our company competitive advantage. Our research was based on findings from:
1. Interviewing costumers and employees
2. Observing their interactions within these organization;
3. Analyzing the company’s marketing strategies.
From our research, we have identified the main issues that we have to work on in order to become the leading company in UK:
• From the research, we found out that staff turn-over and employment of under qualified people are some of the main problems encountered within the company especially in the sales department and customer care centers, where the attrition rate is much higher compared to other departments. The reason we have found out for this is the lack of policies that make the staff give something back to the company after they have been properly trained and unjustified incentives within the companies and a poor and ‘set up’ arrangement in the recruitment process. According to the changes in the market, lack of efficient employees cause customer dissatisfaction, which leads to business failure. Moreover, it takes a lot of time for the untrained staff to deal with technical processes that are core to the sales department e.g. sale of phones with special features , which eventually costs lots of money for organization.
• A wide communication gap within the organization this affects the coordination and interaction within departments, this in turn results in delay in processes and the turn out of substandard services, which in the long run results business failures. This can be categorized as two and they are internal and external to the organization
According to the research, customer queries regarding the product and services take a lot more time to be attended to because, there is minimal or no communication between the front end departments and the warehouse. It even gets worse, where the customer service staff doesn’t know who should deal with the queries, This results in dissatisfied customers.
Further more, communication between these companies and their suppliers also lacks, because many of these companies still have outdated phones in stock and on the shelves and do not know the current trends in the market. A better communication system with our suppliers will solve this problem.
• From our research, most of these mobile phone retail companies require about 6 to 8 months to bringing new products to the market, One of the ways in which organizations gain competitive advantage over the competition is first mover advantage where the early movers into the market gets a larger market share than late movers. especially so in this customer oriented market. The project team who implements the launch of new product into the market deal with some logistics issue which are internal as well as external,. This may include identifying the customer needs, and the changes that are required meet these needs and how to inculcate them within our organization. Also, the identification of the vendors and the external partners, whose services are necessary to have this edge must be carefully selected
1.2. How These Business Problems Are Knowledge Problem
We consider these as knowledge problem because these business problems that we have considered all point towards the knowledge gaps with organizations. In order for companies to know what the customer needs are and what changes they have to make in their system to fulfill customer needs there has to be some interaction and action based on those interactions. No one knows what information either within the company or outside might be beneficial for their business and to overcome this problem, some kind of knowledge sharing is required within our organization.
Furthermore, the high staff turn over is also a knowledge problem because of a lack of good working environment and incentives, which causes employees to leave the firm early, also there are no policies that enforce the transfer of whatever knowledge any staff has to be shared and incorporated within their daily duties.. So by giving the good working environment and a knowledge sharing culture and the proper training, our employees can be nourished to the advantage of the organization.
Co-ordination within the different departments is the backbone of good information flow from one department to another. There are no arrangements made by the organization that encourages communication within departments and levels. This results in the lack of co-ordination which will in turn mean that the same problems faced by someone will be repeated to another and the solution is someplace within the organization but is not common knowledge. This will result in increase in the response time.
Knowledge is an important concern for VOSAPA. We spend large amount of resources on training and identifying the market & customer needs. The leadership of VOSAPA wants to make the company a high performance organization and believes that knowledge management plays a significant role. We believe that the future market belong to those who gather the right knowledge about the customer’s needs and address these needs on time. We also believe that sharing and utilizing knowledge better and faster than our competitors will help us to capture the market, which the one of the main goals of our company.
We are aiming to provide the best environment and opportunities for knowledge creation and encouragement of knowledge transfer for our employees, so that they will be fully aware of changing customer requirements and be innovative in bringing new ideas that will improve the company`s processes, ,facilitate and satisfy the customers in the best possible way, Capture and share their experience with other colleagues during job activities, help in supporting decision making and organizational learning and use knowledge management activities in their job routines because we believe that one satisfied customer is the key to our business success
2. SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS PROBLEM :STAFF TURNOVER AND UNDER QUALIFIED EMPLOYEES
Best management of people breeds easier managed processes hence we can easily achieve competitive advantage. Emphasis is based on recruitment, sustainment and evolution of qualified workers because of the globalization of the market. Companies have realized that human resources have changed more and more from a cost factor to success factor. In a discussion with the HR manager of RMS ltd, Nigeria, Mr. Samuel, he stressed the important role of properly managed staff in an organization, they hold up processes of the organization, and represent the humane side of business. A well managed working force, achieves more than a well paid staff.
Knowledge management system is required in VOSAPA in order to ensure that the mistakes encountered in the processes and operations of early entrants into the market can be countered upon to produce better services for our customers.
We will resolve the problem of under qualified staff by improving our recruitment process. Our research reveals that, certain companies use a set up strategy to employ people. For example, the person who knows someone in a company can leak out answers to interview questions, which in turn helps the person to pass the interview without being proficient in what he is being tested for. This strategy leads to employment to the wrong people because they know someone instead having skills and passion to work for a company.
2.1. Advance Recruitment Process
By introducing detailed recruitment process, which is strictly adhered to, each department requests a number of staff. Our organization has the BizExpress web portal used to connect external partners which are register with our company, each company is represent as separate entity in BizExpress and have their secure area, which contains instant email client and repository of document shared with each other only authorized person could access these information. In serving in recruitment process BizExpress connect with designated recruitment agencies with who we share the knowledge of the profile (this profile includes academic criteria, skills, experience etc) for the job and all its remunerations, while they search through their database and shortlist people for us.
The shortlisted are then invited for a written test, which is conducted in-house, the questions and results of the test are stored for future reference, we also conduct real life scenarios where the applicant’s skills are observed and tested. Further short listings are done at this stage. A group test project is given to the remaining applicants where their team work, leadership skill and knowledge sharing capabilities are observed and documented; short listing is done at this stage. Finally, an interview is conducted for the few remaining applicants where the final selection is made. Every step of this recruitment process is properly documented and stored. And all these documents used for this recruitment process are stored in knowledge repository, which is known as ‘knowmore’. To improve recruitment processes and protect it against any leak, community of practice is introduced within the organization, where new ideas of applicant selections is analyzed, improved upon and implemented in order to employ the best people for our organization. For this kind of innovations ‘eXpress’ can be used as a platform and our discussion forums are also plays an important role.
2.2. Better Incentive System
To decrease staff turnover and increase collaboration, incentive system is introduced, where staffs are given the option of becoming partners in the organization when they are innovative, active and supportive. According to Tracey Killen (Director of Personnel, John Lewis), being an employer of distinction helps define the culture, encapsulating the balance between rights and responsibilities which is central to being a partner, and bringing about outstanding levels of partner commitment which provide us with a competitive advantage. The amount of motivation given to the employees through good incentives creates a good environment to work towards their personal goals, which eventually helps to achieve the organizational goals.
Our reward system is based on appraisal from team leaders, where team leaders recommend staff of the month with reasons and at the end of the year the staff of each month is recognized and rewarded. The appraisal of the employee can be identified on the basis of the discussion forum and the topics they were covering in the forum. But going through the forum topic is not the only metric used for the recognition of the employee. We are also observing the performance of our employees on the daily basis to monitor their actions. The ideas put forwarded by the employees is taken into count which are useful for the organization and it is implemented for profitable solutions. Recognition is used as an encouragement to other staff members to be more active within our company and encourage them to aim for our company’s shares. Once employees become partners of the company, they take more responsibilities and treat the business as their own.
3. SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS PROBLEM :LACK OF CO-ORDINATION WITHIN ORGANIZATION:
One of our business problems, which coincide with our KM problem, is lack of co-ordination within the departments, and within the organization and with our suppliers.
3.1. Introducing Happy hours in Organization
To improve the staff coordination in overall organization we introduce policies for regular activities to be organized for staff to interact in order to share knowledge and relax in an “out of office” setting. Happy hours are arranged every month and last Friday of the month has been set aside for a social gathering among staffs. There are quarterly weekend retreats organized for senior management in order for them to relax and brainstorm on new ideas. This kind of social gathering is possible via a good working environment, which is supported by the open culture characteristics of the virtual online community, which is used by our organization. In addition, we promote team members socialization outside of the working hours, organize trips, picnics, competitions between branches, so that employees could built a strong team. We also use the Second Life as a fun way of interacting and learning new things.
3.2. Open Environment
Secondly we also operate an open environment in which there are no managers or directors, but team leaders and team members, and no subordinates or assistants but all team players. According to Portier (2008), large organizations have a problem of innovating because they work with cross-functional teams that have not broken down the layers. So, to overcome this problem we promote open environment so that every team leader is more approachable and they can enforce decisions more effectively, and are open to any innovative suggestions. All these will directly or indirectly helping the implementation of the KM and eventually it helps in resolving the business problem of staff turnover which we have mentioned in the beginning. Because of the open space environment in the infrastructure, the hierarchies haven’t got much importance in our organization.
To improve the synchronization with each team we have introduce policies within each department as well
3.3. Ameliorate Coordination in Finance department
In the finance department, professionals are responsible for accounting, audit and company’s budget. Our finance department supports our organization on a day-to-day basis to assist in the delivery of the business plan, also supports in securing financial balance, which includes the determination and establishment of financial balance, and to advise the company on strategic and operational matters relating to finance. Inadequate trained professionals cannot cope up with daily procedures also they are not capable to take best decisions that contribute the whole business. Creating and developing a knowledge management system, we are willing to deliver these duties as efficiently as possible to the highest professional standards.
We introduce the environment of sharing of knowledge among our professionals to get the best services and competitive advantage in the mobile market. An open culture was implemented to solve the problems, through brainstorming sessions which is organized biweekly in the finance department. Continuous brainstorming sessions relies on person-to-person contact to encourage experience sharing and knowledge. This strategy facilitates a controlled approach for information retrieval by letting the staff arrive at deeper insights of problems they need to solve. By adopting these sessions, our organization will be able to think-out-of-the-box and invent new or specialized ways of solving things for themselves or their customers.
3.4. To improve Coordination in Sales Department
This is one of the main concern in all the big retail companies, in which the sales people are working as individuals, they don’t share their knowledge in order to gain personal competitive advantage among others, to gain more sales, which means more commissions. Some people in sales staff, feel left out, because their colleagues are stealing their costumers, leaving them empty handed. Usually these people leave the company after few months. Only way is to progress staff satisfaction in sale department. According to Kimiz (2005), knowledge is a property and ownership is very important. As a result, hoarding of knowledge often leads to negative consequences such as empire building, reinvention of the wheel, feelings of isolation, and resistance to ideas from outside organization (Kimiz, 2005¬). Hence to improve knowledge sharing and coordination among employees we introduce pay system: basic salary plus team commissions, which are split equally. Every branch has their team, so every sales person share their knowledge within the team, give advice and support each other in order to work effectively, to raise as much sales as they can and to provide the best customer service in order not to lose the sale in the future.
To promote knowledge sharing between branches we introduce the company’s partnership system. Area managers can follow what is happening in our social network eXpress, who is saying what, to whom. People promoting their ideas and knowledge within our social network to other branches, following their posts and commenting on the forum are introduced to company’s partnership scheme; the rights to company’s shares reward these people. Therefore, to become entitle to company’s shares employees have to prove active involvement in business.
3.5. IT support for Business problem
Our organization is using IT as a tool to support the knowledge management system. As mentioned above our organization is using a web portal service known as eXpress, which is a social networking community within our organization. Our aim is to provide a open and friendly environment within our organization. Every person in our organization is supposed to have profile in this site. The profile may contain personal and professional experiences of each employee, even posting of videos, music and photos are also allowed through eXpress. If a new employee is hired by our organization, it will be easy for him/her to identify himself as a member of the organization from the start itself, even though he/she is under training by HR department in the beginning. Being social in nature, it’s easy to interact with the other people. Hence the new employee can initiate his job without any hitch.
‘xEpress’ also has a discussion forum, which deals with different topics, which may be general or it may be of problems within the organization. Discussion forum helps the employees to find out some frequently asked questions and the answers to them. Nowadays discussion forums have got a great power within them, because of the exchange of views; there is a possibility of evolving a better solution every time and its get better and better. Nobody can be an expertise in everything, everybody have got their own specific interest, experience. The time to get the answer to a specific question in a social networking site is very small. This will enhance the coordination within the team as each team have their own separate forum and they can make discussion thread “viewed to public”, which could help other to get knowledge about their work, thus it will improve the knowledge sharing .if there is a project which consist of teams from different department, we will make a discussion forum with will contain all the document and communication happen during this project.
Happy hours, open culture, incentive system and brain storming sessions are also employed to boost the co-ordination within every team in the department. The imperfection in the knowledge sharing is reduced by applying the IT support in different department, which supports in different way in each department.
4. SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS PROBLEM :PRODUCT TO MARKET:
In the current competitive world for any organization to be successful all its departments has to function at its best in order to achieve the organizational goals. One of the key department that has to work very efficiently is the warehouse department. And we need good co-ordination between the members of the warehouse department and other departments especially sales department where market intelligence is introduced to enhance services. We have got many large and medium sized warehouses spread all around the country. The director the whole warehouse department has to be highly skilled with sound knowledge about technologies and with good managerial skills. In order to manage the whole department and fulfil all the office and store needs on time and to achieve this, the director of warehouse has to communicate with the other departments (there is a two-way communication from warehouse to human resource, finance, sales and IT departments), also with suppliers outside organization.
4.1. Improvement in Warehouse Department
Warehouse department has many teams, who are responsible for new products, deliveries, client – tracking, distribution and goods storage. Every team has to interact and find the best solution for a problem. To solve this through the IT support we are using discussion forums as a tool to boost the interaction and getting the optimized solution, which will in turn support the business goal. . Other big companies face the problem of lack of adequately trained staff especially in procurement and delivering processes, which is very important to run a successful business. This will directly impact the procurement process within our organization, which leads to slow business process.
As buyers teams of warehouse attend exhibitions and conferences, they interact with other organizations and suppliers outside the company. All these kind of information can be put in our online community to know what are the events around the organization. It is very crucial to encourage warehouse department constantly interact with other teams, and suppliers because they provide the information regarding future market trends (colour, brand names, shape etc.). In addition, they gain a lot of knowledge about the new technologies that going to be used in next generation handsets. Teams will have meetings every week with all the managers of the warehouse and these meeting logs should be made available to all in eXpress web portal.
By detailed procurement process, which is assigned to warehouse department plays an important role in launching the new product within short time, to get the maximum benefit for our organization. Our organization has the BizExpress, which is our business networking web portal used to connect external partners like vendors, suppliers and different logistic company which are registered with our company. Each company has got a separate and secured space in BizExpress. The communication is very important in the case of organization, because everything relies on the way we used to commute. Any kind of transaction which are gone through our partners are stored as minutes of log, which is stored in our document repository, ‘knowmore’.
4.2. Market Intelligence
As sales people constantly communicate with customers, they can identify their needs, and expectations also evaluate their opinions about new trends, competitor’s activities and their mistakes in order to gain competitive advantage. Our sales people are encouraged to interview the costumers for market intelligence. According to E. Naylor (2008), sales force can help to put the pieces of the marketing puzzle together as they talk to customers every day. Sales people can help to answer so many questions in order to achieve company’s competitive edge; E. Naylor (2008) identifies few of them: shape product or service development; invest in research and development initiatives or acquisition candidates; enter new markets and geographies; uncover product or service opportunities; divest losing products or services (Naylor, 2008).
By holding staff meetings our sales people get trainings to solve customer’s problems and close deals, also sales people are induced to broaden their interviewing skills in order to examine the needs of marketplace and identify opportunities for selling company’s products and services. It helps to gain the feedback on how the company and its products are perceived in the marketplace. By interviewing customers, sales people can get information about activities of our competitors and get their opinion about latest products and services. All the acquired information is shared in our cell staff meetings where discovered information and best ideas are sent to regional managers, who are responsible for new marketing and promotions strategies, which are approved by general manager.
4.2. IT implementation of Business Problem “Product to Market”
Nowadays every business enterprise is using the new technologies to attract more customers and at the same time to increase the revenue by increasing the speed of information flow. Web technology is evolving with the users to become a new standard to satisfy the user itself. In the case of web2.0, it cannot be considered as new technology, but it’s a new service of the web itself. Since the capability to implement these kind of new technologies is based on the previous technology (Paul Anderson, 2007).
As mentioned above our organization supports open space environment in the infrastructure. The hierarchies haven’t got much important in our organization. To do that in IT level, we created a web portal service known as Express, which is a social networking community within our organization. Our aim is to provide a socially open space within our organization. Every person in our organization is supposed to have profile in this site. The profile may consists personal and professional experiences, at the same time about the family about their friend’s etc.Even posting of videos, music and photos are also possible through Express. If a new employee is hired by our organization, it will be easy for him/her to identify himself as a member of the organization from the start itself, even though he/she is under training. They can get the information about the employees of the same department, which they are supposed to work. Being social nature of the network, it’s easy to gel with the other people. Hence the new employee can initiate his job without any hitch.
Until now we discussed about the social nature of our networking site, ’Express’. Now we will discuss the business aspect of our organization, within the boundaries of social networking site. Within our company, a well-tuned online social network can boost the company's collective knowledge and effectiveness of the employee. Eventually it increases the connection within the employees, results in good bonding between them, which creates a nice environment to work with. Connecting with scenario on an individual level builds faith and integrity. Being in a good working environment will definitely enhance the effectiveness of the people and they will work towards the goal of the company. The main problem of many of the organization is the lack of good working environment. By giving the open space within the infrastructure, and in the virtual network, can improve the culture so that there will be a less attrition rate. An online social network and knowledge area can reinforce organization's interaction between the different parts. Online social networks alert people to the things that crash when someone’s got a good idea but doesn't know the affect on the other department, or how their idea affects other's plans or resources. In these kinds of cases timely communication is very important, as everybody knows “time is money”. So just waiting for the next meeting in the weekend will result in worsening the problem .Online networking sites within our organization can act as an alert in these situations. The alertness of our social network site is improving the co-ordination within the team. It rectifies the problem mentioned in the beginning, which directly resolve the business problem mentioned above.
‘eXpress’ also have a discussion forum, which talks about the different topics, which may be general or it may be of problems within the organization. Discussion forum helps the employees to find out some frequently asked questions and the answers to them. Nowadays discussion forums have got a great power within them, because of the exchange of views; there is a possibility of evolving a better solution every time and its get better and better. Nobody can be an expertise in everything, everybody have got their own specific interest, experience. The time to get the answer to a specific question in a social networking site is very small. But there is limitation, to know “who knows what”. Being in an online network it’s easy to identify the person with expertise in a specific field. Then the next question which we arise is why somebody would share the answer. The reason of answering, being in a productive relationship within the social network, we feel favorable to answer the question and ability to answer the question multiplies spontaneously because of the culture within our organization. There is another option, if somebody needs quick solution it can be classified into “quick request”. Because of the 24/7 nature of the site service, we can get the solution as early as possible. This kind of technique is used by one of the global provider of telecommunication solutions (Rosen, 2002). In this discussion forum we are using tagging, which is supposed to be a web 2.0 technology. In the forum, if anyone is discussing about the specific area, that person can add the title as a tag, so it will be added to the tag cloud. So the high intensity topic of the discussion forum can be easily found out by anybody, and reach there by clicking it. Being operated on the basis of employee ID and the password, we don’t have to worry about information leakage or exposing the solution to the others, which is very important in the case of an emerging organization. The quiet people who might never have something to contribute in a face to face meeting are capable of composing their message as thought or as a write up in their own time, which eventually becomes the best suggestion to the organization. In most cases the high level management is considered to take the decisions, and the suggestion given by the middle level employee can be used for a long term goal.
People finder is an application which is used under our web portal service to gather the information about those who are expertise in some specific field. The problem with most of the organization is, people don’t know those people who are capable of solving the questions which is posted in the discussion forum. This is basically a directory of the details of the people, which contains the email id, address, field of interest etc. So according to the topic we can find the people in our organization easily. In the case of HR department if we need a recruitment, then we can find the best recruitment agency which supplies the efficient people, which eventually enhance the selection of the right people, leads to the reducing the staff turnover.
‘Knowmore’ is a knowledge sharing repository in our social networking site. Because of the accessibility of every member from different departments, it contains the global knowledge. Here no one is consumer, but everybody is a contributor. Our primary concern is to grab the local information and make them global. ’Knowmore’ contains the tacit and explicit knowledge of the people who are working in different departments in our organization. The information may be of different types such as business environment, functional and technical solution components, and project documents. More than organizational documents, it includes the professional experiences of solving the problem. It basically acts as a database, which includes every document used for a project; it may be an advertising campaign, global rights document or even details of the competitors. So that it can be used by any employee who needs a reference from the past experience. An organization runs simply on the basis of conversation. Almost all the time the conversation is less structured and hardly recorded. So the important conversation is also stored as minutes. Web based conversation such as web conferences, video chat, graphs, charts, diagrams used in the meeting can be stored here to further reference. An example of this kind of service is ‘sharenet’ (Rosen, 2002).Whenever an employee uses the material from this repository and which rewards the progress, the employee can give the feedback, how much useful was the document for his work. In a sense every contribution is ‘commentable’ by the whole community of employees. The topics can be arranged on the basis of a category, subject and keyword just by tagging it. So that every member of the organization feels to be a participant, and there will be free flow of information. This will encourage the employee to be an active participant in the organization, and it feels good for them. Here no one was sharing the knowledge with the organization, but with the people itself. But an important thing to remember about repositories is that they get value by being used as references for new process, rather than being archivable information. The concept of the repository is a living system which co-evolves with the existing ideas to become the innovations to the future.
Intranet within our organization is a useful connecting link between every department. It will improve the way of communication more efficiently within our organization. Almost every organization is using the intranet within them. Educational institutions also applying this to increase the information flow within the staff and also within the students. Common e-mail system is used in our organization to disseminate the information more efficiently. It may be of new projects, events, workshops, symposium, holiday trip and agenda for the next industrial year etc. Mexpress is an instant messaging service used in our intranet, same as yahoo messenger, google talk. Most of the people use the instant messaging service in the internet, because of the nature of liveliness of conversation. It’s much more effective than making a phone call or mail in the internet. We cannot fully rely on Mexpress, because of the nature of the confidentiality of certain things which is possible only through the mails. It provides the real time information flow, which eventually reduces the response time, and increases the throughput of the employee. But there might be a question of productiveness of the employee using these kinds of technologies within the infrastructure. As everybody knows the interactive discussions have got more liveliness and it increases the response time. That is one of the reasons of high use of chatting software in the web.
Because of the different application within our organization, it may be a difficult to get along with these technologies suddenly. As a fresh employee we will provide a free tour to know about the application when he/she get into the organization. It will be useful for the person in the first, although the application used in our organization is not difficult to understand, it’s just a web environment within our organization, which is familiar to web world outside.
Appropriate Training is an essential for an employee in an organization. In the past training is to be done in specific time at the starting of the job, as an event. But now training is “in time”, where training is completed when the trainee actually needs to apply the new information or expertise. Rather than an event, it’s a continuous training throughout the span as an employee. The main concern of every organization is getting the best employee to work with. The ability of retaining the employees is a difficult job, but creating a powerful community within our organization will reduce this risk. Online social communities provide the close relationship which is essential in the organization being there for the organization, which in term decreases the staff turnover.
5. SUCCESS INDICATION
To us in VOSAPA our concentration is on people as an asset in gaining competitive advantage. After applying all the solutions we have proffered, we expect an improvement in the culture of our organization where every employee acts and participates as a partner and stakeholder. Our employees with the freedom to self manage we give them, have shown more initiative in creating solutions to problems and disseminating these solutions company-wide.
Our culture will become one of trust, openness and tolerances of error with the aim of encouraging the employees to take part in innovation of ideas ,and best practices. We also expect more innovative ideas from our staff in order them to be rewarded which should in turn better the organization, when employees outdo themselves to improve the overall process of the organization.
Communication is enhanced with the open structure, so we have begun to see employees and management sit together to discuss and even belong to communities of practice. IT has been used as a tool to support knowledge management in VOSAPA, we estimate that it will improve information flow and quick communication because technologies creates values by decreasing expenses and time and its also very convenient in the organization processes.
Conclusively, with the knowledge management system implemented in VOSAPA, we are a continuously learning organization which is crucial in this dynamic environment.
REFERENCES
Adams E. J., 2001, Cisco Business case report: Optimizing organization and employee capabilities. Available:
http://www.beepknowledgesystem.org/Search/ShowCase.asp?CaseTitleID=315&CaseID=1344
(Accessed March 12, 2009).
Anderson. P, 2007, What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education, JISC Technology and Standards Watch. Available
www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf (Accessed February 25, 2009).
Killen T. John Lewis partnership. Available: http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk (Accessed February 20, 2009)
Kimiz D., 2005. Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice: Theory into Practice.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xtFLTymKV0QC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPA108,M1 (Accessed February 10, 2009).
McKenzie, J. & Winkelen. C., 2004, Understanding the knowledgeable organization : nurturing knowledge competence, Edition London. Thomson.
Naylor E. (2008), Enable Sales to Elicit Market Intelligence: The Cooperative Angle, Business Intelligence Source. Competitive Intelligence magazine. Volume 11, Number 3, pp 45 – 46.
Probst G., Raub S. & Romhardt K., 2000, Managing Knowledge. Available:
http://www.beepknowledgesystem.org/search/ShowCaseFullReport.asp?CaseID=451 (Accessed March 7, 2009).
Rosen. P, 2002, Case Study: The Siemens ICN Knowledge Management Challenge: ICN/ICM ShareNet. Available http://www.knowledgeboard.com/ (Accessed March 11, 2009).
Thursday 29 January 2009
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Data
Data is a gathered body of facts
Data can exist in a variety of forms- as numbers, text on a piece of paper, bytes store in electronic memory or facts stored in a person`s mind.
Data is raw content or inputs obtained by the market research about customer requirement .
Information
This is processed data which can be inform of charts,graphs memos etc.
Applying this information to predict and forecast some business situation example high demand for particular phones
Knowledge
Knowledge is an understanding of data and information, it is also an experience
how and why we do certain things. An understanding how to approach a customer, use different technologies and systems and how to adapt to adapt to changing technologies and new trends. Also how to communicate between different levels.
Knowledge Management
This is gathering ,sharing , analysing and application of knowledge in an organisation.
Knowledge Management and Our Business
To us, Knowledge management is operational in two ways i.e. organisational and technological
CHECK THIS OUT
video
Data is a gathered body of facts
Data can exist in a variety of forms- as numbers, text on a piece of paper, bytes store in electronic memory or facts stored in a person`s mind.
Data is raw content or inputs obtained by the market research about customer requirement .
Information
This is processed data which can be inform of charts,graphs memos etc.
Applying this information to predict and forecast some business situation example high demand for particular phones
Knowledge
Knowledge is an understanding of data and information, it is also an experience
how and why we do certain things. An understanding how to approach a customer, use different technologies and systems and how to adapt to adapt to changing technologies and new trends. Also how to communicate between different levels.
Knowledge Management
This is gathering ,sharing , analysing and application of knowledge in an organisation.
Knowledge Management and Our Business
To us, Knowledge management is operational in two ways i.e. organisational and technological
CHECK THIS OUT
video
Monday 26 January 2009
Thursday 22 January 2009
Introduction of team
Team:: VOSAPA
Salis khan (pakistan)
Bankie (Nigeria)
Emmanuel (nigeria)
Abhijeet (India)
Vaida (Lithuania)
Praveen (india)
Salis khan (pakistan)
Bankie (Nigeria)
Emmanuel (nigeria)
Abhijeet (India)
Vaida (Lithuania)
Praveen (india)
hello world.....
We welcome you to our blog, and its the reflection of VOSAPA`s view towards the world.
Thank you,
regards,
Thank you,
regards,
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