Knowledge management was all the rage a decade ago.\u00a0 People realized the need to maintain institutional and intellectual capital as employees filtered into an organization, created new knowledge, and then often left the organization leaving little trace of the knowledge they developed and didn\u2019t share effectively.\u00a0 But knowledge management didn\u2019t really take off as a practice.\u00a0 More than hard core data building, knowledge management was replaced by increasingly better search capabilities, the decreasing cost of storage and disk space, and the increasing digitization of our work.\u00a0 All of this led to the capture of knowledge that was more effective than any attempts to archive and categorize knowledge \u2013 although there has been some of that as well.<\/p>\n
Today, we\u2019ve shifted from making sure we \u201cknow what we know\u201d to \u201cknowing who knows what we know.\u201d\u00a0 Wow, that\u2019s pretty convoluted sentence structuring, but the bottom line being that in the ever increasing pace of innovation, we have to be able to mobilize innovation capabilities at an exponential rate.\u00a0 Simply having knowledge and creating more of it on a linear scale is meaningless in today\u2019s world \u2013 that tactic would put you 50% behind your nearest competitor within a year.\u00a0 What matters is that you can mobilize the people who are best able to broker knowledge within the organization to increase the rate at which knowledge connections are made.<\/p>\n
So again I ask \u201cwhy does HR care?\u201d\u00a0 Well aren\u2019t we the people people?\u00a0 And aren\u2019t we the competency people?\u00a0 Shouldn\u2019t we be the ones identifying who our best innovation networkers are?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t the ability to collaborate effectively a skill we should be tracking?\u00a0 We\u2019re not trying to figure out who are the smartest people in our organizations, although that does impact the ability to innovate.\u00a0 We are trying to catalog a particular set of skills that allow innovation to happen.<\/p>\n
Yes it\u2019s possible that innovation and collaboration networks can be mapped, but the reality is that very few of our organizations are going to be spending the huge time investments it takes to perform this task today.\u00a0 What we can do is have our managers help us identify who has these competencies and get them recorded into our talent management systems.\u00a0 Our managers surly have a pretty good grip of who their go to people are, and with these people in the talent systems, it gives management not only an idea of how their innovation network functions, but also gives us another basis upon which our succession plans as based on.<\/p>\n
It would also be critical for HR to be looking at some of the key metrics for this population \u2013 minimizing the turnover in this population might be the most important turnover statistic you generate, as is probably different from the turnover statistics you\u2019re doing today.\u00a0 Having an upward trend in terms of headcount for this population over time would also be a very positive indicator that you\u2019re recruiting the right type of people.\u00a0 In the end, having an innovation and collaboration focus in your HR practice and filtering that through to the functional components to increase recruiting and retention of the \u201cright\u201d people will eventually drive your partnership with the overall business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Knowledge management was all the rage a decade ago.\u00a0 People realized the need to maintain institutional and intellectual capital as employees filtered into an organization, created new knowledge, and then often left the organization leaving little trace of the knowledge…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[44,13,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation","category-knowledge-management","category-talent-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}