Contemporary Issues in HRM. Knowledge Management

1. Contemporary Issues
in
Human Resource
Management
Lec-1
-Knowledge Management
-Cultural Diversity

2. Introduction to Course
• The course is not aimed at mapping all debates in HRM: rather, the
course is a topics-based approach to HRM research and practice.
• key controversies in HRM research
• Relationship between the theory and practice of HRM, the challenges
of managing human resources and the state of contemporary HRM
research.
2

3. INTENDED COURSE LEARNING OUTCOMES
1. Describe and discuss key issues and controversies associated with current
debates in human resource management;
2. Critically assess the objectives, rationales, uses and limitations of various
managerial policies and practices in human resource management;
3. Identify the scale and nature of adoption of specific human resource
policies;
4. Identify the perspectives of key stakeholders in the theory and practice of
human resource management
5. Understand the nature of contemporary HRM research;
6. Consider the longer term consequences of current trends in HRM
3

4. Knowledge Management
Types, Tools, Process, Techniques
4

5. What is Knowledge Management (KM)?
• “The basic economic resource is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor
labor. It is and will be knowledge.” Peter Drucker
“Knowledge management is a process that helps teams gather,
organize, and share information. Learn why it’s important and how to
get started.”
“Knowledge management is leveraging relevant intellectual assets to
enhance organizational performance.” Stankosky, 2002
“The systematic process of creating, maintaining and nurturing an
organization to make the best use of knowledge to create business
value and generate competitive advantage.”
5

6. 6 © 2004 Superfactory™. All Rights Reserved.
Why Knowledge Management?
• Organizing existing corporate knowledge
• New ways to share tacit knowledge
• Support for research and knowledge generation
• New ways to share explicit knowledge
• Smart tools to aid decision making

7. Basics of KM
• Knowledge is the human capacity (potential & actual ability) to take effective
action in varied and uncertain situations.
• Wisdom is a state of the human mind characterized by profound understanding
and deep insight. It is often, but not necessarily, accompanied by extensive
formal knowledge.
• Forms of Knowledge
• Concepts, methodologies
• Facts, beliefs, truths & laws
• Know what, Know how, Know why
• Judgments & expectations, insights
• Relationships, leverage points
• Intuition & feelings
• Meaning and sense making
7

8. Types of knowledge management
Each type of knowledge plays a role in helping your organization operate efficiently.
1. Explicit knowledge is information that’s easy to document, share, and scale (like data
and repeatable processes).
2. Implicit knowledge is the ability to take explicit knowledge and apply it to a problem.
3. Tacit knowledge is information that’s difficult to express or put into words (such as
personal experiences with your customers or things you know how to do intuitively).
4. Employees: Insights from employees, product experts, and external partners can lead to
help center articles that address common customer inquiries. These insights are also
helpful to agents as a reference point when they’re assisting customers.
5. Customers: Through 1:1 customer conversations, surveys, case studies, social media
engagement, and support requests, your support team has access to a wealth of
knowledge that can help improve marketing, sales, customer support, product
development, and mor
8

9. Knowledge management process
Creating an organizational culture around knowledge management starts with
building a formal process for sharing information. Here are five key steps in the
knowledge management process.
1. Identify role model companies where knowledge is an enterprise-wide
initiative:
• Create links with successful companies and seek knowledge from where to
start.
2. Finding Individual with essential skills
• Project management, content management, and technical writing are crucial
skills for developing your knowledge management channels. Project
managers ensure your knowledge management efforts don’t lose steam,
while technical writers are adept at writing clear, concise, and engaging copy
for complex topics. Partner with people in these roles on content creation and
maintenance. 9

10. Knowledge management process
3. Use Technology to Streamline your KM
• Use of knowledge management software automatically serves up relevant
articles in response to search queries.
• Knowledge base solutions equipped with machine learning get smarter
over time, improving the quality of the AI-driven responses.
• Technology can automate other areas of your workflow, too. You can
regularly prompt knowledge contributors to update articles or ask subject
matter experts to verify the accuracy and relevance of content before it’s
published.
• The simpler it is to collect, store, and distribute knowledge, the more likely
your knowledge management process will stick.
10

11. Knowledge management process
4. Share the Process with All
• Knowledge management only works when everyone at the company
participates. To explain why your business needs knowledge
management, first create a mission statement describing your
purpose.
• Then, show employees how it will benefit their work by stating the
objectives of your knowledge management objective.
• Finally, make it easy for people to participate. Identify different
stakeholders within the company and tell them how their knowledge
will contribute to the initiative’s success.
11

12. Knowledge management process
5. Repeat
• Knowledge management isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it scenario. Your
team must vet knowledge habitually to ensure its relevance as your
product and business evolve.
• To increase the chances of success, empower agents with tools for
knowledge capture as well as tools that enable them to edit and
update help articles.
12

13. KM Tools History
• Ruggles (1997) provides a classification of KM technologies as tools
that
1. Enhance and enable knowledge generation, codification, and
transfer.
2. Generate knowledge (e.g., data mining that discovers new
patterns in data).
3. Code knowledge to make knowledge available for others.
4. Transfer knowledge to decrease problems with time and space
when communicating in an organization.
KM Tools 13

14. KM Tools History
Rollet (2003) classifies KM technologies according to the following scheme:
1. Communication
2. Collaboration
3. Content creation
4. Content management
5. Adaptation
6. E-learning
7. Personal tools
8. Artificial intelligence
9. Networking
KM Tools 14

15. KM Tools 15

16. Major Tools and Techniques of KM
1. Knowledge Capture and Creation Tools: Content Creation Tools
• Content management systems (CMS) should be used for capturing of data. A lot of CMS
fail due to simpler focus on use of technology rather then data management.
• CMS should be handled in a strategic way. Such failures provide a valuable source of
learning.
• In CMS advance and Additional standards should be used for storing, structuring, and
managing content.
• Authoring tools, the most commonly used content creation tools, range from the general
(e.g., word processing) to the more specialized (e.g., web page design software).
• Annotation/foot note technologies are used for short comments with a number of
different authors (e.g., by making used of the track changes feature in Word).
• This allows a “running commentary” to be built up and preserved. Annotations may be
public (visible to all who access and read the document) or private (visible to the author
only).
16

17. Major Tools and Techniques of KM
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Content Management is a feature that is oriented to view web
pages or layouts.
• Developing a website is not as difficult as imagined before. Many
sites have sprung up on the Internet, ranging nature using only
static HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to dynamic
programming language such as ASP, PHP, Java Script, and so forth.
• This resulted in the difficulty level users to periodically update the
content (content) website. Each time you make changes to your site
requires the institution or person to contact the Webmaster to
update. This has encouraged the emergence of CMS.
KM Tools 17

18. Major Tools and Techniques of KM
2. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• Typical applications of data mining knowledge discovery systems
include market segmentation, customer profiling, fraud detection,
evaluation of retail promotions, credit risk analysis, and market
basket analysis.
• The data mining and knowledge discovery processes automatically
extract predictive information from large databases based on
statistical analysis (typically, cluster analysis).
• A combination of machine learning, statistical analysis, modeling
techniques, and database technology, data mining detects hidden
patterns and subtle relationships in data and infers rules that allow
the prediction of future results.
KM Tools 18

19. Predictive Model
• Raw data is analyzed in order to offer a
model that attempts to explain the observed
patterns.
KM Tools 19
Black Box Model
• A large number of inputs are required, usually
over a significant period of time, and the
types of models produced range from “easy”
to “almost impossible” to understand.
• Examples of easy-to-understand models are
decision trees.
• Regression analyses are moderately easy to
understand, and neural networks remain
black boxes.
• The major drawback of the black box models
is that it becomes very difficult to hypothesize
about causal relationships

20. Major Tools and Techniques of KM
• Data mining tools that are currently in use include:
1. Statistical analysis tools (e.g., SAS).
2. Data mining suites (e.g., Enterprise Miner).
3. Consulting/outsourcing tools such as EDS, IBM, and Epsilon.
(Note that these tools are models, not just software.)
4. Data visualization software that coherently presents a large
amount of information in a small space. They make use of
human information processing capabilities—your eyes—to
detect patterns, for example, in a virtual reality or simulation
environment where you can “walk around the data points.”
KM Tools 20

21. Major Tools and Techniques of KM
3. Blogs
• Blogs, by their language is an abbreviation for Weblog.
• Weblog itself is an abbreviation of "Logging The Web".
• The origins of the term "Logging The Web" is entering the web and write
"conclusions which links interesting" and give an opinion on these links in
their online journal.
• Blogs are websites with content (content can be text, images, links, audio
or video) that is updated regularly as well as represent and from the
viewpoint of "character" that makes the content of certain characteristic
(generally using a personal standpoint).
• By default, the blog content are sorted in reverse chronological (new
content in the future, the old content in the back) and can be commented
on.
KM Tools 21

22. • Blog searching breaks down into at least two categories:
(1) information from within blogs/across blogs or
(2) addresses of feeds from blogs so that you may subscribe in your
aggregator
• Blogs not only offer a new way to communicate with customers, but
they have internal uses as well. For example, large organizations can
use well formed blog to exchange ideas and information about web
development projects, training initiatives, or research issues.
• Blogs are basically built in HTML, XML, javascript, etc
• Spiders and bots (or web crawlers, knowledge robots) automatically
search for information online and collect posts (i.e., messages that
are submitted to a computerized messaging system) the same way
as they collect other online information.
KM Tools 22

23. Cultural Diversity
23

24. What is Cultural Diversity?
• Cultural diversity in the workplace refers to hiring employees from
different backgrounds, regardless of race, gender, and culture.
• Hiring a diverse pool of talent is beneficial for the company and the
employees.
• The human race comprises diverse people with distinct experiences
and skills. Disregarding someone because of who and what they are
can make you lose out on great talent.
24

25. Benefits of Cultural Diversity in the Workplace
1. Higher Team Performance
• Cultural diversity in the workplace helps to increase productivity at work.
Diversity is a combination of beliefs, values, and norms for people to work on a
common goal. Promoting cultural diversity in the workplace enhances team
performance because:
• It allows employees to learn and grow by sharing each other’s experiences.
• Employees from different backgrounds engage with each other.
• It enables them to come up with fresh ideas.
• It allows them to think out of the box and increase productivity.
• A diverse workplace includes employees from different backgrounds, races, and
ethnicities.
• And when they work together, it breeds a positive work environment.
25

26. Benefits of Cultural Diversity in the Workplace
2. Creativity
• The second benefit of cultural diversity is enhancing creativity in the
team.
• When different groups of people with diverse ideas come together
and work. One can find a solution. Every individual has their way of
thinking, operating, decision-making, and problem-solving skills.
• By promoting diversity in the workplace employers can:
• Inspire their workforce to perform their best
• Increase employee engagement
• Foster creativity and innovation amongst team members
26

27. Benefits of Cultural Diversity in the Workplace
27
3. Increases profits
Many studies have found- a diverse work culture increases profits for the
company.
As per the 2013 survey of the Centre for Talent Innovation, 48 percent of
organizations in the US with a diverse workforce showed improvement in
their market share compared to the previous year.
For a global company, language diversity can be an excellent strategy to
bring in new clients.
For example, companies dealing with India’s businesses hire people fluent
in major Indian languages. It increases their reputation in the Indian
communities. Such strategies can increase sales resulting in improved
profits.

28. Benefits of Cultural Diversity in the Workplace
4. Inspires trust and respect
• The best way to learn about various cultures and ethnicities is from
coworkers who come from different backgrounds.
• While your workers are on a lunch break with their colleagues,
conversations happen. Promoting a diverse work culture is all about
employees:
• Getting to know their culture and lifestyle
• Communicating about life experiences
• Discussing their festivals and foods
• Building trust and respect.
28