Stephanie McFarland
INF 385Q — Knowledge Management Systems
Dr. Don Turnbull
May 11, 2005
Knowledge Management in Public Organizations
Many organizations see knowledge management as a practice that enhances their
ability to compete with others. Strong knowledge management strategies often translate
to more satisfied customers, better products, and increased innovation. In fact, some
knowledge management proponents believe the concept of knowledge management
originated in part as a result of economic factors like globalization as businesses sought
to capture their knowledge in order to “bring new products and services to wider markets
ever more quickly” (Prusak, 2001).
But in the public sector, competition, products, customers, and marketplaces often
do not exist in the traditional sense, and many nonprofits tend to assume that employees
find motivation and reward through means unrelated to money. And in the absence of
dire financial consequences as a result of poor knowledge management, many public
organizations simply fail to see the need for such initiatives. Furthermore, federal
operations and government branches tend to not function like the average corporation,
with many adhering to stricter guidelines about how knowledge is created, disseminated,
and stored, as well as how employees take ownership of the knowledge they obtain.
Recent well-publicized examples of failed technology initiatives and poor
communication in the federal sector have begun to explore knowledge management in
that setting, while many nonprofit leaders have published articles and books seeking to
improve the non-corporate approach to knowledge. As a whole, public organizations
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function quite differently than private businesses, due to a variety of financial and social
factors that influence the organizational culture as well as the knowledge it breeds.
Private vs. Public
By private sector, economists mean private firms and companies that are not
controlled by the state. The public sector, on the other hand, indicates “that part of
economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by
and for the government, whether national, regional, or local/municipal” (Wikipedia,
2005). For the purposes of this paper, public knowledge management will specifically
point to what are commonly known as nonprofit organizations, as well as those operating
as part of the federal government. Examples of such entities range from smaller social
organizations such as churches, city libraries or local chapters of an advocacy group such
as Planned Parenthood, to large operations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
and the United States military. Independent federal agencies, such as the National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), and the United States Postal Service (USPS), also qualify as
public organizations.
Unlike private companies, public organizations do not rely on earnings reaped
from commercial products and services. Federal departments and agencies, for instance,
receive funds via national taxation. Nonprofits, working as organizations established not
for private gain but for public or mutual benefit purposes, finance their activities through
donations. Entities contributing to a nonprofit's well-being can include the government
(federal, state, or local), charitable foundations, or individual donors (Light, 2000). One
consequence of relying on such outside funding, rather than sales of merchandise or
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services, is that nonprofits and other public organizations often must answer to those
external sources about how they assist or improve the community they purport to serve.
So in addition to proving to their clients that they can help them without providing
traditional goods, nonprofits have donors who want, and often demand, to know their
money is well spent.
Money and Motivation
Likewise, due to totally different financial concerns than those in a corporate
setting, government and nonprofit workplaces’ efforts at establishing new technology,
revised communication strategies, and training, “rarely yield tangible results such as
increased sales or profits” (Chiem, 2001). This absence of material, product-based
income makes it virtually impossible for public outfits to motivate workers to create and
share knowledge according to the traditional, extrinsic bottom line measure of success
that creates financial rewards for the organization and its employees.
When a corporate worker comes up with an idea for a product that reaps millions
of dollars in profit for the business, he/she usually receives a monetary bonus or higher
status in the organization. In contrast, in a public business, innovation may help further
the organization’s mission or the lives of its clients, but rarely increases the bottom line
or the innovator’s paycheck. While this altruistic aim often motivates individuals to work
in the public sector in the first place, it poses some problems when used as the sole
reward for knowledge creation and sharing.
More often than not, workers look to improve their knowledge skills when they
know the organization uses knowledge as a measure of an employee’s potential longevity
with the organization or when management grants raises and promotions based on
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innovation, be it individual or collaborative (Chiem, 2001). Although many individuals
might respond to simple words of praise or the possibility that colleagues can benefit
from their knowledge, many knowledge management theorists argue that acknowledgment without extrinsic results can wear thin. Financial- and status-based rewards, on the
whole, keep a greater number of employees happier and around longer than lofty ideals
about sharing knowledge purely for the benefit of others (Van Grogh, 1998).
Although the promise of serving a social or political cause might attract
employees working for Planned Parenthood or the United States Army, the average
nonprofit or government employee still has economic needs, as well as a drive to advance
within the organization. And with limited funds and resources leading many nonprofit
and government organizations to rely on a smaller number of workers to produce results,
it is not uncommon for a public employee to feel he or she performs the duties of three or
four employees at once, without the salary to back it up. As a result, public management
has undergone a recent shift toward ensuring employee longevity and stability. Some of
these strategies to motivate public employees include tuition and housing benefits, extra
vacation and holiday time, aggressive retirement contributions, and paid memberships to
health clubs or professional organizations (Gassner Otting, 2004). Yet by offering such
incentives across the board for all employees, many public organizations and nonprofits
end up failing to motivate individual knowledge acquisition — if everyone gets the same
benefits, why work harder to acquire and use knowledge?
Another notable characteristic of public organizations’ knowledge management
revolves around the common complaint that public workers are simply stretched too thin,
overworked, and overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility attached to the public
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sector. As stated earlier, many public and federal outfits lack the funding and resources to
hire a great number of people to accomplish a great number of tasks. Stories about foster
care agencies that allow children to “fall through the cracks” (Bouffard, 2004) and
failures to introduce cutting-edge technology into an organization such as the FBI often
place the blame on federal funding guidelines that limit the amount of manpower
required for these organizations to accomplish their often broad, multifaceted goals.
Yet as Nonaka and Takeuchi’s The Knowledge Creating Company: How
Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation states, the most successful
corporations promote free-form collaboration among employees and encourage formal
and informal socialization. In fact, the authors repeatedly assert that knowledge creation
“is a ‘social’ process between individuals and not confined within an individual” (Nonaka
and Takeuchi, 1995), arguing that the best innovation and knowledge management
initiatives occur in organizations where many workers across several different
departments get together and share their knowledge skills. Nevertheless, as is most often
the case in nonprofit and federal work environments, a smaller number of employees
working under a great deal of pressure to deliver crucial services to their communities
and, in some cases, the entire country, there simply are not enough employees,
knowledge, or free time to go around.
The Bulk of Bureaucracy
On the other hand, Nonaka and Takeuchi point to the United States military (a
definitively public organization) as an example of a knowledge-building entity when
small task forces mobilize during wartime. This contrasts the strong sense of bureaucracy
that pervades many workers’ perceptions of the federal government and its failures to
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create a knowledge-savvy culture. Frequent complaints about government bureaucracy’s
role in knowledge management initiatives are that any attempts to establish a new system
requires workers to wade through a great deal of paperwork and permissions from higherups. In addition, many government workers seeking to enhance knowledge flow must
take on protracted battles against the old guard’s way of doing things.
An example of a federal branch that has undergone significant changes in the past
couple of years is the Department of Defense (DoD). While some of the DoD's new
practices were attributed to a post-September 11 attempt to rework the government's
responses to terrorism, many resulted from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
Pentagon-wide initiative to do away with what he called the “institutional inertia”
(Wasserman, 2002) that plagued that branch of the government. This inertia led to the
Pentagon finding itself woefully behind the times in the information technology arena,
and Rumsfeld’s plan sought to conquer “organizational barriers that have long stood in
the way of meaningful change: old technologies, incompatible systems and a Defense
Department bureaucracy so entrenched that it can, at times, keep the Air Force from
communicating with the Navy and the Army from sharing data with the Marines”
(Wasserman, 2002).
Likewise, in the wake of the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster, federal
knowledge management took a hit when NASA admitted it had overlooked significant
warning signs due to a “fixed mindset” at the organization. This insular perspective
caused NASA to lean heavily on the organization’s past successes rather than
acknowledging that a failure might be possible. For many workers, the process of
launching an internal investigation into problem areas on the shuttle prior to its voyage
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was overwhelming and stifling. While channels existed that could have alleviated
problems and workers possessed the knowledge to fix these issues, they were beyond any
average employee’s scope of understanding or level of patience (Ericson, 2003).
And, finally, a recent U.S. News & World Report cover story on the FBI’s
scrapping of the Virtual Case File — software that was three years in the making —
placed much of the blame on the “fixed, concrete” culture of the FBI that only wants to
“bring good news” to higher-ups like the organization’s Director, Robert Mueller.
Compounding this setting was what many FBI sources describe as Mueller’s
“impatience” with technology and a lack of “follow-through” with knowledge initiatives
he thinks will help FBI workers communicate with other government outfits such as the
Central Intelligence Agency. The article cites 3,000 “orphaned personal digital assistants
(PDAs)” Mueller ordered in an effort to help FBI agents communicate with each other
more efficiently and share valuable information and knowledge. Despite Mueller’s
backing of the PDAs, the FBI’s information technology (IT) division dedicated a “nickel
and dime” server to the devices, preventing them from ever getting off the ground
(Ragavan, 2005).
Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe
Sensitive knowledge, while present on occasion in the private sector, differs
greatly from the kind of knowledge present in public organizations. Many federal
workers, especially, are charged with handling information and material that present
security risks and, as a result, restrict them from sharing certain knowledge. Military
classified information, for example, can be categorized according to what level of risk the
unauthorized discovery of this information poses. Confidential information poses
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“damage” to national security, Secret poses “serious damage,” and Top Secret poses
“grave damage.” Security clearances prepare employees for the responsibilities and
regulations associated with each of these three levels and result from background checks
into an individual’s character and reliability (Powers, 2005).
As a result, it is not unusual in federal or military environments that some
employees are granted different levels of clearance than their colleagues. This setting
opens up the possibility for miscommunication or complete lack of communication
between individuals who might not be allowed to share knowledge or might not know the
other is working on a similar project. An example of how this “need to know” mentality
affects knowledge sharing can be seen in the military’s strategy during the Manhattan
Project. Scientists working on varying elements of the atomic bomb were only
encouraged to communicate and maintain awareness of the other teams’ work when
Robert Oppenheimer, a civilian scientist, fought for an open knowledge policy. Up until
then, scientists working on the project often duplicated each other’s work or devoted
hours to solving problems that had already been solved in other laboratories (Rhodes,
1986).
Although this case demonstrates how security measures might seem like a
hindrance to knowledge in the public sector, some knowledge management scholars point
to the rigidity of federal knowledge management as a positive example for some
corporations. As private companies move more and more toward competing in the
“knowledge society” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), businesses with closely guarded
knowledge such as the formula for Coca-Cola and the winner of “The Amazing Race”
might benefit from techniques used by the military or DoD (Desouza and Vanapalli,
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2005). In addition to integrating the concept of corporate security clearances, Desouza
and Vanapalli suggest that private organizations emphasize employee training on a
regular basis and establish “secure knowledge devices” such as computers and cell
phones dedicated to the transfer and storage of sensitive information. So, essentially,
private businesses can take some elements of public knowledge management to fit their
needs.
Closing Remarks
Knowledge management research, with few exceptions, has focused on
knowledge in private corporations. And while public and private organizations work with
and promote knowledge differently due to separate financial and social concerns, neither
setting does everything right, or does everything wrong. It is important to note that
nonprofits and government organizations have begun to explore how they can improve
their knowledge management strategies, and that some practitioners see value in varying
elements of public knowledge management.
One suggestion for improving knowledge management in the public sector is for
organizations to conduct thorough research into the potentials of information technology
(IT) before implementing a purely technology-based solution to knowledge problems. As
seen with the FBI’s attempt to solve communication issues with BlackBerrys that lacked
the infrastructure or IT funding, technology without organization-wide support does little
to enhance employees’ knowledge. In addition, public organizations in which knowledge
is closely guarded might benefit from promoting collaboration and communication
among workers who possess similar knowledge skills and security clearances. Finally, as
with any organization hindered by a top-heavy management structure, public
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organizations can take steps to examine and perhaps remove bureaucracy and its effects
on knowledge.
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References
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Wikipedia. “Public Sector.” Retrieved April 2, 2005, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sector