Grabbing the Tacit Knowledge-- Minute Details from Big Data

'Tacit Knowledge' is important for organizations -- the coin first tossed by Michael Polanyi in 1958. Since then a long debate has been done over its importance in organizatoin. However, very little has been materialized in terms of proper process management and knowledge capturing. In fact, if there would be enough konwledge present, indeed there wouldn't be enough power of analysis in past. Through 'Tacit Knowledge' we may revealed several important knowledge regarding talent management, gap anlaysis (helpful for recruitment), change management, leadership profiling, and HR performance metrics. 

In our model for dealing with 'Tacit Knowledge' we grab communication pahtways, coordination/support networks and many more for C level executives. For us, recriutement, talent management/retention, gap analysis are all spiral in nature. It is a continuous process and have to be in 'treck' all the time. However, the issue arises how? how to transrform basic information into valuable konwledge and generate results. 

Here I share our experience of dealing with a support network in an organization. Different colors show different groups,  in this graph each node represent an employee and edge represents the relation among them i.e. physical support over here. We can comprehend following entities from the support network, apart form the numeric analytics just depiction over here is also valuable and offer insightful details such as:

-- gaps among groups   for eg. production vs testing, production vs marketing. 
None of the organization can generate optimal results while having gaps among departments like here

-- we certainly answers that 'whom you cannot move without backup'

-- why some groups are in isolation?
-- do you need leadership profiling? 

these are just few of the results, what you percieved from it.
Thanks 
-RM

Talent Management Demands New Methods

Today in the age of economic competitiveness, top management, wants to effectively utilize the ultimate power of available workforce,  lack of coordination and gaps in collaboration kill the performance of a valuable team in great deal. Companies are massively undergoing change in processes however what change succeeded in filling employee engagements gaps? how knowledge leaders are being tracked? and how energizers are fully utilized by the corporate strategists? are few of the issues which still demand new ways of solution. 

Employee interaction maps, advance computational analytics allows corporate strategists to take the right decision at right time. Our upcoming INS Network methodology harnesses the power of advanced computational skills and digs out valuable tacit knowledge for Talent and Change Managers which were not available earlier. 

Coordination for Team Performance: Is that necessary?

While working with an IT organization we found following situation of 'coordination' in a team as shown in the figure. We believe that team performance is tightly coupled with the flow of information among them which should result into strong cohesion among them. Gaps, coordination hubs, integrators and islands can be observed within the team, what else you depict from it?

Secondly, what we suspect about performance from this team having coordination gaps among them?

powered by INS Network

Building a Well-Networked Organization

Here is an interesting article published at MIT Sloan Review. The article Well Connected Organization is an interesting one and close to INS Network methodology.

Need of Vertical Knowledge by Corporate Strategic Decision Makers

  Need of Vertical Knowledge by Corporate Strategic Decision Makers

Hierarchical structures in organizations provides abstraction among the top management and the workforce. The formal leaders within the hierarchy are responsible to manage the workforce down the stream and to implement the corporate strategies. The formal leaders or managers abstract the pressure to the workforce applied by the top management and create motivational environment for the employees. Moreover, the managers are also responsible to manage the issues among the employees and let the top management only focus upon the corporate strategic decision making. The benefits of hierarchic structures of employees is a proven strategy and has no match with the flat organizational structure where boss is supposed to communicate with all the employees.

Human Resource Management experts are responsible to measure the employee performance through managers' feedback in order to decide promotions, benefits and future leaders. The human resource management department performs several activities to identify skillful people within the organizations as a human capital (or at least supposed to perform).

 If the organizational structures got messed up, it effects the employee performance. Several issues   evolve within the workforce like insecurity, lack of trust, and so on. On the other hand when any manager got overloaded it may also cause vulnerabilities within the system. It does not matter how efficient a manager is, the load will eventually effect either on his own progress or the relationships with his workforce.

 Whatever would be the nature of the problem occurs within the formal leaders, it will cause disorders in the system equilibrium i.e. organizational desires from workers vs workforce desires from  top management. This imbalance of equilibrium impacts on the viability and performance of the workforce. Consequently, the issues associated within the workforce or with managers may cause bottlenecks in the dissemination of the ideas, and the development of green environment within the organization.

 Here, top management of an organization need vertical knowledge with a degree of precision about 'whats happening down the stream'. This kind of knowledge could be a performance metrics of employees or work environment related knowledge. Performance metrics are generally qualitative in nature and mostly based on the managers choice (of course to some extend 'biased'). Secondly, methodologies or tools for measuring work environment indicators are rare in practice and very few knowledge management tools guarantees such results.

Here I am sharing my analysis results (powered by INS Network) over a group (at a financial organization) when trust measured within the group. We measured several other social interactions within the group, however, just discussing trust here. The following figure indicates several important aspects of the social/relationships. Regardless of the nature of trust i.e. social/technical, the impact can be understandable over the group performance.

Trust Network in a Financial Institution

 

In above figure it can be seen that the peoples are living in islands, within a single group there exists several islands, no bridges among them. This lack of trust contributes in the performance degradation specifically at the time of stress. What we found that the human resource managers, organizational development experts and the top management could not have accessibility to such results with a degree of precision. In such situations when appreciations and benefits being awarded by the top management, they fail to reach out the underlying facts. Most of the performance metrics and indicators  are measured by the managers. If the manager is inclined towards any of the islands (as shown in the figure) its really difficult for the others to receive the deserving appreciation and support.

Therefore, what we perceived that the human resource managers, top management, knowledge managers, organizational development practitioners, and trainers/coaches should include such 'vertical knowledge' tools in their best practices, otherwise their efforts could not be fruitful due to the 'invisible'.  Many more conclusions can be made upon this, you can share your remarks as well.