In this Issue: The Human Factor
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Nick Bontis, Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute for Intellectual Capital Research Inc., assistant professor of strategic management at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and chief knowledge officer (CKO) of Knexa.com Enterprises Inc. Bontis is a frequent lecturer on knowledge-related topics at conferences around the world. We spoke with him at the InfoToday 2001 conference in May. An excerpt from that interview follows.
IE: What is the state of knowledge management (KM) in the enterprise today?
Bontis: The KM technologies are suffering from poor return on investment, simply because the KM decision has been made by a CKO, who's a brand-new individual, or an IT individual, and neither of them have ever consulted with human resources (HR), which knows how to motivate and compensate employees.
One of the missing links right now in KM is integration with HR policy. We can motivate, compensate, reward, and recognize employees by giving them incentives to use the KM tools that we're investing in. The problem that I see in large KM implementations is one of participation.
IE: Do you think that enterprises are making full use of their own intellectual capital?
Bontis: Absolutely not! The latest research that I've seen shows that 2 percent of what we know is being leveraged by the enterprise. If you were to look at it from an operations perspective, most factories operate at between 70 and 95 percent capacity utilization. If a factory drops its capacity utilization [to] less then 50 percent, we shut it down. We're operating at 2 percent knowledge capacity utilization.
IE: What do you think are the main challenges in KM for the enterprise today? Extracting tacit knowledge from employees or retrieving knowledge?
Bontis: I think anything technological is easy. It's the human stuff, that's the biggest challenge with KM right now. Sometimes you go to a KM conference and you see 95 percent of the exhibitors are technological tools. Why isn't it 50 percent technological tools and 50 percent HR consultants? The HR community is missing a huge opportunity in KM.
The problem, though, is the culture and the human problem. Having the CEO answer the questions: Do we know what we know? Who in my organization of 50,000 employees do I go to - to solve this problem? It's having CEOs develop among their senior management team the behaviors that they want to see in the rest of the organization.
To read more of this interview, visit www.intelligentKM.com.
— Chuleenan Svetvilas
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