KM in a Malaysian Govt. Research Organization: Interview with Izuzi Marlia

Wednesday, October 22 2008 @ 03:26 AM EDT

Izuzi Marlia is currently attached to a leading R&D organization in Malaysia. Her interest in Personal Knowledge Management has brought her to the real-world knowledge management implementation. With 10 years background in academic and research in Creative Process and Knowledge Management, she hopes to merge theory and practice in place.  She has published in various conferences in KM and her ongoing PHD research is in Knowledge Transfer for Knowledge-Intensive Process. KMTalk recently spoke to Marlia about KM implementation in her organization.

• Tell us the nature of your company’s business

The organization is a government funded research institution with 600 employees. We do research and development in the area of applied research and ICT. We have highly skilled technology experts around the world working with us and we strive to stimulate Malaysia's economic growth by producing innovative technology platforms, which will be used by the industry to develop products and services to meet market demands.

• When did your company begin doing KM?

The interest in KM has started long time ago as the organization itself is a research institution. A lot of knowledge-intensives activities were introduced among researchers and engineers; however, there was no integrated approach to conduct KM from the organization-wide approach. Back in 2006, the need to invest in KM became visible when a major transition took place in the organization. We realized the importance of knowledge capture and retention to help organizational growth. Still, KM is conducted as many separate initiatives – we have one group whom focusing on research to develop KM tools, another group is concentrating on People capability development and there is a group that focuses on software development capability- on processes and best practices. As we also a service provider for many agencies, we introduced a service management best practice into the picture. But the interface that brings all these initiatives together is the KM Portal- the intranet portal as our main channel of communication to everybody in the organization.

• What was the main objective, issue or problem you were using KM to address?

What I’ve mentioned above sounds overwhelming that we have various initiatives at one time. Each initiative has its own champion, objective and issues to address and be measured at the end of the day as far as the roadmap is concerned. We’re trying to address technology issues and tools for KM, getting the process in place and documented, getting the people developed in people capability development and harnessing the culture of knowledge-aware through all these initiatives, KM Portal and Community of Practice (CoP). On top of that, “Shared Vision Among Team Members”, “Teaming as a Way of Life” and “Culture of Innovation, Creativity and Productivity” are among our core organization’s values that govern everything. The main challenge is to align all these initiatives towards KM at organization’s level.

• What is the main focus of KM in your organization? ( i.e. technology, process, people management/culture)

Our vision is to be a premier applied research centre in frontier technology. To achieve this, the values, culture, people development, technology and knowledge itself need to come side by side. We might not achieve everything in one time but we’re paving the path towards it, step by step.

• In brief, what do you do in KM?

My current roles are developing KM strategy through KM Portal, established CoP strategy and monitor its development, provide an interface and prepare viable platforms for other KM initiatives, integrate personal innovation tools or thinking tools, monitor the core values-KM-culture growth, as well as measuring and monitoring the implementation.  We are also taking a bottom-up approach towards organization wide KM where we are preparing our KM platform for embedded technology we’re developing in our research labs.

• What technologies (if any) do you use for KM?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, IBM Rational Clear Quest, Rational Portfolio Managers, SAP and various in-house development and customization applications.

• What KM concepts and techniques did you initiate to assist staff in managing knowledge wisely?

KM Portal provides divisional, departmental, projects and personal sites for knowledge documentation. We introduced standardized metadata to ease the knowledge retrieval, CoP with Forums, Blogs and Wiki to help the knowledge sharing and transfer. We’re planning to integrate innovation tools to assist the knowledge creation. Various knowledge sharing session and dialogue are always in place.

• How do you monitor progress of your KM initiatives?

We introduce champions at every initiative, sites and CoP.  Champions will be actively participating to get things going. Each quarter we will issue the progress report and at the end of the year, the audit or measurement will be carried out.

• What challenges or barriers have you faced in implementing KM? How have you overcome them?

The main challenge is to prove that KM will do you good. If people did not see KM benefits their daily work or life, they will not appreciate the need. That’s why, quick wins is a must and needed fast! With lack of resources and technology limitation, we managed to pull out a test bed sites that demonstrate the possible outcome. Slowly we are getting one after another sites created and used. We’re getting the buy-in, slowly but progressing.

• Any lessons learnt for other companies who are willing to implement KM?

KM is more than technology and tools. A lot of grounded works needed at the very foundation levels. Patient is a must. You might not need to implement KM as one big approach throughout; instead small initiatives might be possible as long as the pieces fit the puzzle.  Above all, KM is very personal to you, your team and your organization. No size fit all.

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