Introducing Knowledge Management (KM) to Telstra
The paper will propose a knowledge management strategy of Telstra in Australia. Telstra Corporation Limited is the largest telecommunication company in Australia. It develops and generates telecommunication markets voice, networks, pay television, internet access, mobile and other services and products. The paper will explain the fact that the company possesses weak knowledge management practices within its organization. The paper will provide an analysis of knowledge management systems that are significant for the organizations including Telstra. Therefore, it will provide recommendations to Telstra to improve its knowledge management strategies to enhance its business processes. It will also present the implementation plan for adopting knowledge management strategies within the organization.
To improve organizational knowledge management (KM) it becomes important to include the overall knowledge spectrum. It would help in developing knowledge at all the levels and promote and provide its diffusion to the entire firm, groups, and individuals based on the requirements of the organization. KM manages retrieval capabilities and organizational knowledge storage that generates knowledge sharing and learning (Donate and de Pablo, 2015). However, KM is highly reliable on managing and understanding organizational culture, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, organizational memory, and organizational learning. More often the adoption of new ideas in organizations such as knowledge management is neglected. Considering the measures of knowledge management it is can be said that an organization must develop KM strategies to enhance its business processes.
Challenges at Telstra related to KM are as follows:
Technology is determined to be the lifeblood of the telecommunication industry such as Telstra. The company lacks in making efficient use of technologies within its organization such as, including parental controls to the flagships of the television device. Parental control is determined to be a new feature that is designed to help parents to set controls for the use of computer for their children. This is a significant issue for the company as the customers are complaining that the company fails to meet their needs that puts a negative impact on their productivity and reputation. Currently, Telstra faces the challenge of shortage of various technologies such as artificial intelligence tools, data warehousing, groupware systems and document management technology (Hume and Hume, 2015). It puts a negative impact on fulfilling the demand of the customers as per their requirements.
Communication is also considered to be a significant element in the telecommunication industry, especially in Telstra. It has been observed that the company encounters weak communication strategies within its business strategies. Due to this lack of communication, the manager and the employees of the organization feel difficulty in sharing knowledge with one another. At Telstra, the activities related to KM are managed but not recognized systematically (Mäntymäki and Riemer, 2016).
Assessment
The two types of KM strategies are as follows:
It focuses on supplying knowledge so that it can be reused again. The supply-side of knowledge management involves collecting files and documents, work products, storing explicit knowledge in repositories and capturing information.
It is regarded as a fundamental way of sharing knowledge by building direct contact with an individual.
Presently Telstra makes use of online services such as, Microsoft Office 365, market voices and telecommunication networks for sharing knowledge (de Vasconcelos et al., 2017). Market voices means the involvement of the voice of customers and competitors within the marketplace. Telstra is making use of supply strategy, where the business focuses more on implementing programs to become more customer focused.
It is strongly recommended that for implementing such programs, Telstra must implement network strategy within its organization. The network strategy provides a clear understanding of the telephony, security and data infrastructure.
The company is more focused on capturing the tacit knowledge based on presentations and conversations. Therefore, it is recommended that Telstra must focus upon expanding and building a network that would create valuable connections among groups and individuals (Santa and Nurcan, 2016). Thus, the organization will create a KM team that will adopt emerging software resources that is useful in collecting information about the KM issues faced by the company. For example, the company would make use of window system, utilities and many more that will help Telstra to achieve high level of required skills. The resources would be helpful in resolving the KM issues effectively by analyzing the data.
Knowledge Management aims to provide secure and reliable information and to make it accessible throughout the organizational lifecycle (Massaro et al., 2016). It has been observed that innovation, efficiency, risk management, and community are the primary goals of Telstra.
The specific KM goals are as follows:
- To provide accurate and complete knowledge when required
- To make sure that the employees possess a common and clear understanding
- To enable Telstra to be more successful
A KM strategy needs three components to execute its policies. It has been observed that the modern way of working needs the managers of Telstra to change the way they manage and the employees to change the way they work. The workplace needs to be broader that supports productivity, creativity and typical work activities from communication to brainstorming. On the other hand, technology helps in planning the process and selecting the solution carefully based on measurement and management (Walker, 2016). The department of knowledge management of Telstra aims to establish appropriate technologies such as artificial intelligence and Web 2.0 technologies that would enable people and business with protection at every level.
Challenges at Telstra related to KM
The employees of Telstra are highly customer focused hence, they are well aware of the things that are required. The workplace enhances productivity, creativity and improves work activities as per the requirements. Even though, Telstra is highly focused on making use of technological innovations its processes are not integrated and managed systematically.
Every organization must follow the piloting strategy after developing an effective knowledge management strategy that will help the organization to enhance its business processes. Piloting strategy is something that is helpful for the organizations to start with new work, manage the authority and the people as well as identify and reward the employees who perform well (Koloniari and Fassoulis, 2017).
At Telstra, the piloting strategy would be implemented at the administrative department along with few of the objectives. After the implementation of piloting strategy, the company would be able to begin with a new work by stopping the old work that helps in reconstructing the plane of implementing piloting strategy. It would be helpful for the company to organize the authority and people efficiently and effectively by providing responsibilities to each rebuilding process (Bernardo et al., 2015). With the help of piloting strategy, the company would recognize and reward the employees to execute excellent work. The reward system would motivate the employees to perform better that will improve productivity of the organization.
The organizations must realize that every member of the organization must be informed regarding the roll-out plan. The roll out plan includes strategy, structure, organization, and test, gather information, prepare templates, and provide training for administrators and quality check. The administrative department of Telstra will make the announcement of getting everybody involved within the roll-out plan. The department would provide every executive and board member with a full copy of the strategy. The entire plan would be distributed to every member of the organization (Duffield and Whitty, 2016). The portions of the plan would be included in the procedures and policies that would involve employee manual. In this way, the roll-out plan for knowledge management process would be executed by the company. Telstra must implement a road map as follows:
- Evaluation of infrastructure
- Development, design and analysis of knowledge management system
- Deployment
- Evaluation of metrics
- Lessons learned
It becomes essential for organizations to measure knowledge management with the help of performance measurement. Telstra needs to determine that knowledge is a key performance indicator that needs to be enhanced (Massaro, Dumay and Garlatti, 2015). The company must follow the following performance measurements tools such as,
Strategy and Framework
Performance measures
KM outputs: Select, integrate, align and collect information and data.
Use: It is used to measure the overall performance of the organization.
Impacts: Employee satisfaction and organizational benefits.
For example, the aim of delivery workers involves clean driving records, positive interaction of customer and so on.
KM outputs: Facilitate the initial version of the tool that enhances practitioners to measure agility.
Use: Making use of various efficient approaches and tools such as key performance indicators, performance management framework and reward and recognition programs to measure the agility.
Impacts: Organizational sustainability and development.
For example, analytical thinking could be used for calculating states and measuring factors.
Stakeholder data
KM outputs: Recognize the key stakeholders along with their data.
Use: To provide responsibilities to the data governance team.
Impacts: Decision-making process and expectations to address the data governing programs.
For example, in order to improve the design of a web application.
It is strongly recommended that Telstra must implement efficient tools and processes such as knowledge retention tools, knowledge mapping and communities of practice to improve KM strategies. The knowledge retention tool would help the company to share knowledge with the employees. Thus, the managers must retain particular knowledge within the organization.
Moreover, the company must use knowledge mapping that allows the manager to select specific processes significant for the organization. Another recommendation is that Telstra must adopt communities of practice that would help the organization to bring together the group of people and provide them with responsibility to attain the community’s business objectives.
Conclusion
The paper discussed the weak knowledge management practices of Telstra in Australia. It presented few of the knowledge management strategies adopted by the organization. It has been observed that the company needs to apply the KM strategies in a systematic manner. The paper provided few of the measures that would be helpful for the company to measure the organizational performance effectively. Therefore, it presented recommendations to improve or enhance KM practices within the organization. It can be said that the company must utilize corporate directory that provides contact information of external sources. It should adopt community of practice where a group of people shares a profession or craft and apply organizational learning which is determined to be a process of transferring, retaining and creating knowledge with an organization. It stated the implementation plan of such strategies within the organization where culture change influences cultural capital on community and individual behavior. Thus, the overall concept of the paper is based on effective KM strategies that must be followed by the organization.
References
Bernardo, M., Simon, A., Tarí, J.J. and Molina-Azorín, J.F., 2015. Benefits of management systems integration: a literature review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 94, pp.260-267.
de Vasconcelos, J.B., Kimble, C., Carreteiro, P. and Rocha, Á., 2017. The application of knowledge management to software evolution. International Journal of Information Management, 37(1), pp.1499-1506.
Donate, M.J. and de Pablo, J.D.S., 2015. The role of knowledge-oriented leadership in knowledge management practices and innovation. Journal of Business Research, 68(2), pp.360-370.
Duffield, S.M. and Whitty, S.J., 2016. Application of the systemic lessons learned knowledge model for organisational learning through projects. International Journal of Project Management, 34(7), pp.1280-1293.
Hume, C. and Hume, M., 2015. The critical role of internal marketing in knowledge management in not-for-profit organizations. Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 27(1), pp.23-47.
Koloniari, M. and Fassoulis, K., 2017. Knowledge management perceptions in academic libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 43(2), pp.135-142.
Mäntymäki, M. and Riemer, K., 2016. Enterprise social networking: A knowledge management perspective. International Journal of Information Management, 36(6), pp.1042-1052.
Massaro, M., Dumay, J. and Garlatti, A., 2015. Public sector knowledge management: a structured literature review. Journal of Knowledge Management, 19(3), pp.530-558.
Massaro, M., Handley, K., Bagnoli, C. and Dumay, J., 2016. Knowledge management in small and medium enterprises: a structured literature review. Journal of Knowledge Management, 20(2), pp.258-291.
Santa, M. and Nurcan, S., 2016. Learning organization modelling patterns. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 14(1), pp.106-125.
Telstra.com.au. (2019). Telstra – Our company. [online] Available at: https://www.telstra.com.au/aboutus/our-company [Accessed 4 Feb. 2019].
Walker, D.H., 2016. Reflecting on 10 years of focus on innovation, organisational learning and knowledge management literature in a construction project management context. Construction Innovation, 16(2), pp.114-126.
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