What advice would you give Cathy Bautista on improving the strategic focus of Unilever’s knowledge management activities?
Based on article, Unilever is one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world with an annual turnover of over €40bn. The company employs around, 250,000 people based in over 100 countries. Unilever supply products like a Dove, Calvin Klein and many more around the world included Malaysia. Unilever started its knowledge management activities in 1996. Unilever’s knowledge management group has aimed at delivery the learning organisation vision through number targeted interventions. They have developed a frame of organisational knowledge processes and focused their efforts on locating, capturing, sharing, transferring and creating knowledge.
My advice can give to Cathy Bautista to improving the strategic focus of knowledge management activities is stop calling it knowledge management. It’s a bit of a misnomer. While fields like records management and information management are really about managing the things they describe, ‘knowledge management’ is much more about knowledge sharing than any kind of management and sharing makes people feel that they can and should contribute to the process. Think about people, then technology. Instead of focusing on what cool technologies can do for your business, think about the basics of how people communicate and share things. I guarantee the only technologies that will help you be successful in any kind of business have human communication at their root. If you think about people first and technology second (yes, that sounds like a cliche, but it’s true), you won’t get mired down by technologies you don’t need. Don’t buy when you can steal, so i don’t mean stealing in the illegal sense. To put together a set of knowledge sharing activities that are beneficial to you, stop trying to build the