Knowledge advancements in Hong Kong

Like other major societies worldwide, Hong Kong is also transforming itself into a knowledge-based economy where increasingly firms are competing based on their leverage of collective wisdom and innovative capability of their staff and other stakeholders to design and deliver knowledge-intensive services.

Up to now, Hong Kong has traditionally fared very well at the infrastructural level especially in areas like transportation, education, ICT and facilities. However, when it comes to high levels of measurement for gauging a knowledge-based society, HK’s ranking is at best mediocre compared with OECD and European countries.

Effective knowledge management (KM), a trans-disciplinary field covering organizational behaviour, culture, process, technology and more has long advocated by academics and leading practitioners as a major tool for enhancing a firm’s operational effectiveness and innovation capability.

Typically good KM practice involves sourcing of quality knowledge, harnessing existing knowledge for reuse, collaboration among staff and other parties for decision making and problem solving, categorizing and sharing knowledge for easy retrieval and learning, measuring and auditing knowledge for business alignment, planning and reporting purposes, and more.

Following the footsteps and unfortunately also the mistakes made by many early adoptors of KM, ICT has been overly used as the “entry point” to KM among many of the KM projects in HK, dated back to around 2000-5.

The major reasons for failure are firstly, codifying knowledge (typically using ICT) often does not take into the context in which the knowledge derives its meaning and usage hence rendering a codified knowledge asset to be largely ineffective for reuse.

Secondly, a holistic KM strategy is often needed for a sustainable and effective KM journey to be launched. Merely relying on ICT as the entry point does not, in most cases, lead to the formulation of this much needed strategy.

However, there are signs of KM coming good in the city. For the last 6 six years, the Knowledge Management and Innovation Research Centre (KMIRC) has seen a steady shift from merely codifying knowledge to cultivating an environment that fosters natural elicitation and sharing of knowledge.

This comes in the form of process and workplace re-design, schemes for peer assistance, mentoring and knowledge transfer, often with the support of appropriate iCT tools.

Organisational’s awareness and commitment to supporting KM as a program or journey as opposed to a series of discrete projects is also rising with several major utility, transportation companies and one government unit demonstrating a KM track record of more than 7 or 8 years. Separate and in addition to the above, there are also focus by organizations in distilling and summarizing their codified knowledge into a compact form for ready reuse, as well as may organizations leveraging on Web 2.0 tools in particular Wiki, RSS and tagging for enhanced collaboration, knowledge sourcing and learning, and easy navigation of knowledge.

Furthermore, HK and Singapore are leaders in the use of social media for networking, collaboration, marketing and other purposes, both at the business and personal levels.

With just over 100 KM graduates produced annually by two local universities together with some providers offering certification courses, let’s hope that these graduates can continue to act as fuel and catalyst to accelerate the city’s transformation into a truly knowledge-based society.