Stop Reinventing the Wheel, Collaboration is the Future

Instances of reinventing the wheel, reinventing the square wheel, pre-inventing the wheel and redefining the wheel are not uncommon to the men in olive greens. Such occurrences not only hamper the wheel’s natural tendency to move forward, but takes it back in time. It is therefore not unnatural for commanders to advise subordinates and staff to desist from such practices. The advice is a manifestation of aspiration to move further from where one has already been and gain from the richness of individual and collective experience of the men as well as formations of the world’s third largest army. In the contemporary management jargon, the aforesaid would be stated as drawing on the wealth of Institutional Memory through Knowledge Management with the aim of improving Organisational Learning. Man’s quest for knowledge is probably as old as the human species; however, it is only in the last 15–20 years or so that a distinct field ‘knowledge management’ has emerged[1]. This article attempts to explore its relevance in the context of the Indian Army.

Admiral Raja Menon (Retd) recently put forth a very interesting argument on importance of institutional memory while speaking in a seminar on ‘Building Strategic Culture in India’ organised by the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. The Admiral in his talk narrated some of the actions taken by the British, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which led to the defeat of Napoleon’s army, re-occupation of Mauritius, and isolation and defeat of Tipu Sultan in India. The Admiral went on to analyse how Great Britain was able to act cohesively towards coherent strategic objectives on a geopolitical scale, nearly two hundred years ago. The answer, as per the Admiral, lies in the country’s rich institutional memory of over 600 years, dating back to the issue of Magna Carta.

Knowledge is ‘facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject’^[2].  Organisations do spend a lot of time and deploy considerable resources developing knowledge and capability. While some of it gets translated into procedures and policies, most of it resides in the heads, hands, and hearts of individual managers and functional experts[3]. This implicit knowledge is particularly prone to loss, primarily for three reasons. Firstly, this type of knowledge is not shared simply and cannot be easily codified and converted to explicit forms, like policies or Standard Operating Procedures. However, it is often what gives institutions sustainability and even competitive advantage[4]. Secondly, much of the institution’s knowledge is lost as commanders and staff move out on posting/retirement. Thirdly, at times, adoption of new set of Key Result Areas by new appointees on taking over also leads to loss of knowledge created while pursuing agenda of the previous incumbent. This accelerated loss of institutional memory has prompted the corporate as well as public sector organisations, world over, to exploit Knowledge Management.

Knowledge Management is a rich set of processes designed to preserve and optimise utilisation of institutional memory. Knowledge Management is the planning, organising, motivating, and controlling of people, processes and systems in the organisation to ensure that its knowledge-related assets are improved and effectively employed[5]. Army Knowledge Management has been defined as a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, retrieving, evaluating, and sharing an enterprise’s tacit and explicit knowledge assets to meet mission objectives[6]. The process of Knowledge Management has three distinct stages: knowledge acquisition and creation, refinement and storage, sharing and utilisation.

The first stage of Knowledge Management, namely acquisition and creation, demands a very high degree of human involvement, but rest of the stages are amenable to automation. Thus, organisations practicing Knowledge Management need accretions in terms of Knowledge Managers as well as Knowledge Management Systems. A Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) heads the Knowledge Management department in an organisation. The CKO is responsible for managing the organisations intellectual capital and is the custodian of Knowledge Management practices in an organisation[7]. More importantly, the CKO is not a new name for the Chief Information Officer (CIO). The CIO focuses on the management of organisations’ computer and network assets, and has distinct responsibilities towards Information Technology (IT) strategy, IT operations, and managing the IT function. The CKO is a lot more likely to be concerned with a complex set of activities that reflect human behaviour in organisations, including but not limited to actions such as work processes, reward systems, knowledge collecting and sharing, information dissemination and similar acts[8].

Knowledge management systems (KMS) are computer applications, which support the various Knowledge Management processes. The United States Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) is a very good example. The AFKN provides a web-based collaborative environment, which links people who know to those needing knowledge. In the last 15 years, it has grown to more than 19,000 Communities of Practice (CoPs) and 400,000 members.  Similarly, the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) offers a set of collaboration services, which provides the US army community with means for accomplishing their assigned missions. AKO empowers knowledge dominance and is the passport to army information, breaking news, documents, communication, e-learning, personal and financial information amongst many other things. One of every two deployed soldiers accesses the portal daily for mission and personal purposes, and in 2008, AKO recorded its one-billionth login[9]. It has 2.3 million registered users, and supports over 350,000 users logging in up to a million times a day as well as receiving and delivering on average 12 million emails daily[10].  

It is time for the Indian army to realise that the future lies in convergence and collaboration. The army needs to establish a doctrine of collaboration, which gives impetus to knowledge sharing, ensures that there is no loss of knowledge, and standardises collaborative tool sets. The requirement is to create a portal, which provides a secure enterprise wide access to comprehensive all-encompassing knowledge assets. The army needs to train and place Knowledge Managers across the enterprise, who should diligently build multi-discipline knowledge assets, which provides service users access to contextual knowledge by use of a robust search capability.

The author is a Senior Fellow at CLAWS. Views expressed are personal.