7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Rewards and recognition address the universal question “what is in it for me”? Measures
for incentivizing the employees’ participation in the acquisition, submission, reviewing
and reuse of knowledge assets are very important in spreading the KM culture in the
organization. In the early stages of implementation, providing the right quantum and kind
of incentives is considered as an important success factor for the KM movement.
Incentives are provided to all the important stake holders in the KM process – authors,
reviewers and users. Authors are to be rewarded when their knowledge asset is accepted
for publication. Subsequent to the publication, authors can also be rewarded by employees
who find the knowledge asset useful by assigning suitable grades to the knowledge assets.
Additionally users can also provide textual feed back on the utility of the document or
suggestions for improvement. Subject matter experts are to be rewarded for their efforts in
assessing documents submitted for publication. Users of knowledge artifacts are
rewarded for their contribution in the spread KM culture and resultant organizational
benefits. The quantum of rewards which employees get is an index of their contribution
and involvement in the knowledge sharing across the organization.
The material rewards provide visibility to the KM initiative and shapes beneficent
participatory behavior in the short term. However, a successful KM program needs to go
beyond material rewards in the long term. An integration of KM as an activity and a
concern into the reflexive aspects of working in communities and public recognition as a
tool to further this can be used as a major motivational factor for knowledge sharing.
6.2 Content
Providing context for every piece of content in the knowledge repositories of the
organization is a basic concern in the definition of the content architecture. The
organization of assets along with different dimensions as specified by the content
architecture helps the provision of the context and facilitates easy retrieval of the right
type of knowledge asset corresponding to a user requirement. Different content types are
to be identified based on the requirements of the organization. Typical content types can
be project experiences, product reviews, frequently asked questions etc. in the relevant
areas of the organization. Knowledge assets are also to be tagged based on the roles for
which they are considered most suitable and useful and by security parameters that allow
access only to relevant roles. Each knowledge asset can also be tagged by a single grade
number which can be arrived by the weighted aggregation of the grades given by the
subject matter experts, multiple users of the asset and also by the frequency and recency of
its use. This grade number is a market determined indicator of the quality of the
knowledge asset.
6.3 Technology
The technology architecture should provide all the basic functionality and features
associated with robust, scalable and secure enterprise knowledge portal. The suite of
applications available through the portal has to be customized to suit the business process
of the organization and cater to the knowledge needs of the employees (within intranet and
extranet) which can vary from self learning to online collaboration.
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