Siemens Keep Knowledge Management Booming

Siemens Keep Knowledge Management Booming A review of Siemens Management Case Study Latasha Smith National University November 03, 2012 A review of Siemens Management Case Study 1. How did Siemens knowledge management system evolve? Siemens knowledge management system evolved into a formalized information system that is readily available to any employee regardless of title, rank, or position. The new implemented KMS allowed Siemens to leverage and manage the many skills and talent of the 460,000 employees.

The evolved system is called Share Net which combined all aspect of file sharing such as chat, repository and search engine. With the use of ShareNet Siemens was able to make their brand more locative and preserve the reputation of being one the world’s leading technology company. 2. How does Siemens view knowledge (intellectual) assets? Siemens knew the importance of being able to encompass a way of passing knowledge down from the most senior to junior employee was a task that needed to be done. This will not be an easy job considering that Siemens has 460,000 thousand employees worldwide.

In order to be able to pass information to all employees in a timely matter it was imperative that Siemens overcome technical and cultural barriers to be able to reach all employees. With the amount of employees Siemens has they knew it was an array of potential that could be used for the good of the business, but there was not a system in place to capture it. 3. What does leveraging expertise mean? How did Siemens do this? Explain how this relates to the high return on investment. Leveraging expertise means to disburse information across the board.

Accruing knowledge from the knowledgeable and having it available at the hand of the entire organization in an organized format. Siemens accomplished this by implementing a knowledge base system that made it easy for employees to share information. The easier it is to share the more likelihood employees will provide valuable knowledge. Incentives and “shares” was also part of Siemens KMS to inspire knowledge. Siemens invested in their employee who in returned invested their knowledge to aid in the organization becoming very profitable. 4. Describe the benefits of the Siemens ShareNet knowledge management system.

ShareNet was a very lucrative and rewarding implementation for Siemens. Siemens spent $7. 8 million on developing portions of the ShareNet to support communications Net Groups, and within two years was able to yield a profit of $122 million in sales. In addition Siemens was recognized as “one of the most admired knowledge enterprises worldwide for five years by Telco (Turban et al, 2011)”. ShareNet enabled collaboration among the organization from top to bottom. The most junior employee was able to provide insight and ideals and most of all received the recognition.

Acknowledgment is a critical element in retaining good employees and generating a positive workplace. ShareNet gave employees a sense of ownership in the company image, and long term growth. 5. Explain the meaning of culture transformation as occurred at Siemens. Include how the various constituencies bought into the system in your answer. Culture Transformation occurred at Siemens in many forms. Sharing information is nothing new and Siemens staff has done an alright job considering the amount of time they have been in business prior to installing a knowledge management system.

The old way of sharing knowledge required the person who needed it to locate the person through others. This was resource waste and tiresome for a company the size of Siemens. Therefore, something had to be done to connect the global knowledge and the local knowledge. The willingness to implement a technology system that Siemens has never used before shows cultural transformation. Siemens was able to step out and take a gamble without knowing the consequences. The culture transformation brought in constituencies such as rewarding employees to enhance knowledge sharing. 6.

Explain how the Internet and Web technologies enabled the knowledge management system. The Internet enabled the knowledge management system by providing a means of organizing the data in a standardized format that is utility available as long as there is an Internet connection. A network was set up to collect, categorize to share information. Files could be uploaded and deleted as they become obsolete. The Internet was the knowledge behind NetShare. References Turban, E. , Sharda, R. , and Delen, D. (2011). Decision Support Systems and Business Intelligence Systems (9th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.