Building Knowledge Management in Malaysia
This article was published in ‘InsideKnowledge’ in April 2006 (Vol. 9 Issue 7).
Trust, believes Karl Wiig, one of the pioneers of knowledge management (KM) and author of four books on the subject, is one of the most challenging barriers hindering its wider adoption. People need to trust each other for knowledge sharing to happen spontaneously and efficiently, but in Asia, people basically do not trust each other and the knowledge that they each possess.
Wiig was speaking at a conference in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. People also lack the confidence to share and exchange expertise. Another factor is the fear of being penalised. This, perhaps, should be considered the most challenging barrier to wider implementation of KM in Asia. Many people think that if they share knowledge and make their opinions openly available to others, they will lose out in some way.
Typically, that will either be in terms of losing their personal competitiveness — the argument in favour of keeping what you know to yourself to enhance your own value (‘knowledge hoarding’) — or the risk of incurring criticism from management for speaking out. It is much better, on balance, to stay silent. Perhaps that is why people are so reluctant to contribute to new ideas or to criticise openly.
Most of the Asian countries that adopted KM in the late 1990s are focusing especially on the cultural aspects of the discipline since people’s involvement is the essential pre-requisite of any KM success — indeed, it is its raison d’etre. Creating awareness and understanding of KM are considered important in countries such as Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and India in order to reduce people’s reluctance to share their knowledge.
Generally speaking, most KM models are formed in the context of a Western framework in which freedom of expression and individualism are both accepted social norms. But this is not necessarily the case in many organisations in Malaysia. Psychologists accept that Asians are generally less vocal and critical in the workplace compared to Westerners.
Management practices in Western and Asian countries are also different. In Asian culture, developing long-term relationships based on mutual trust stands in contrast to Western organisations’ inclination towards short-term goals, reflected by quarterly reporting, for example.
Indeed, right across the developing world, many of the companies large or important enough to be considered prime candidates for KM are either still state-owned or have only recently been privatised. Consequently, they inherit a corporate culture that sometimes resembles a civil service in terms of values such as deference to authority, seniority and hierarchy, which still define social interactions within the organisation. These values can seriously inhibit the sort of exchange of ideas and information a KM strategy is intended to achieve. Employees will always be conscious of the appropriateness of their contributions; superiors on the other hand, would be cautious to ensure that their comments do not reveal a lack of familiarity on any relevant subject.
The result is a sterile, and possibly superficial, exchange that betrays the whole concept of knowledge sharing. Faced with such a situation, unsuspecting managers could easily fall into the trap of attempting to implement standard — Western — approaches to KM without paying sufficient regard to the social aspect — only to meet with failure, to see millions of dollars wasted and cynical employees further demoralised.
KM adoption in Malaysia
In 1991, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Doctor Mahathir bin Mohamad, highlighted the need for the country to develop its ‘knowledge economy’. At the same time, various information and computer technology-based initiatives were initiated to enhance the country’s competitiveness.
However, the concept of KM only really began to take off in the late 1990s when influential multinational companies, such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (HP), brought their existing KM practices, process and applications into the country.
A broader national interest in KM also began to take shape at the same time. The Malaysian government, through its ‘Knowledge Economy Master Plan’, had inspired government agencies as well as local companies to adopt KM, although some big companies had already made some tentative steps.
Some government-linked companies, especially Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC), started their KM journey more than five years ago. In the case of MDC, in 1999 when it officially set up a KM department, headed by a chief knowledge officer. In 2003, MDC had also set-up the Knowledge Management Association of Malaysia (KMAM), which is a registered society and aims to provide a platform for KM practitioners in Malaysia to collaborate and share knowledge and expertise. Other practitioners set-up the Malaysian chapter of the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI) to exchange ideas among themselves.
What is lacking at the moment is a comprehensive report on KM adoption in Malaysia, as well as a comprehensive list of local companies that have implemented KM practices. A number of local institutions and government-linked companies are known to have set-up KM initiatives, including MDC, MIMOS, INTAN, MAMPU, MINT, SIRIM, Khazanah Nasional, Telekom Malaysia, TM R&D, TNB and Petronas Carigali. In the private sector, pioneers include Protasco, SpeedToyz, Cosmos Electronic, Sunway City and ASEAN Bintulu Fertiliser.
The banking industry has also started to consider KM as a result of increasing competition and the need for better risk management. Bank Negara, for example, is one of the pioneers of KM in the Malaysian banking industry, together with other practitioners including CIMB, OCBC, Bank Muamalat and SME Bank. In the education sector, Multimedia University Malaysia (MMU), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Universiti Islam Antarabagsa (UIA), Open Universiti Malaysia (OUM), Monash University (Malaysia), Universiti Tun Abdul Razak (UNITAR) and Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) have also set up KM centres or units in order to improve knowledge sharing among academics.
It is recommended that those universities with a KM system in place classify all research by faculties and publish them on the internet. The idea is that this will attract industry and a meaningful collaboration can therefore more easily be established.
Although KM has been accepted in principle in a majority of industries, awareness in Malaysia’s small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector remains low. Research done by Niza Hamzah and Peter Woods (2005) from Multimedia University Malaysia (MMU) revealed that three-quarters of the employees in the Malaysian SMB sector feel that KM is purely about the use of information and communications technology (ICT).
Most employees spent the biggest percentage of their office hours preparing reports and presentations and doing administrative work. The management of most SMBs are afraid that implementing KM projects would be expensive and would rather ‘wait and see’ what others do and to imitate them. Some of them also do not have appropriate and proper guidance on how to practise and implement KM.
Malaysia’s KM challenges
Knowledge sharing is considered the core driver of KM, but there is a common belief that people are reluctant to share knowledge.
To better understand the major obstacle in sharing knowledge in Malaysian organisations, a poll was run by the kmtalk.net website (which focuses on KM issues in Malaysia). One-third of the respondents suggested that the corporate culture in Malaysia simply does not support openness and the sharing of expertise.
Some attributed that to the lack of education and awareness on the value of knowledge sharing with peers. People also tended to have a common excuse — lack of time. They try to avoid knowledge sharing if it is not a required task and tend to focus more on their day-to-day activities.
Some organisations tried to develop KM systems and processes but failed because people are simply not open to such a culture of sharing. Some organisations, however, do not even want to invest in a KM system, while others think that there is already plenty of knowledge available in books, reports and on the internet; so investing time, money and effort on the cause of corporate knowledge-sharing is just a waste of time.
Opinions vary widely. According to Hulwana M. Labib, a project manager of information and knowledge management at software and services provider Paradigm Systems Berhad, Malaysian people can be very resistant to change. They do not want to change the way they work, to make the extra effort to learn new things and to try and improve their work efficiency — unless there is a clear direction from the top management.
Nurbek Jusupov, a project specialist at local consultancy Tactics Asia, believes that a lack of skills and commitment is the major barrier to any successful KM implementation in Malaysian organisations. “People don’t know how to manage knowledge and those who know are not committed enough to carry on with KM and sharing”.
Rizal Alwani Mohamed Nordin, the president of Locomo Sendirian Berhad, an innovation intelligence company, believes that KM is expensive and that lots of organisations in Malaysia are not willing to invest so much in KM for the time being as a result.
Muhammed Ismail Bin Shahulhameed, a product system engineer at IT security consultancy Tesvin Technologies, believes that “people are just not interested — they do not want to take the responsibility to learn new things or to accept new challenges”. Some believe that reluctance to embrace KM is due to lack of positive KM stories and best practices in Malaysia, which deters others from embarking upon KM initiative.
The first step we can look into is the learning culture in education institutions in Malaysia. Visiting universities or colleges, you can find very few Malaysian students that like to raise questions and/or challenge the lecturers in the classroom. Similarly, lecturers do not tend to encourage the students to participate in the learning session.
If there is an absence of curiosity and a ‘learning mind’, knowledge sharing can be very difficult to realise from the start. So, knowledge sharing has to be inculcated at a basic level in educational institutions, starting at school, to stimulate creative learning in youngsters. They will later drive the knowledge creation and sharing habits they learnt at school in their working lives.
Accelerating KM adoption
According to some local analysts, Malaysian executives need to develop a strategic perspective on their organisational knowledge. Companies should identify their knowledge assets, analyse the corporate culture and design the KM roadmap in order to focus on openness and the sharing of knowledge without any fear of being penalised.
Just last year, Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education suggested that by 2010, the country will have some 1.6 million knowledge workers between the ages of 17 and 23 with tertiary education qualification entering the job market. It is important to inculcate them with a desire for learning and knowledge sharing for KM to take root within the Malaysian industry.
Researchers worldwide have emphasised the importance of developing strategies for personal knowledge management (PKM) so that KM can be viewed as a set of problem-solving skills with both a logical/conceptual component, as well as a physical/hands-on component. These skills need to be taught in educational institutions or learning centres.
PKM proponents have identified the seven core skills individuals need to learn:
1. Retrieving information;
2. Evaluating/assessing information;
3. Organising information;
4. Analysing information;
5. Presenting information;
6. Securing information;
7. Collaborating around the information.
By mastering PKM, people can not only empower themselves but also their organisation. It is easy to get buy-in for organisation-wide KM when each individual is personally practising KM for their own efficiency.
The last word Knowledge management is an on-going process — technology is merely an enabler. Therefore, commitment from senior management is absolutely essential. That is true everywhere. But it is also important to ensure the adaptability and flexibility of information interfaces and information flows among employees.
In any organisation, knowledge sharing can be promoted through the establishment of cross-cultural teams and communities of practice. Rewards (whether intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on the culture of the organisation) should also be designed to encourage knowledge sharing.
Malaysia ought to enjoy a cultural advantage compared to many nations, since the country is very much a melting pot — of Malay, Chinese and Indian — and people from different backgrounds will have a long history of sharing different kinds of views and ways of thinking.
People should not see knowledge-sharing as a threat or a burden, but enjoy the benefit of sharing knowledge and ideas with colleagues without being afraid of losing face or credibility. What is important is to make knowledge management exciting for people. And that is as true for anywhere in the world as it is for Malaysia.
Naguib Chowdhury is currently working with Multimedia Development Corporation Sdn Bhd (MDeC). He can be contacted at naguibch@yahoo.com. This feature represents the personal views of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of MDeC.
References:
· Mariam Ismail, 2005, Malaysia: Creating Job Markets for Graduates;
· Niza Adila Hamzah & Peter Woods, 2005, Current Awareness of KM in Malaysian SMEs;
· Simon Lelic, 2003, ‘Knowledge management in Asia’, Inside Knowledge, V6 (10);
· Steve Barth, 2003, ‘A framework for personal knowledge management tools’, KMWorld, V12(1);
· Thailand: Operational progress of office of knowledge management and development, 2005, Thai News Service;
· Frank-Jürgen Richter, President of Horasis, Interview on ‘Global Future: The New Challenge for Asian Business’.
