All entries for Friday 15 June 2012

…hiccup

My friend told me that she is working on a very large scale computer system project in America for her organisation. A big portion of the human resources working on the project is from Bangkok; yes, imported from Bangkok because they are cheaper, but highly efficient.

After the implementation, all the good knowledges on how the system works needs to be transferred to the American employees who are to be supporting the system in a long run.

The funny thing is that, there is a problem regarding those expensivemanpower to support the system because after several knowledge transfer sessions, the American are still pretty much blank on how to support users of the system once problems arise; not because they're dumb, but the system is so complex that the people who did not involve in designing stage would be struggling understanding all the logic behind the designs.

She's still complining over this as the supporting people should have been involved throughout the designing and implementation stage, not just having several hours listening to a lecture. Something can't just be learned in a classroom without any hand-on experience (problem translating tacit knowledge into explicit and then share it).

She thought the company must have somehow realized this, but ended up having no choice due to the fact that the American are so expensive and their involvement would exceed the project budget. However, they might have to suffer even more cost when the system crashes and none of the expensive labour is able to do anything.

Like Greme said before sometimes what we can trasfer is only information, knowledge is cognitive things it involves experiences.
KMis an on going process that can never reach saturation. For this cross continent project, those Thai system designers will still have to work hand-in-hand with the American, a one time knowledge transfer session or a complete manual will not be enough.

Ungsutorn Thavornlertrat : 15 Jun 2012 10:24 |  Tags: Kbam |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem