Leveraging the power of knowledge in B Schools

Knowledge Management in B Schools

Development and sharing of knowledge have been going on ever since man learnt to speak
and write. Indeed, the first turning point in knowledge sharing came when man learnt to
write, enabling future generations to have access to the knowledge of the earlier generation. The discovery of the printing press, which allowed copies of the same document to be made and distributed to people in a costeffective manner was another watershed event.

Few, however, thought it necessary to look at knowledge management (KM) as a separate
discipline till recently. Now, KM has clearly emerged as one of the most visible disciplines in
management education. And the main reason for this trend seems to be information technology in general and the Internet in particular.

When we think of knowledge, we instinctively tend to think of teachers, schools, colleges and
universities. Indeed, for most people, the primary source of knowledge is teachers and academic
institutions. Yet, how committed are our institutions of higher learning to KM? Very little,
especially if we look at what is happening globally.

Most of the leading B-schools in Europe and the US have strong KM initiatives, many of which are web-based. They have Web sites rich in content. Leading American B-schools also have powerful Intranets that allow information to be shared among faculty and students within the
campus.

Some of the KM initiatives undertaken by academics in the West are truly mind boggling.
Prof. Raj Reddy, (of Carnegie Mellon University), the world's leading expert in artificial intelligence is attempting to collect virtually all the information available in the world and host it free of cost, in an easily retrievable form on one Web site. www. ulib.org. Prof. Reddy is talking about going back hundreds of years in time. And his vision is to store information pertaining to at least 1,000 years and make it available free of cost to the general public.

Another laudable initiative is that of Prof. Werner Antweiler of University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada. His Web site pacific.commerce.ubc.ca / xr allows us to access foreign exchange rates going back several years for almost all traded currencies. If you want to know how the rupee was trading against the dollar in 1993, don't go to the RBI! Prof. Antweiler's Web site will give you the figure in seconds.

With stray exceptions, such a commitment to compiling, documenting and sharing knowedge is
lacking among our academicians. How many of us have a home page? Do we document our
lecture notes and store them for posterity? We teach batch after batch of students. Do we
document the common mistakes which students make in the examination or the questions
typically asked by the students in the class? Imagine a scenario where such information is
provided to the students on the Net before the semester starts. Students would come well prepared and the quality of discussion in the class would improve by leaps and bounds. Not only that, if one of the regular instructors is not available for the semester, an alternative instructor can be quickly briefed and pressed into service, without in any way diluting the academic standards.

Most of our leading B-schools have Web sites today. Unfortunately, their quality leaves a lot to be desired. Except for a prospectus and a few photographs, there is nothing to excite a visitor. Unless the site is enriched with lecture notes, power point presentations made by faculty, research papers and useful links it will remain static and be of little utility. A bulletin board is also a must to accelerate the process of sharing insights.

In the medium to long run, our B- Schools should aim to develop knowledge portals like Insead. But in the short run, basic information like lecture schedules, course curriculum, lecture
notes and solutions to assignment problems can be made freely available on the Web.
I would like to think that our faculty, especially in the top 100 B-schools, are reasonably capable
people. Many of them are well-read and the increasingly demanding students are maintaining
the pressure on them to upgrade their knowledge.

So, more than knowledge development, it is knowledge sharing which is the key issue. In
general, we Indians are reluctant to share what we know with others. We feel worried, that all
the hard work put in by us will be meaningless if some one has easy access to our knowledge.
This is a wrong mindset. People will invariably learn what we know as no secret is permanent.
On the other hand, if we share our knowledge, reciprocity is quite likely. And as knowledge is
shared among academics, new knowledge will be created. This type of climbing spiral is what we
need to make our B-schools centres of excellence. Like in business, it is innovation which will create sustainable competitive advantages for a B-school. And knowledge sharing is a must to foster an innovation-driven culture.

The Net has thrown up possibilities which were not available earlier. While installing an intranet
such as Lotus Notes can be a very expensive process, the Internet is a very inexpensive medium to store and transmit files of data. Let us hope Indian B-schools will appreciate the
potential of the Web as a knowledge sharing tool.