Managing for Knowledge: HRs Strategic Role

Case study: The Berkshire NHS Shared Services Unit^[4]

Within the county of Berkshire there are six Primary Care Trusts, a Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Trust, an Ambulance Trust and two general hospitals. In May 2000 a KMC Network was formed as a way of encouraging knowledge sharing across the wide range of health professionals working within the Berkshire region. The funding for this partnership venture has been provided through a number of sources: Department of Health, South-East NHS Regional office and Windsor, Ascot and Maidenhead PCT (the overall project sponsors). The KMC network is being championed by the workforce development team within the Shared Services Unit.

The KMC Network project has a number of key deliverables:

• Creating KM centres (KMCs) within Berkshire. These centres enable healthcare professionals to have access to a wide range of national and other information sources related to health and learning. ‘Human portals’ i.e. the KM co-ordinators who work in the KMCs provide advice and guidance on how to access the information that is needed. KM co-ordinators also encourage local practitioners to share their knowledge with colleagues.

• Creating an infrastructure that aligns KMCs with other knowledge-building activities.

• Marketing e-learning facilities for health and social care staff within Berkshire. Each KM centre will become a licensed Learndirect site, enabling healthcare and other professionals to have access to a wide range of courses.

• Provide a ‘signposting’ service to connect the diverse healthcare resources across Berkshire, this way capitalising on the explicit and tacit knowledge available within the county.

Clearly organisational size, combined with the nature of the work that needs to be done, will have a bearing on the number of people that need to be employed in these new information management and knowledge management roles. The big question though is whether these new roles will become a permanent feature of organisational structures, or whether they are simply transitional, i.e. only needed until organisations become more experienced at managing knowledge. For example, until organisations have at least reached Stage 4 of the Knowledge Management Journey discussed in Chapter 1.

However, given the time that it can take to get from the knowledge-chaotic to the knowledge-centric stage, it is likely that some of these roles will become a permanent feature. HR then will need to keep a watching eye on this. They will need to ensure that others in the organisation do not use the presence of these new roles as an excuse to avoid developing their own information management skills. If this becomes the case, what could happen is a shift in power from the information management illiterate to the information management literate, a situation that could prove counterproductive to building a flexible and responsive organisation.

^[4]See Fawcett, J., Knowing me – knowing you? Knowledge Management, April 2002.