A Guide to Knowledge Management: The Restaurant Sector

In data analytics, information management is how we manage the data that we collect. There are two types of information management, knowledge management and business intelligence. Stay tuned for our piece on Business Intelligence, but for now I’m going to discuss these points:

• What is Knowledge Management?
• Tacit Knowledge and Explicit Knowledge
• The Knowledge Management Life Cycle
• The Benefits and Challenges of Knowledge Management

 

What is Knowledge Management?

“Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.”

(Definition of Knowledge Management (KM) - Gartner Information Technology Glossary, 2021)

Content management is important to knowledge management as it allows an employee to search for information using internal portals, databases and content management systems. They enable indexing and timely, organised retrieval of information and are powered by data analytics and machine learning. ‘Lessons Learned’ is a database commonly used for knowledge of common errors, experiences and ‘How-To’ knowledge. This could be tips about a cooking method or approved substitutions for ingredients.

Tacit Knowledge and Explicit Knowledge

Knowledge management can be split into two types, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge based on skills that are gained through experiences and context such as body language and empathy skills or innovative thinking. These can be hard to describe which can make quantifying it a challenge in order to teach that knowledge to others. Explicit knowledge refers to knowledge and skills that could be found if searched for like a definition or instruction. The difference between the two is that explicit knowledge is more tangible so it’s easier to document in databases and teach to others.

The famous ‘push and pull’ marketing concept in this context refers the ingoing and outgoing of information. Push is the encoding of knowledge to be made available for the public, for example converting notes in a personal recipe book into a corporate blog page with a recipe. Pull happens when an employee requests knowledge from an expert to satisfy a need from the public. For example, when the owner of a business talks to a dietary specialist or nutritionist within their organisation to answer a specific question from a customer, as they hold expert knowledge in this area.

 

The Knowledge Management Life Cycle

A knowledge management system is an information storage system. It involves the gathering, accumulating,  maintaining and codifying information. The knowledge management life cycle includes these processes and the necessary tools and technologies involved. There are 4 models in the life cycle that contain their own individual steps; creating, sharing, auditing and structuring. For more information on these steps, see the renowned models published by ‘Wigg’, ‘Zack’, ‘Bukowitz and William’ or ‘McElroy’.

(Dalkir, 2005)

Kimiz Dalkir (Dalkir, 2005) proposed a renowned version of the framework called ‘the integrated knowledge management cycle’. It was innovative because it integrated all the concepts proposed by the previously mentioned authors into one framework with 3 stages. The objective was to achieve increased amount and quality of knowledge stored and in processes.

 

The Benefits and Challenges of Knowledge Management

At the heart of knowledge management is an organisation wide focus on maintaining and increasing the knowledge collected from a business’ processes. As well as promoting the distribution of information to employees who need it.

A study by Alonse Perez-Soltero (Perez-Soltero, 2013) aimed to identify improvements to knowledge management processes within 12 small and midsize restaurants in which managers and staff were posed with questionnaires. It revealed problems in maintenance and valuation of knowledge and key factors for their success or failure were the “availability of entrepreneurs to participate, staff responsive to the needs of the company, and staff is willing to share their knowledge.” Key challenges identified were “resistance to change, low level of knowledge in the use of technology by some members of the organization; difficulty accepting a strategic plan including knowledge management and unwillingness to document good practices.” Although this study was conducted in Latin America, I would suspect that the results could be considered by this industry globally.

 

Summary

Key benefits of knowledge management:

• Increase in volume of expert knowledge
• Increased access to information by employees resulting in better collaboration and ideas.
• Increased efficiency and faster decision making
• More informed, more profitable decision making
• The culture of the organisation is enhanced through knowledge sharing
• Ability to manage knowledge and human capital as business assets
• Ability to collect and store knowledge for future employees

Key challenges of knowledge management:

• Identifying the expert of a certain topic within your personnel can be challenging. 
• This may be easier within restaurants where chef's often specialise in one area such as patisserie or teppanyaki for example.
• It’s hard to define metrics to measure knowledge, particularly for tacit knowledge
• Must use a document management system to organise files, making they easy to find and utilise
• Must use a knowledge transfer system to assign access to information to the correct personnel, ensuring it’s security.
• The system’s processes must be continuously reviewed and optimised.

 

#Knowledge Management #Knowledge Management Life Cycle #Knowledge Management Benefits #Knowledge Management Challenges

#Restaurant Sector #Restaurant Industry #Restaurant Management

Author: Elizabeth Duffy

References:
Gartner. 2021. Definition of Knowledge Management (KM) - Gartner Information Technology Glossary. [online] Available at: <https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/km-knowledge-management> [Accessed 25 February 2021].

Dalkir, K., 2005. The Integrated Knowledge Management Cycle. [image] Available at: <https://dianabarbosa.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/knowledge-management-kimiz-dalkir.pdf> [Accessed 1 March 2021].

Dalkir, K., 2005. Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice. 1st ed. Elsevier Inc, pp.57, 58.

Perez-Soltero, A., 2013. A diagnostic of knowledge management processes at the restaurant industry SMEs to identify improvements at their productive processes. Intangible Capital, [online] 9(1), pp.153-183. Available at: <https://www.intangiblecapital.org/index.php/ic/article/view/381/310> [Accessed 1 March 2021].

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