Knowledge Management in Small and Micro Enterprises

Tips to architecting knowledge management in mIcro enterprises, like dental practices.

While modernising the dental practice of City Dental Centre City Dental Centre (Cape Town) and others, I had to address challenges in the area of Knowledge Management.

This graphic published in Knowledge Management in Small and Micro Enterprises: Applying a Maturity Model by Mirian Oliveira et al.  shows remarkably similar features to my experiences with  dental practices, namely that knowledge creation, sharing and storage is low and IT support for knowledge management is abysmall.

Small businesses need to obtain external knowledge due to the small number of employees and often limited managerial experience.

top management needs to encourage and provide resources for  knowledge sharing among employees.

the employees need incentives to use electronic storage , and knowledge networks (e.g., virtual communities, groupware) to access and share  knowledge. 

Knowledge can be obtained from experts, colleagues and patient, but there is a need to formalise the way to store and propagate this through mentorships, micro courses and howto guides etc.

IT is an indispensable tool for KM support, as it can be used to leverage both tacit and explicit knowledge.

It is tough going but with support from top management like Dr Narges Shirzadi things are improving.