Sunday, September 11, 2011

Government Contracting & Knowledge Management

What is the impact of government contracting (both in terms of volume and types of contracts) on core competencies, intellectual capital, and knowledge management practices?

Insufficient attention is being paid to the government / contractor relationship in current KM strategies and practices.

HYPOTHESES:
1) Current KM strategies and practices ignore the organizational barriers, refusing to acknowledge that they exist;
2) Current KM strategies and practices focus on "government" knowledge and ignore the contractor perspective, while contractors may have their separate KM approaches focusing on their intellectual capital. 

Is the ultimate goal to merge government and contractor KM approaches?
Is the ultimate goal to establish knowledge sharing practices building bridges between government and contractors without necessarily merging KM strategies?  If so, at what level should this happen?  Project-level or higher?

I haven't scoped the issue very thoroughly yet but I think it's worth exploring.



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2 comments:

Nick Milton said...

personably rather than try and come up with a single system to cover government and contractors (which would be effectively unworkable, IMHO), the government should ensure within the contracts that the contractors can demonstrate that they have their own effective working internal KM approach.

That way, at least the government can have some degree of comfort that outsourced knowledge is being managed.

Barbara Fillip said...

That's the easy solution. It probably works in a lot of situation but wouldn't the government also want to ensure that the contract stipulates that some of that contractor knowledge acquired through government funding is effectively shared with the government... all of which gets tricky in a competitive environment.