Promoting knowledge-sharing as it attracts interest amid work-style diversification and labor shortages -

An interview with a senior manager who contributes to business growth with success in knowledge management from a long-term perspective, through activities that encompass other departments.

 

K.N

Why ABeam ?

K.N

Upon graduation, I started working in a general career-track position at a city bank, then changed to ABeam during the second year of my career.
What occasioned my career change was a sense that I got from watching my senior colleagues that it would be years before I would be able to engage in the work of my choice, since this was a bank that rotated us every few years among the branch offices.
While bank support for enterprise focuses on finance,
the consulting industry allows for a variety of approaches.

I became interested when I sensed that I would be able to go into companies, and provide support from closer in. I did my job search concurrently with my busy work duties, and had an encounter with ABeam, which I joined sensing that the environment would provide satisfying challenges even to junior employees.

Experiences in ABeam ~ Impressive Project~

Knowledge management support for a manufacturing client made a particular impression on me. Having built up hundreds of locations worldwide, the client was aiming for further growth overseas. Through repeated interviews, we determined that the client had issues with sales knowledge collection and utilization.
For instance, since sales know-how and knowledge was not being shared with local members at local branch offices, new business orders had settled in at low levels. Also, each local member had to inquire with the Japan office by e-mail every time they needed to know what to include in proposal materials, such as the required data granularity, sales action processes, etc. The burden it placed on those in Japan who had to respond made it inefficient. On top of that, the overseas culture of career advancement through changing jobs prevented know-how from taking root as organizational knowledge.

So, in order to overcome organizational barriers to share and retain knowledge and expertise, we recommended building a knowledge management organization. From the outset, the effort on which we focused was that of building appropriate rules with due consideration to the balance between knowledge sharing and information security. Knowledge sharing and ensuring information security have essential characteristics that conflict with each other. Compliance with information security-related regulations is a must, but decisions that are more conservative than necessary impede company-internal knowledge sharing. Moreover, highly confidential projects are the ones that involve high-value information available nowhere else. So we made arrangements in meetings with the compliance department to define a knowledge sharing policy and authority. We succeeded in building a flexible and appropriate information sharing system in consideration of the differences in confidentiality between each project and information type.
In a reverse calculation from the organization's purpose, we established KPI such as knowledge collection count and order acceptance rate. By providing consistent support toward achieving targeted KPI, even including organizational operation, we went beyond merely setting up the new organization to establishing it as a body that was fully functioning toward its goal.

On this project, I was enabled for the first time to take knowledge management expertise cultivated over many years and provide it to the client as a service. We also launched a knowledge management organization at ABeam as an internal company project, although that was more than ten years ago now. Initially created to raise company-internal awareness, it has continued to provide arrangements for meetings and employee training for each department, gone out to overseas offices directly during their Kick-off meetings, and created a variety of opportunities for educational activities. As a result, the organization has gradually established itself, achieving recognition and practical application, so that we can proudly say that we back up ABeam's internal culture of sharing know-how. There is no greater sense of achievement than that of providing clients with this long-term accumulation of knowledge and expertise to help them solve issues.

Future ~Growth Story~

K.N

A new challenge that I'm taking on now is that I've begun providing support in the talent management domain. Like knowledge management, talent management is of crucial importance in boosting corporate competitiveness. That's precisely what makes it critical to set final goals for what you want to achieve, then act toward achieving them. If you don't do that, then renewing organizations and tools becomes the goal, and your actions become disconnected from solving the original issues and achieving goals.

And this doesn't just go for talent management. Amid wide-ranging changes in business environments, transformation is required of companies, and you can't change a company or organization overnight. It takes a certain amount of time, but by applying past experience while working tenaciously and steadily, I intend to persist until I see the client through to achievement of their goals.

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