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Networks for Prosperity PART 2, Chapter 5: The Knowledge Organization
5.5 Conclusions
As indicated in Chapter 2, key measures of organizational networking available for a large country sample come from the WEF and World Bank surveys and include the percentage of firms offering formal training; the local availability of specialized research and training services; and the extent to which companies invest in training and employee development. As discussed, important indicators include the strength of personal networks (possibly using social network analysis); the years of experience of managers and staff; their cross-sectoral work experience; and finally, gauges of the quality of institutional KM systems (knowledge mapping and audits). To date, there are no large samples of measures looking at public sector knowledge sharing practices. The Central American exercise cited in the El Salvador case did not assess KM specifically as a gauge of bureaucratic competence. Designing knowledge sharing surveys should be a fruitful area for discussion with experts on institutional capacity building. As one might expect, enterprises in countries such as Switzerland, Denmark, the USA, Sweden and the Netherlands perform well on these self-assessed measures of training provision. Only Costa Rica from the study group is in the top 50 and several study group countries come low down the list. Some countries present a paradox when it comes to intraorganizational networking. In the case of Turkey, managers are experienced but tend not to provide much formal training, so policy-makers should probably focus on encouraging informal on-the-job training.
On the other hand, Egypt, like Turkey, has excellent scientific and technical capabilities, but the informal networks originally tasked with transferring that knowledge to entrepreneurs have been struggling, and need more coordination. There is no one-sizefits-all approach to institutional capacity building in either public or private sector, as the experience of the National Cleaner Production Centres shows (see Chapter 1). In Turkey’s industrial planning process, serious attention is paid to the issue of implementation – the space devoted to implementation in strategy documents is probably a good gauge of how likely they are to be implemented. Policy-makers also need to ensure that implementation networks have the resources and sustainability they need to deliver on their expanded remits, given that institutional transformation processes can easily take four years (as in the case of El Salvador), or even longer, making them vulnerable to cut-backs by incoming administrations. Many of the 200+ policy-makers, business people and researchers interviewed told us that knowledge sharing is less about technical platforms than about culture and incentives. The UN’s Teamworks experience is that the technology has to be right before the social network gets started.
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