Towards a Social Knowledge Management in a Knowledge-Intensive Public Organization

Knowledge-intensive organizations can benefit from introducing knowledge management procedures. In this sense, human capital plays a relevant role in helping the organization to work and act in a more knowledge-oriented perspective. A so-called "Social Knowledge Management" is highly recommended to be sure that everybody in the organization is able to change his/her behavior to work in a knowledge-sharing perspective. The experience of Swissmedic, the Swiss Agency for Therapeutic Products, can help to understand this phenomenon, especially within public sector organizations. Swissmedic, a public institution of the Swiss Government, affiliated to the Federal Department of Home Affair, can be defined as a knowledge-intensive organization; this means that much of the work it does is intellectual. Its employees are well-educated knowledge workers, and knowledge is the primary factor that determines the success of the organization. Swissmedic started to develop a Knowledge Management system back in 2012. At first, the company concentrated on acquiring and developing several KM tools related to the specific industry, such as wikis and CoPs. However, it came pretty clear since its early stages, that Knowledge Management at Swissmedic had to be primarily focused on the human resources who work for the organization. Managers of Swissmedic do think that a living knowledge culture based on respect, transparency, individual responsibility, and flexibility is the only way to create an integrative and participative working environment. The real challenge is how to encourage and improve communication and collaboration between people within the organization, leading to a so-called "Social Knowledge Management." According to the experience of Swissmedic, managers are the primary drivers of the culture change. They support and communicate the required change, and employees take their cue from them (top-down). Enhancing a culture through Knowledge Management was the primary goal for all the first phase of development (2012 to 2014), to foster a shared management philosophy that takes account of the particular characteristics of a specialist organization and its protagonists. The second phase (2015-2016) was about training the management skills, especially leadership. The third phase, ongoing from 2017, is about determining the values that are relevant to knowledge workers. According to Swissmedic's experience, these values lie in trust, reciprocity, appreciation, and interest.