Managing knowledge A case study

Introduction

Knowledge management system is the practice of storing and retrieving knowledge to improve understanding, collaboration and process alignment by the help of the information Technology (IT). It helps to enhance team cooperation and manage the knowledge of the employees in the organisation, so that it would be possible for the organisational leader and managers to handle the workers and lead them towards achieving the future success. The aim of the knowledge management report is to analyse the activities in the organisation UBER to handle their operations and ensure knowledge audit in the workplace. The efficacy of the workers and the overall performance of the brand depend on the knowledge management activities and through this study, it is possible to analyse the knowledge management activities in the organisation and evaluate the impacts of company culture on the knowledge management principles.

Organisational background

UBER Technologies, Inc. is an American technology company serving ride hilling, package delivery, couriers, freight transportations and food delivery through the partnership with Lime, Electric Bicycle and Motorised scooter rental. It is successful to run their operations across 900 metropolitan areas worldwide. It is also considered as one of the largest firm, in the gig economy with over 93 million active users worldwide. In the USA, there is more than 71% market share of UBER due to ride sharing facilities. And 22% market share is for food delivery. It is prominent brand in the sharing economy with operation across 69 countries. The products are website and mobile application and the services of UBER are riding facilities, food delivery, and packaging and courier services (UBER, 2021). The numbers of employees in UBER is more than 26900 and it is successful to serve the customers with the best quality riding facilities and other food delivery system and courier services. The customers of UBER utilise the mobile application and choose their rides as per the location and personal preferences. It is hereby beneficial for UBER to enhance their revenue and sales volume over the period of time, where UBER is efficient to protect the clients and provide them secured services. UBER's mission statement is “Transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone.” It is hereby possible for the organisation to arrange rides for the customers and provide them the best quality and secured services related to transportation. UBER becomes an international brand which is secured and affordable to access for transportation. The availability of UBER in the market is also high where the clients can access their services easily through the mobile application (UBER, 2021).

Evaluating practice of organisational culture improving knowledge management practice

Knowledge management is one of the important ways to handle the employees of the organisation and enhance their efficiency to serve the ultimate users of the brand. It is hereby important for the organisation to ensure knowledge management for achieving the future success and gaining high competitive advantage over the competitive firms in the market through delivering the best quality products and services to the customers. The main goal of knowledge management is to improve an organisation's efficiency and save knowledge within the company. The organisation UBER is efficient to ensure knowledge management with the three main reasons that are accumulating knowledge, storing knowledge and sharing knowledge, so that they would be able to develop a strong and efficient team by including the proficient workers, who can handle the operations of UBER across the international countries (Hartmans and McAlone, 2016). Knowledge management in UBER is hereby important for the organisational leader to create more efficient workplace by inclusion of the experienced workers in the organisational workplace, so that the employees can handle the whole operations. Additionally, it increases the collaboration and internal cooperation among the team members who can work as a group and manage the operations in a synchronised way. Building organisational knowledge and activities are also possible through knowledge management and additionally, it helps UBER to increase employee participation and retention in the company, where they can improve their proficient and contribute positively in the organisation (Stumpf, Bedratiuk and Cirit, 2018). Through knowledge management practice, it is hereby beneficial for the organisation UBER to increase creativity and innovation so that it would be possible to make unique decision for client handling and managing the international operations.

UBER focuses on creating good corporate culture in the workplace, as the corporate culture provides a scope to the company to improve ethical practices and manage the internal knowledge successfully. Culture mainly reshapes the knowledge sharing activities in the organisation and it further provides a scope to the organisational leader to create good workplace where the employees can cooperate with each other and share knowledge and understanding for working creatively. Hence, organisational internal culture creates the context for social interaction that ultimately determines the effective way that an organisation can be at creating, sharing, and applying knowledge to manage the processes. As per the cultural typologies, the dimensions are power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity versus femininity and long term orientation. The equality and diversity management in the workplace create a good culture with equal power of men and women in the workplace. The organisation UBER focuses on collectivism principle to create good team work in the workplace, so that the company can manage their activities and share the knowledge and latest technological information with each other. The whole process of UBER is maintained by the online website and mobile application and in this regard such cultural typologies of equality, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and collectivism will provide a scope to the organisation to manage their international operations. In the context of strong versus coherent culture, UBER focuses on coherent cultural practice with harmony and freedom to work. The UBER drivers are the main employees who can handle their operations efficiently to serve the best riding facilities to the customers across the international markets. Hereby, the organisational culture is important to reshape the knowledge management principles in the workplace (Uber Newsroom, n.d.).

UBER mainly focuses on creating values for all the stakeholders and the organisational values are such as customers obsessed, celebrating differences, doing right things, values creation for the stakeholders, maintaining corporate sustainability and managing harmony and integrity,. The organisational values are hereby beneficial to reshape its culture which in turn helps to ensure knowledge sharing, creating and achieving future corporate success. UBER culture is unique which enhance the knowledge management practices (Webb, 2017). The organisational leader mainly focuses on creating good team work in the workplace, where the UBER drivers, front line service management group and the back office staff are working as a team through engaging with each other by the technology of UBER. The IT innovation is another tactic of UBER which creates a good culture with improvement of operational efficiency and organisational uniqueness. The organisational leader in this regard focuses on empowering the stakeholders mainly the employees, managers and operational head so that they can share their thoughts and knowledge with each other for creating a successful decision for UBER. Additionally, through the online website and mobile application, the employees are interconnected with each other to serve the customers uniquely and this corporate culture further enhance knowledge sharing activities with the latest Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and technical innovation. The organisation is hereby enhances the team collaboration and communication in order to share and create knowledge so that the staff members can handle their operations creatively.

In addition to this, the organisation is able to maintain harmony and freedom, where the employees are able to work creatively and contribute with their full potential and experience. The integrity management, positive body language at the workplace and open interactions are also helpful to create good corporate culture and it further enhance knowledge management practice. UBER also faced challenges to manage their organisational culture with the controversies of harassment, lack of work life balance, discrimination and mismanagement, which leads to negative corporate image in the international business. In order to mitigate such controversy, UBER focuses on maintaining integrity and respect others in order to fulfil their needs and preferences as well as create values by providing them high return on investment. The culture with communication and partnership working practice is hereby beneficial to share and create new knowledge with each other to perform better and meet the client’s requirements (Webb, 2017). The organisational leader also maintains non-discrimination practices, enhancing equality and diversity in order to ensure fairness and integrity in the workplace. Additionally, the culture of continuous support and guidance to the staff members will be beneficial for UBER to manage knowledge and transfer the knowledge to other employees, so that they can improve their capabilities for better performance.

Evaluating schools of knowledge management in UBER

Knowledge management is important in the multinational corporations to enhance the efficiency of the employees and ensure the business excellence in near future, so that the company would be able to gain high competitive advantage and run the business creatively. Knowledge management at UBER is one of the effective ways to tackle the employees and retain them for long run, where the overall operations are conducted through online organisational website and mobile application, where the drivers get registration in UBER and then provide all the necessary information related to documentation of registration. The bank information is important to link the mobile application with personal bank account so that the UBER drivers can get paid timely. Additionally, the customers also share their personal information to book UBER rides and fulfil payment through online transactions. Hence, the overall system is performed in a synchronise way, where all the employees including the back end team, front line staff and drivers try to utilise integrated software system to share the data and information for client handling. Hence, getting educated through gathering experience is one of the effective ways in UBER to educate the drivers and share all the necessary information and data with them so that they can fulfil the orders of the customers across different locations. UBER is hereby efficient to manage knowledge and adequate resources in the organisation in order to support and guide the employees of the firm. UBER focuses on knowledge management practice in order to enhance their overall performance and maximise profitability by retaining more numbers of customers for their innovative services (Chan, 2019).

In this context, Earl's 7 knowledge management processes is effective to be discussed here in order to analyse the technique of UBER in managing knowledge where the leader and management team of UBER believe that, knowledge management in an intellectual property of the organisation to handle the employees and maximise their creativity to perform (Chan, 2019). As per the Earl's 7 knowledge management process, the seven schools are such as system schools, cartographic school, process school, commercial school, organisational school, spatial school and strategic school. The system school process refers to the principle of “codifying experience and expertise for other to access using their own judgement”, dependent on IT and encourages the individuals to provide content to the company’s knowledge based system. Through gathering experience, it is possible to improve open knowledge and understanding. The cartographic school uses the idea of gathering knowledge from the company employees. The explicit and tacit knowledge are transferred via intranet and extranet. IT is utilised to connect the people and help them to find the interactions and gather data for improving own capabilities (Grabher and van Tuijl, 2020). The engineering school relies mostly on the improved knowledge among the employees by shared database management process in order to enhance the performance of the employees. The commercial school is concerned with the protection and application of knowledge asset and intellectual such as patent, copyrights and trademarks to turn into a profit. Organisational school refers to the practice of “tradition of sociability and networking” to directly share tacit and explicit knowledge within the community as well as with other communities. The spatial school refer to a design that causes employees from different departments to meet, socialize and thus exchange knowledge. On the other hand, as per the strategic school, there is rising consciousness of the role of the knowledge management in the organisational workplace through developing “conceptual models to articulate and explain the purpose and the character of intellectual capital” (Grabher and van Tuijl, 2020).

Through the schools of knowledge management, it is hereby possible to analyse the strategy of UBER in knowledge management. UBER mainly focuses on managing the knowledge through experience gathering, where the drivers try to gather experience and improve their knowledge and understanding towards mobile application handling and client handling with the learning process through gathering experience. It focuses on supporting the staff members and drivers with the mobile application and organisational website for improving understanding about booking orders, riding time management and payments methods so that the drivers can fulfil the rides and get payments in a systematic orders. It also follows the principles of cartographic school, where it is possible to utilise IT for educating the staff members and enhance their skills set to manage their job roles and responsibilities (Baj-Rogowska, 2017). In this regard, UBER also focuses on managing the staff personal and professional developmental activities through experience gathering and supporting hem with the mobile application. Through educating the people to access the mobile application of UBER, the leader and managers try to improve their abilities to handle the clients and fulfil their rides. Hence, through the IT framework and internal computerised system, the employees and drivers of UBER are getting interconnected to manage their knowledge and skill set for serving the customers proficiently. Hence, the system school works on the principle of UBER here gathering experience is the source of improve knowledge and increasing the skill set of the employees.

The system school hereby refers to tacit knowledge gathering, where the employees of UBER are able to maximise their knowledge through improving tacit knowledge which is mainly the implicate knowledge as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge. The tacit knowledge includes personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition, where the employees are able to gather personal experience and utilise own skill set to getting more in-depth insights about the working activities in UBER (Scavarda et al., 2020). It is hereby beneficial for the institution to manage their international operations through knowledge management, mainly tacit knowledge. It would be beneficial for the organisation to follow the engineering school of knowledge management, which refers to the practice of efficient knowledge distribution among the employees by using shared database. In the recent era of globalisation, there is intense competition among the competitive firms in the technology industry around the globe, and it is important for the multinational organisation UBER to ensure effective knowledge management practice for maximising employee’s capabilities to serve the customers with the best quality services. Hence, the engineering school of knowledge management will provide a scope to the company UBER to create shared database, where each staff member in UBER can access the integrated database, store the adequate data and information and process the information for making innovative decision (Vătămănescu and Pînzaru, 2017). Though the system school in UBER with learning through experience is beneficial, the engineering school of knowledge management would be the best way to resolve the queries of the staff and provide them the scope of accessing organisational adequate resources and database system for gathering vast range of information and data to maximise their proficiency.

UBER mainly develops strong and integrated ICT system to enhance communication, both internal and external, through which knowledge is being created in the company. The use of communication tool in storing and sharing knowledge in relation to data, information and knowledge exchange process is beneficial at UBER. Through utilising ICT and gathering experience, it is possible for the employees to learn practical experience from their colleagues and also develop own capabilities to handle the online activities. The strategy of multiple criteria decision making is also beneficial at UBER where the leader and managers empower the employees to make collaborative decision which further enhance the knowledge and skill set of the staff members for working better. After implementing tis multiple decision making model, the human capital becomes the main element to achieve UBER's success (Skok and Baker, 2019). Hence, the organisation is efficient to utilise the latest technology and ICT for developing an integrated system where the employees can perform through cooperation and communication. In this context, it would be beneficial for UBER to implement the engineering school of knowledge management for developing the shared database that the employees can access the database and share information for knowledge management. Storing the data and information, processing the data and creating new solutions are the major beneficial of this knowledge management practice, where the UBER employees can improve their knowledge and maximise their contribution in achieving its mission.

Role of ICT in business and knowledge management practice

Technologies play an important role in knowledge management where the latest technological advancement and creativity of the technicians develop good online platform for communication and knowledge sharing. Hereby, there is great role of technology mainly ICT to enhance knowledge management practices in the organisation. It is the role of the organisational leader to develop technological infrastructure and implement latest ICT innovation in the firm in order to guide and support the employees with updated technology, creative digital platform and managing operational excellence. ICTs are the technologies that facilitate the management to share the knowledge and information. Hence, knowledge sharing is facilitated by the technical innovation and ICT including the computers, telephones, email, database and data mining system as well as the search engines, video conferencing and many more. ICT provides an integrated system where the individual can communicate with other and share their views, perceptions and knowledge over the specific field. Hence, UBER as a creative technology company focuses on developing ICT to provide the access of open interactions and team collaboration. Through the ICT at UBER, the employees can access the shared workspace as well as computerised system of the company and also email, telephones for sharing their knowledge. This further provides a scope to enhance the knowledge sharing activities to educate others and improve the overall performance. Hence, there is a great role of the latest technologists at UBER to educate the organisational staff and improve their efficiency to perform better. The whole operations of UBER are being conducted through its website and the mobile application. The back office staff members handle the ICT framework and the computerised digital database system to help the front line managers and staff to handle the ultimate customers. The UBER drivers are automatically connected with the back office staff to handle their customers and get the rides as per the client’s preferences.

ICT is hereby enhances the principles of data mining and data warehousing, information management, expert system and decision support system, business process engineering and artificial intelligence. The organisation UBER is also efficient to handle the ICT in the company for supporting the employees, back end processors and drivers who are able to serve the clients with full potential. The digital data base management system, through cloud computing is hereby beneficial to support knowledge management practices (Razzaq et al., 2019). Additionally, UBER strategy of tacit knowledge management is beneficial to help the service providers and drivers to handle the customers and fulfil their requirements. The experts at UBER are also provide the access to the stakeholders including managers, back end technicians, front line staff members and UBER drivers to access the integrate computerised software system to handle the clients. The client data and confidentiality are also managed well under the digital data base management system through cloud computing and password protected computerised system. Through the integrated software system and mobile application, the UBER drivers can get the riding option and handle the customers well. The internal system is also important to enhance knowledge management practice, where the employees are able to share their knowledge through telephonic conversation, email and accessing the shared workspace system (Razzaq et al., 2019). This further helps them to understand the working process and gather vast knowledge through experience in the workplace. Hence, the employees also can get the opportunity of personal and professional development through knowledge management activities where ICT is playing an important role to provide integrated system to share and create knowledge for maximising the overall performance of UBER.

Ethical and legal practice in knowledge management is also important at UBER to ensure ethical code of conduct and provide high standard service to the customers. ICT is relevant in facilitating effective and quick decision making, aiding analysing the data quickly and accurately, facilitating the information gathering and dissemination, enhancing monitoring of educational facilities and resources at the workplace, maintaining adequate data storage and improving cooperation to handle the organisational tasks (Jordan, 2017). Hereby, new technologies develop an integrated system, to work efficiently through enhancing communication and cooperation. The ethical principles of knowledge management includes maintaining accountability, managing transparency and integrity in the workplace, working consistently, secrecy, maintaining intellectual property rights, care in authenticity, loyalty and honesty, showing empathy with others in the workplace with the first priority of the manager’s interest to disseminate the ethics in the organisation. Hence, the organisational leader and management team of UBER focus on handling the ethical principles of knowledge management (Richter et al., 2017). They are concerned about maintaining intellectual property rights to handle the data and information, so that the confidentiality of the organisational data and user’s data can be maintained well. The practice of managing fairness, respect for others and empathy to others are also helpful to share the knowledge with each staff and support them to maximise their contribution in UBER so that they can serve the clients with the best riding facilities. As per the legal practice of knowledge management, there is equality and diversity management under Equality Act 2010 and non-discrimination practices (Chan and Humphreys, 2018). Data confidentiality is managed under Data Protection Act 1998 and general data protection guidelines 2018 so that the organisational information can be handled fairly by maintaining its intellectual property rights.

Hence, in the recent technical era, UBER focus on latest digitalisation strategies to improve the innovation and creativity of the firm to create value for the customers. The staff members of UBER are encouraged to share the knowledge with others and create good employee base including the experienced staff members and technicians, who can handle the ICT and create good decision for achieving future success of UBER. The ethical and legal principles of knowledge management further provide a scope to the leader of UBER to enhance the performance of the employees by supporting and guiding them with adequate data and resources (Möhlmann and Zalmanson, 2017). The digital database system and cloud computing are beneficial for data managing and storing, where UBER is successful to collect market data, recent customers trend and analyse their feedback to improve the overall services,. The team members and managers can interact with each other through ICT and maintain confidentiality of the data and other resources of the firm for increasing their capability to contribute in UBER positively.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that, UBER is a successful technology company serving the customers with rides, food delivery and others. The company focuses son creating good corporate culture which enhance the knowledge management practices. In the recent era of globalisation, in order to gain high competitive advantage in the technology industry, UBER tries to conduct knowledge management audit and focuses on tacit knowledge in order to educate the staff members, managers and front line employees so that they can handle their operations. UBER also enhances the ICT uses, where the drivers and organisational employees can interact with each other and also utilise the mobile application and shared workspace system for working collaboratively. This further enhances the knowledge and skills set of the drivers of UBER to serve the customers with the best riding facilities and others. Knowledge management at UBER is hereby beneficial to run their operations creatively and maximising the employees performance through personal and professional development where knowledge sharing, creating new knowledge and developing collaborative decision would be helpful for the UBER to maximise its values.

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