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Siemens, once noted for its bureaucratic and hierarchical approach to business, has adopted a grass-roots and "bottom up" approach to knowledge management, which has transformed the company over the last three years.
Without any suggestion or provocation from above, middle-level employees and managers in Siemens business units began to create repositories, communities of practice and informal sharing approaches for knowledge. After these business units began to develop knowledge initiatives, they looked around and noticed that others were doing the same. After a period of informal communication, the employees and managers who were managing knowledge began to form a semi-official community of practice themselves. Ultimately, they began to feel that they needed a corporate group to facilitate the firm's broad efforts, and were successful in persuading senior executives to create the corporate knowledge-management function. Most of the knowledge-management efforts take place in the business units, but the corporate group plays a co-ordinating role.
Siemens, with 154 years of history, is one of the world's oldest, largest and most successful corporations. Up to 80 percent of the value-added that Siemens generates is linked directly to knowledge. This percentage continues to grow.
There are several reasons why knowledge management is important for Siemens. First, the company is global. If employees are to share knowledge, they must do so through means other than, or in addition to, informal face-toface communications. The aspects of knowledge management that involve technology-enabled repositories and sharing networks - that is, the parts that help to overcome geography - are well...