Introduction
One of the defining word for the internet, one of the most visited website of the internet and one of most valued brand name of the world. Yes, it’s Google. Now a subsidiary company of the Alphabet Inc., Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The American internet tech-giant employs over 50,000 full-time employees, and offers various internet based services from Gmail to Online search – which is the most profitable services provided by the company and is well-known for. By the help of its employees and products its mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful (Google, 2015). In short we could say Knowledge Management.
According to Google’s product marketing manager Arvind Desikan "It is a matter of semantics. Knowledge management is essentially about giving users the right information at the right time”.
According to (Abdullah, 2012), Knowledge management is a systematic process by which individuals, group and organisational knowledge is organised managed and used by making use of best resources available for the success of the organisation as a whole. Practising Knowledge management would mean that, improving decision making through collectivism and knowledge sharing, improving efficiency by following the most efficient and effective method, creating an environment for innovation and also offering much better services and products to customer base (Abdullah, 2012).
In the practise of knowledge management one of the most essential aspect is knowledge conversion methods, such as SECI model. In this model it shows how tacit – which is difficult to articulate – and explicit – which is easy to articulate - knowledge is converted and how it leads to knowledge creation.
Socialisation
In SECI model Socialisation means the transfer of tacit-to-tacit, meaning communicating tacit knowledge between two groups. For instant new knowledge could be created by employees if they are interacting with the stakeholders of the
company, such as customers, shareholders or suppliers (All KM, 2015). Therefore, At Googleplex utmost important is given to knowledge sharing through different forms of socialisation.
One of the fact is that to allow more and more socialisation and to encourage sharing and interacting, considerably a very flat organisational structure is maintained by the company, end result is meet and interact more freely, contact with leaders more frequently and bring-out “leaders” and “experts” - The Nick Leeder, CEO of Google France (Dubois, 2013). Moreover she emphasized that, at Google “the power has shifted from ‘I know, thus I can’ to ‘I share, thus I can.’” Those statements clearly shows the importance and the role of Knowledge management.
One of the best way to socialisation is to engage in teamwork, thus spending more time together and more transfer of knowledge among employees. When we look at Google team-based projects are the key to their productivity and success, thousands of teams – ranging from 5 to 10 members usually – are being interactively working at Google on different topics and projects – which would or could be there future products or services. As a matter of fact daily more than 1000+ conferences are on Google+ among those teams and other employees, thus creating innovative solutions and ideas to current problems and challenges and building more knowledge-based products (Dubois, 2013). According to Eric Schmidt CEO of the Google Inc. for over 10 years and now an executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. at Google, team members are just few feet away, as for him he says “Sitting next to a knowledgeable employee was an incredibly effective educational experience “ (Dubois, 2013).
Another one of the most famous example would be Google’s 80/20 golden rule or policy, which means 20 percent of your time could be spend on any creative project that you want – thus all can share their ideas about a certain topic or those who have same interest could work as a team on a side project, on which anyone can contribute. This culture could contribute towards employee learning and acquiring knowledge in a short period of time, and in a many different meaningful ways. Among many such innovation of that 80/20 rule would be the Gmail, Google News and AdSense
(RecruiterBox, 2015). Nonetheless these innovations could be as example of externalisation when we apply the SECI model, because their team-based ideas are changed into a services, which everyone can benefit from.
Externalisation
The idea of Gmail, AdSense and Google News, generated through sharing of group knowledge and experiences and turning them into online-based services and programs is a perfect example of knowledge conversion from tacit to explicit.
The Externalisation is referred as turning or changing tacit knowledge to more simple forms which everyone can easily understand and make use of, such as turning them into formal procedures, model and into equipment, software.
Now that Google is shifting its 80/20 rule into Google [x] or Google X, the innovative, crazy and mind-blowing ideas or so-called “moonshot” projects are generated in the Google’s X lab and they are turning them into realities or potential products of the future. According to BCR.com, Moonshot projects include Project Loon (idea of providing internet using balloons in remote areas), Glass (the google glass), Wing (using drone technology for delivery), Self-driving car and many more exciting innovations. Before these projects were started these were just figments of collective imagination, either were just in people mind as a tacit knowledge and afterwards they were developed into procedures and plans inside Google’s secret lab.
When we look at the employees side for new google employees or so called “Nooglers”, the experts or the previously experiences programmers and executives have develop a web-based app called “Moma” which is a great example of externalisation, because it is a database about FAQs and walkthroughs written by former or current staffs to assist the Nooglers. In addition to that employees also used a tool called “Snippets” in which they record what they did, how what the progress of their project and works, which helps other employees to get an idea of other on-going projects and lend a helping hand. The google Idea data base is also a
place where lots of tacit is converted to explicit knowledge, where Google’s actual intellectual properties are stored or externalised.
One of the other area where Google converts tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is when we actually google. With every search, Google is making connections “associating key words with relevant contents”. Google algorithms which are design to weigh the search results and making connections and links to relevant web pages, uses search terms of ordinary googlers. Meaning tacit knowledge of customers are used to build explicit knowledge in the form of databases and knowledge graphs which makes Google search more accurate and relevant.
Moreover one of the other such knowledge base is the Google trends, which records most searched google topics, terms, people, and so on, and it creates meaning full results based on the searches. For example it shows which US presidential candidates people are searching most about, and what are the common search terms depending on the seasons of the year, and also searching trends, from different regions and all-over the globe. Hence, it’s about collection of data from googlers all around the globe about what they are searching, or making it meaningful by correlating it whit real world trends and phenomenon, from which further decisions and connections can be made.
Combination
Combination is all about connections, generating more meaningful, useful and productive results from different sources, from various knowledge-bases. Conversion of explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge through meetings, emails, and reports would be examples of combination, in SECI model (Abdullah, 2012).
At Google with every search you do, new combinations are made new connection are made, same goes for the results which are shown to your, previously or more precisely when google.com was registered in 1997, the google only shows list of links in the result page, you should actually visit or click a link in order to retrieve information you are searching for. But now Google, as well as Bing has transformed the ways in which search results are displayed, they use Knowledge Graphs, Knowledge Cards, and graphs and so on. Knowledge graphs are generated by combining data and information from different web pages, Google books and many other databases. According to Google Knowledge Cards contains “condensed factual information that is frequently sought by a user in association with a given query” - head of Google Search, Amit Singhal (Slawski, 2015). For instant knowledge card for John F. Kennedy includes his Assassination date or his famous quotes, because many people query about that. Most of the time none of the information or images showed on the Knowledge Cards are from google, it combines the information in a form of a card by collecting those information around the web from different websites and its articles. Images, twitter account and many other details are also shown on Knowledge Cards.
“Wherever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it,” Singhal said.
Whether it is acquiring companies or using databases under licenses Google will go for it, for instant google acquired a company called MetaWeb, which owns a free Collaborative knowledge base called ‘freebase”, which largely contributed to the Knowledge graphs and quality of their search results.
Agreeing to (Abdullah, 2012) we could say that one of the ways of creating new knowledge is re-contextualisation and re-categorising of the information. Google also uses the information and ranking of billions of webmasters by looking into their back links to other web pages and their collective rankings to decide which results are most relevant (Brockbank, 2015). By the help of this method it is easier for them to decide relevancy of the webpages and allowing them to place the best results at the top of the search results.
Moving away from the results and when we look inside the google work environment they uses verities of tools as I have explained previously, a productivity tool Moma uses different tools inside it such as Gmail and Google Calendar to schedule meetings and to show deadline of the projects and so on (DiDomenico, 2015). Combination of different Google Apps into one tool to increase their productivity, flexibility and knowledge management is one of the best example of combination of explicit to explicit.
Internalisation
The process of converting or changing explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge and creation of new knowledge as a result is defined as internalization in the SECI model, of knowledge creation (Abdullah, 2012). In the process of learning externalised knowledge and implementing or using the knowledge may contribute in employee learning, adding more knowledge to the spiral. An example could be learning from the rules and regulations of the organisation and practising it, while practising employee may learn how to improve or may experience a limitation, this process is the knowledge creating process.
New comers can always get help from experts, just using the ”Moma” they can verify whether they are online or not, learning from experts’ advice and implementing it in the work environment can also be seen as a form of internalisation. The learned knowledge will be used to write their own coding and building programs in their unique creative way.
At Google another great way where explicit knowledge is converted into explicit knowledge through its internship program. According Business insider every years only 1500 intern are selected among thousands of applicants. During the interview process google is well known for asking brainteasers. In practise, if the HR policy defined to use them in the interview process, and if HR follows that it would be learning from explicit knowledge and processing the procedures of interview would be converting those explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. Hence, Google encourages to used brainteasers, at one of the interview, interviews questions “how many cows are in Canada?". That would be learning from explicit knowledge and creating new knowledge as a result (Shontell, 2013).
After intern finished their internships Google allow some of them to be there employees, thus this would mean that, their learned knowledge through the program can be used in the working environment, so this would also counts as an internalisation process.
Importance of KM
The most important aspect of Google Inc. would be knowledge management – because then only it would serve its mission “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google, 2015). When we consider the Google, the nature of the business itself drives them to manage knowledge in order to be the leader of the market and to gain competitive edge. It is the goal and the main objective of the company to manage knowledge, if we imagine google without Knowledge management then there would not be anything left of Google.
As the company operates in the tech industries, the importance of managing the knowledge plays a vital part consider to other industries, because the tech industry is the most dynamic environment where, even a day without managing properly could mean loss in millions of dollars, losing of most valuable assets of the company, which is people. In addition to that, it would mean making decisions without proper understanding of the situations and opportunities.
The most important factor that adds value to the tech companies are continues innovative products and services, such as Gmail and AdSense. Without managing the process of learning, innovations would not be a culture of companies like Google. At google it’s always the idea of everyone, either collective deci8sion making based on data and information, so it is vital that people communicate and make use of the knowledge everyone has, including customers and other shareholders. For instant if customers are not giving reviews and feedbacks, there would not be any customer
oriented improvement in the products or services (Desai, 2015). So, the role of knowledge management at Google Inc. is unavoidable and invaluable.
Conclusion
When we research about the topic, it is evident that the overall knowledge management process is not being recorded in a proper manner. And we consider applying some parts of SECI model, such as internalisation, direct reference from the company it limited and inadequate. Nonetheless many Senior level staff of the Google Inc. often talks about the subjects related to knowledge management, such as Knowledge Workers, and managing of Information.
Theory of knowledge management could be applied to any company, however the implementation of it could be a difficult process, according to (KORTE, 2015), many companies overlook Google as management tool and avoidance of local knowledge-base has become a common issue. Fortunately if that is true it is false for Google. Agreeing to the point, Google’s marketing manager Arvind Desikan, says “we appear to have served the knowledge management needs of several large companies to date”.