Saturday, May 10, 2008

Knowledge management:

“hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now” Steven Wright

The concept of knowledge management is defined as “a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge.” Currently in your restaurant everyone should understand their function. If an employee vacated that position for whatever reason would you be able to replicate their function. All businesses grapple with this issue. Knowledge management addresses this issue by codifying as much as possible everyone’s job. Every function can be broken down into component parts and those parts can further be reduced to their simplest level. You do not need to drill down to a Higgs Boson particle however as much as possible reduce the task, write it down and have it available for easy retrieval.


The process is laborious, redundant and very time consuming. There are several advantages for instituting this process: 1) as you review processes, you discover a better more productive way, 2) the learning curve for new employees is substantially reduced, 3) the Return On Investment for instituting this process is phenomenal.