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Abstract
Internationalization and Expansion is one of the most important objects for enterprises to try their best to operate a successful Knowledge Management (KM) system. Mergers and acquisition (M&A) are one of the fastest strategic options that companies choose for Internationalization. Service technology and knowledge sharing are the two crucial KM factors of the IT companies. Lenovo is a representative IT company that faces international competition by acquiring the division IBM PC. Lenovo’s KM strategy has some advantages but some disadvantages also exit.
This report mainly applies KM theories to analyze the current KM performances of Lenovo and to find the problems of Lenovo’s KM. This report aims to formulate a KM strategy for Lenovo to improve the efficiency of its KM, and the future performance of Lenovo’s KM strategy will be expected.
Contents
Abstract 1
Introduction 3
1. The SWOT Analysis of Current KM Situation of Lenovo 4
2. KM Strategy and Implementation 5
2.1 Lenovo Service Strategy 6
2.2 The Knowledge Sharing Strategy 6
2.2.1 Interactive Mode of Website Platform 6
2.2.2 Knowledge Sharing Culture 7
2.2.3 Knowledge Audit Mechanism 7
2.2.4 KM System Appraisal Mechanism 8
2.2.5 A Dynamic Knowledge Base 8
2.2.6 Support from All the Company Members 9
3 The Expected Changes of the Future KM Performance 9
Conclusion 10
References 11
Introduction
In the 21th Century the success of an enterprise more and more depend on the quality of knowledge it owned, it is always a challenge for an enterprise to use the knowledge of the enterprise to create competitive advantage and sustainable competitive advantage. As one of the lead enterprises of China’s IT industry, Lenovo Group’s road of internationalization faces lots of domestic and foreign competitors. Lenovo was built in1984 by the scientists who were from Chinese Academy of Sciences with a 200 thousand RMB investment. Today, Lenovo has become a large-scaled group company developing a diversified economy in the information industry. In 2005 Lenovo acquired the personal computing division of IBM for $ 1.25 billion making it a third biggest international PC manufacturer.
There is a high frequency of the employee turnover in IT industry and each person has a lot of knowledge and experience in their positions. If other new staff that have no related knowledge to do these jobs, they must start from scratch, and this will directly affects the enterprise’s performance. Therefore Lenovo emphasizes the importance of KM. In order to maintain the vitality of the enterprise, Lenovo officially started the KM project in the end of 2003, and Shenzhen LKSKM Blue Ling system developed based on IBM was introduced. As one of the most important PC manufactures in China, Lenovo has gained some achievements in KM, in 2011 Mr. Shen Yuzhu from the KM team of service technology center of Lenovo gained an honor of “Knowledge Management Figure” (Lenovo, 2011). However there are still a lot of problems of KM which restrain its development.
1. The SWOT Analysis of Current KM Situation of Lenovo
A SWOT analysis has been done by considering the current situation and current KM strategy of Lenovo. The following refines the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats after the SWOT analysis (Pickton and Wright, 1998).
Strengths
From the SWOT analysis it can be seen Lenovo has a high information technology as an IT enterprise. What’s more the acquisition of IBM PC brings Lenovo a new patent of Think Pad brand, and this patent makes Lenovo stronger in the technology area.
Weakness
As an IT company, Lenovo’s service is not good enough comparing with other global big IT industry so that it has a pressure to provide better service for consumers, to provide consumers with cheaper service and to faster deliver solution. It’s not difficult to use technology to build a KM platform, but it’s difficult to build a mechanism of sharing knowledge and a cultural atmosphere to share knowledge. A lot of Lenovo employees are not willing to share their knowledge which makes one more valuable with others. As mentioned above, Lenovo has acquired the personal computing division of IBM, and there are some employees from different countries so the intercultural KM becomes more difficult for Lenovo. And Lenovo has not built up a complete system of knowledge audit. There is not an efficiency system of KM appraisal.
Opportunities
There is large potential in executive sponsorship in Lenovo, and if the KM gains a lot of executive sponsorship it will develop fast. Because there are members from different counties and companies, the employees have various knowledge backgrounds and it will make contribution for the knowledge variety for KM of Lenovo. What’s more, sharing knowledge between different departments will bring the enterprise a new vitality.
Threats
Although Lenovo has become the third PC manufacture in the world, there is a large competition in this industry, and the competitors’ advantages of KM threat Lenovo. Furthermore, today’s IT industry has rapid information changes, if a company can’t respond quickly it will lose it competition advantages.
2. KM Strategy and Implementation
2.1 The Service Strategy
In fact, Lenovo service established a knowledge base management system as early as 2003 when the knowledge was only from a call center, service channels, and it has not formed a unified platform yet.
Lenovo should change each service divisions to build respective KM systems and integrate them into a KM platform of one system, at the same time, and it should support Lenovo call center, the repair stations of the whole country and the users visiting the website. Based on this Lenovo should launch a efficiency service system combining website, telephone call and service outlets together.
2.2 The Knowledge Sharing Strategy
The opportunities and strengths of Lenovo’s KM strategy can be applied to handle its weakness and threats. And some new methods of KM should be introduced for the improvement of Lenovo’s KM.
2.2.1 Interactive Mode of Website Platform
Wiki mode make a lot of people feel proud because of sharing knowledge, and the Baidu pattern and Wiki mode inspire Lenovo. In order to bring the KM platform into play, Lenovo should apply interactive mode to KM platform.
First of all, Lenovo should establish a set of effective process making service engineers submit knowledge documents and sharing problems solved for customers at any time. When several people provide multiple solutions facing a problem, the solution integrated solutions g of several people together will have more value.
Secondly, Lenovo should establish a set of incentive mechanism which gives material and spiritual incentive to people who make contribution to sharing and using knowledge according to the height of scores they achieved. For example, people scoring high can get some enviable title and these titles sometimes play a more important role than material incentives because everybody wants to be a leader in various areas. The number of knowledge people shared should be seen as one of the important indexes for repair engineers’ promotion.
At last, Lenovo should provide convenience for the staff in the application to make it easier to share their knowledge. For example, the website platform can be designed like that when the engineers solve the consumers’ problem they can only push one button on the webpage without other operations to share the solutions.
2.2.2 Knowledge Sharing Culture
Lenovo must establish the intercultural atmosphere of knowledge sharing. Lenovo should make a lot of effort on integration and of company culture. The company should encourage employees from different countries to make contribution of the company’s KM and to share their knowledge. Therefore it can cultivate sound knowledge environment by integration of the company culture. It should integrate both sides’ organizations and flows. And the company should make all the employees know the KM value to make sure every employee becomes willing to share knowledge. Lenovo should accelerate the diffusion of the innovative KM practice in the company by organizing some activities such as knowledge forum and knowledge cafe.#p#分页标题#e#
2.2.3 Knowledge Audit Mechanism
Lenovo must develop a mature knowledge audit mechanism. And the company’s knowledge policies and information should be studied to investigate its health situation. The KM audit system should investigate the knowledge that company needs and evaluate the current knowledge structure of the company so that the company will adjust its KM strategy at any time. The KM audit system of Lenovo should investigate the process of flowing and converting of knowledge and find the disadvantages and some rooms for improvements at any time. The ability of the company’s KM should be evaluated too.
2.2.4 KM System Appraisal Mechanism
A mechanism of KM system appraisal should be set up, and the mechanism of KM system appraisal will evaluate the number of knowledge that the employees have contributed to the KM system, and the number will be seen as one of the indexes of performance appraisal. A special department for the KM appraisal should be built. Furthermore, for the concrete project the KM appraisal practice can apply concrete business target as a guide, so that Lenovo can combine the enterprise’s business target with KM strategy and the application process of KM together, for example, in order to reach the company’s business target of sales improvement in a quarter, the sales staff will learn technology knowledge from the technicians to have a good performance when marketing products.
2.2.5 A Dynamic Knowledge Base
Lenovo should build a dynamic knowledge base to respond the rapid changes of information in IT industry. There should be a large input of manpower and material for the updating and maintenance of the database. In the one hand, Lenovo should encourage technology innovation, and it should pay more attention to research and development by explore the potential of the researchers. On the other hand, Lenovo should learn from other companies who have advanced technology, for example, Lenovo can learn from the advanced experience of IBM KM and integrate the knowledge of foreign employees with that of domestic employees, so that the knowledge base of Lenovo will be enlarged and the knowledge will become diversified.
2.2.6 Support from All the Company Members
Lenovo KM should gain more support from the executive sponsorship and all the members of the company. For example, when improving the efficiency of produce department, the new technology should be introduced, and the leader who is responsible for the project should not be a manager who comes from administration department, and he should be from a research and development department, so that the project can be implemented more quickly, because the leader knows a lot of knowledge and has lots of experience about the project.
3 The Expected Changes of the Future KM Performance
The answer accuracy of the intelligent robot gradually should increase. Lenovo will become the leader of the service area in the industry. An efficient management platform will bring Lenovo’s knowledge documents over the years accumulated more opportunities, and will also bring more value to repair engineers and users. Lenovo service KM platform will become a KM system facing call center and repair stations of the whole country and providing technical supports for its users. This system will be connected with a large number of hotlines and call agents, and the information will cover throughout all the service outlets, and it will support all the professional services engineers. It will not only provide strong intellectual supports for each internal user but also open for Lenovo users, and users can conveniently visit through Web enjoying a lot of pieces of quality documents. The platform will publish a large number of pieces of knowledge documents.
In the future, Lenovo will build a set of effective and practicable flows to encourage all knowledge documents submitted by service engineers and all questions and problems of consumers can be solved without delay at any time. An incentive system will be built and it will provide spiritual and material encouragement based on scoring and merit. And an organizational mechanism of Lenovo will ensure the KM strategy’s implementation.
The KM of Lenovo will attract more attention of the whole company, and all the foreign and domestic employees will realize the huge value of KM, and they will gain benefits from KM.
The knowledge base will become more diversified because of the knowledge sharing both from foreign employees and domestic employees. And with the improvement of the company’s KM ability, the dynamic knowledge base will be also built.
A mature KM system will be built, and it will contain some special departments that have clear divisions of labour, and a department for KM appraisal will be built, and the employees’ contribution for company’s KM base will be evaluated efficiently, and the employees can get rewards according to their performance of KM, and then the sharing culture will also be formed. Every staff will become more active to contribute knowledge.
Conclusion
This report analyzes the current situation of Lenovo’s KM and find out its disadvantages. Then this report provides some recommendations for its further improvement of KM performance. Lenovo should apply its strengths and opportunities to handle its weakness and threats. And it must pay more attentions to its knowledge sharing between employees from different countries. It is believed that in the future, Lenovo will form an advanced KM mechanism, and the company will get more benefits because of the mature KM system.
References
Lenovo (2011). Lenovo Service Gaining Honor again in 2011. Beijing: Lenovo News. Available from:
Pickton, D. W., & Wright, S. (1998). What’s SWOT in strategic analysis? Strategic Change, 7 (2), pp101-109.
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