PhD research by Dr. Alina Pukhovskaya

Most of non-profit organizations (NPOs) including collaborations are searching for the ways of increasing their professionalization and efficiency. Introduction of knowledge management (KM) practices can help to achieve constant improvement that non-profits aim.

Knowledge management (KM) is systematic coordination of people, technology, and processes through creating, sharing, and applying knowledge as well as through adding the valuable lessons learned and best practices into corporate memory in order to support on-going organizational learning.

Organizational efficiency in non-profit organizations directly results from the efficiency of human resources and application of intellectual capital.

NPOs face some typical problems related to human resources that KM could help to address.

One of the main issues in NPOs is the instability of knowledge caused by turnover of personnel. The high rotation of employees, board members and volunteers results in the loss of organizational memory. If the issue of knowledge retention is not addressed on time, the NPO faces a constant risk of loosing its competitive advantage.

Other common problems are:

• Reinvention of existing solutions (“reinvention of the wheel”)

• Low accessibility of data and information

• Lack of analysis of training needs

• Inefficient communication between operations and board

• Accumulation of administrative paper documents

• Deficiency of record of best practices

Nowadays non-profit organizations are considered being knowledge-intensive organizations. This means that the major part of the work is of an intellectual nature and the knowledge has a greater importance than other inputs, such as labour or capital. NPOs need to know how to create and share their knowledge in order to be transparent and operationally efficient.

Research shows that organizations benefit from knowledge exchange not only within, but also across organizations through inter-organizational knowledge management (IKM). IKM is a network-focused knowledge management, which addresses all the stages of knowledge management process between organizations. Consequently, knowledge is a critical strategic resource not only in organizations internally, but also in inter-organizational collaborations.

Strengthening inter-organizational knowledge management (IKM) practices is one of the ways of increasing professionalization and efficiency of non-profit networks.

Consult the IMPLEMENTATION GUIDELINE for step-by-step advice on how to implement inter-organizational knowledge management in non-profit collaborations.