Wednesday 13 November 2013


KM in Pensions and Investments - an interesting survey


Personal finance Here is an interesting survey by the pensions and investments research centre on KM in the P&I world.

The conclusion of the survey is that Knowledge Management is underutilised by money managers - something I would agree with, as it would seem that the financial sector is still behind the curve where KM is concerned.

Here are some of the highlights of the survey.
  • KM is a familiar concept to "38"% of those surveyed and "very familiar" to 32%.
  • 74% believe that the collective knowledge of investment teams is more critical than the individual knowledge of a star performer
  • 74% believe that integrating the star performers' knowledge into the collective knowledge would help rather than harm the star performer
  • The biggest hurdles to KM in the Pensions and Investment world are
  • Compensation structures (37%)
  • Portfolio managers protect their knowledge (36%)
  • "You can't codify investment knowledge" (18%)
  • "All knowledge is already accessible" (5%)
  • Knowledge is so specialised that it doesn't make sense to share (3%)
  • 58% believed that KPIs should and could be set for KM
  • The preferred incentives were
  • Bonuses linked to transferring tacit knowledge to the organisation (37%)
  • Bonuses linked to transferring tacit knowledge between individuals (35%)
  • Bonuses linked to transferring tacit knowledge between individuals (26%)
  • Bonuses linked to transferring tacit knowledge to the organisation (23%)
  • Incentives don't work for tacit knowledge transfer (20%)
And here is perhaps the key quote in the article, from Eduard van Gelderen, chief investment officer of capital markets investments at APG Asset Management, Amsterdam, who was involved in the drafting and analysis of the P&I/Oxford survey.
“On the one hand, asset managers claim that knowledge management is very important. On the other hand, if you really look at the reality, a coherent knowledge management system is actually extremely limited (in asset management). Many struggle to put it into practice consistently across the company.”
But the first step is there - the recognition of the importance.

Once that step is made, all else will follow.


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