Box 3.1 Banking on Knowledge
The World Bank has been dispensing loans to developing countries
for over 50 years. In 1996, James Wolfensohn, then the new president,
announced that the World Bank would strive to become the “Knowledge
Bank”. As usual with such Olympian pronouncements, the bank’s staff
scrambled to figure out what the heck Wolfensohn meant, and the
skeptics argued that “this too shall pass”.
But it did not. Instead, a large variety of initiatives appeared that
penetrated almost every corner of the far-flung organization. Sure, there
were the usual knowledge repositories, benchmarking efforts with
other companies and consulting projects. But what the Bank has that
few other organizations can boast is integration with the organization’s
basic mission and processes. The Bank’s mission statement was modified
to read: “To help people help themselves and their environment
by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and
forging partnerships in the public and private sectors.” Its strategic plan
included a major section on knowledge management that defined the
concept and how it would be applied within the organization. By fiscal
2000 the Bank spent about $45 million, or 5 percent of operational
expenditures, on knowledge management. Every staff member was
expected to devote two weeks of time a year to knowledge creation,
sharing and learning. “Communities of practice”, or as the Bank quirkily
called them, “thematic groups,” were organized for the creation and
sharing of knowledge in key content domains, such as early childhood
development, school health and disaster relief. Presently, there are
about 100 such groups, and almost half of the Bank’s employees are
active members of at least one group.