Knowledge Management Practices And Service Delivery At Oxfam International, Kenya

ABSTRACT

For several organizations, periods of rapid technological changes are also periods of incessant struggles with maintain a high performance. Obviously, knowledge is slowly becoming the key factor in production after labor, land as well as capital. Knowledge management (KM) has been considered over and over by every organization. In a broad dimension, it has been recognized that knowledge is a significant component of strategic organization in ensuring that innovation is enhance and that organizational performance is consequently improved. The main objective of the study is to determine the effect of knowledge management practices on service delivery at Oxfam international, Kenya. The study variables include knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, knowledge application and knowledge storage. The study focused on the effect of knowledge management practices on service delivery at Oxfam international, Kenya. The study was anchored on 3 theories: The Resource-Based theory, the Adaptive Saturation theory as well as the organizational Conversion theory. The study used descriptive statistics method carrying out this research. This research design describes data and the features relating to a population under study and hence it was ideal in this study because it was easier to describe the influence of knowledge management on the organizational performance. The target population was therefore 65 staff of Oxfam international headquarters. The collected data was analysed using descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, frequency distribution as well as percentages. Managers of Oxfam farms and NGOS in Kenya benefit widely from the study, as it helps them to assess the knowledge management and put the best measures in place so as to ensure that NGOS is enhanced and improved thus increasing on productivity and better services to clients. Government benefits widely from this study. It s important for growth in terms of revenue that government organizations remain profitable because this is where the government earns its revenue via taxes and through knowledge management this goal will be easily met. NGOs regulators such as NGOs regulation authority- NGOs Co-ordination Board greatly benefit from the study because they are responsible in ensuring that the NGOs Kenya operate within the law and they offer quality service which are fair to all communities thus it benefits the regulator in the sense that they are able to manage knowledge in all aspect and ensure quality of service is offered. The study concluded that knowledge management practices had a significant and to a great extent affected the service delivery at Oxfam International in Kenya. The study concluded that the organization embraced knowledge sharing through sharing lessons, publicizing the lessons, cooperation and exchange of experience, valuing lessons and awarding and recognizing lessons learned. It was concluded that knowledge application was significantly employed by the international organization through knowledge conversion, training, seamless use of available knowledge by staff, integration of modern IT, KM strategy use and support from staff. It was further concluded that the organization employed knowledge storage to a great extent through documentation, record keeping, classifying information and training on use of structured format for documentation. The study recommends that the management of the INGO should invest more in modern technology, knowledge application, storage and dissemination. The organization needs to improve the capacity of its human resource to enhance their ability to learn, share, apply, store and disseminate knowledge. The study recommends that the organization should have an improved system for knowledge storage to avoid plagiarism and loss of copyright.