SBM ITB: Knowledge Management Amid the Pandemic Situation

By Adi Permana

Editor Vera Citra Utami

BANDUNG, itb.ac.id—Knowledge management has become very important for businesses and organizations in facing the recent pandemic situation. Knowledge management can be defined as a method that can be used to identify, create, and distribute knowledge to fulfill certain goals. This was explained in the “Quo-Vadis in Knowledge Management Implementation: Becoming an Agile Organization” online webinar, which was held by the School of Business and Management (SBM) ITB on Saturday (24/10/2020).


“Knowledge management related to agile transformation is really needed in many organizations, especially at SBM due to the turbulent business landscape that we are facing right now,” Rea Azhari Nasution said during the opening of the webinar.

As the Deputy Dean of Human Resource and the Group Head of Business Strategy and Marketing Excellence, he also encouraged everyone to join this webinar since it can give the participants insights about knowledge management and its applications.
Achmad Ghazali, a lecturer from SBM-ITB, was the first speaker of the webinar and explained that knowledge management has been known since the 1990 from a book by Peter M. Senge.

“Knowledge management is as important as financial management or operations management in an enterprise” Achmad said.

During his session, Achmad also showed the results of a research from Deloitte Consulting Firm, which stated that knowledge management plays an important role on a company’s growth rate for the next 1 or 2 years. Therefore, managers must take advantage of knowledge management for the company’s innovation process. “Businesses will change with innovation and innovation itself will cease to exist without knowledge. Therefore, innovation and knowledge management are needed in an organization,” he added.

Serafin D. Talisayon then explained knowledge management implementation for creating an agile organization. For this topic, she also gave an example by explaining how teachers in Philippines can adapt to the current pandemic situation by creating online courses.

From the business perspective, Libertha Hutapea also explained how Tokopedia can become an agile organization. She explained that, in driving agile implementation at Tokopedia amid the pandemic situation, there are 4 key factors that need to be considered. The key factors are culture, organization and collaboration, leadership, and infrastructures such as technology.

“In becoming an agile organization, our company culture along with organization factor and the way we collaborate sets us apart from other platforms. It is also important to note that leadership and technology, which transforms the way we work, plays an important role in ensuring agile transformation in organizations,” Libertha said.

At the end of the webinar, Prof. Dr. Ir. Jann Hidajat Tjakraatmadja M.Eng., concluded that there are many different concepts of knowledge management. However, these different concepts would eventually result in agility. He also added that there are different types of knowledge management concept told by the speakers, such as Knowledge Management 3.0 by Achmad Ghazali, application of Knowledge Management 3.0 by Serafin D. Talisayon, and Knowledge Management 4.0 by Libertha Hutapea.

Reporter : Deo Fernando
Translator : Verdyllan Nurendra Agusta