Corporate Knowledge as a Sting for Inclusive Facility Management Roundtable Discussion in Nigeria


The emergence of corporate knowledge sharing platforms is playing a significant role in eliminating barriers to sustainable knowledge management in businesses and industries across the world. As the world’s interest in facility management increases every day due to the need to have functional and efficient facilities at the workplace and home, corporate knowledge has become a strategic tool in advancing specifics of the industry, solutions and products.
CK as a tool enables an employee to share tacit and explicit knowledge with another employee for their company to have advantages over others in the same industry.  As part of its contribution to advance facility management industry in Nigeria, Alpha Mead Facilities and Maintenance initiated the Nigerian Facilities Management Roundtable, an annual business-to-business forum to commemorate World Facilities Management Day, in 2012.  
By May 2019, Alpha Mead Facilities and Maintenance and other players in the industry will converge to deliberate on issues affecting the industry. As the companies and professionals prepare for the event, Infoprations believes that appropriation of CK will lead to the inclusive FM Roundtable event. 
Our model indicates that companies in the industry need to exploit corporate knowledge tool beyond organisational level. Extending the tool to the industry will enable organisers have robust themes for the event. It is imperative that company’s individual knowledge gathered while dealing with clients across the industry segments is exploited for the themes formulation and invitation of the participants.
The focus areas must be driven by the specific issues encountered by each company in the last one year. The Nigerian facility management industry is in need of local insights into the industry’s issues rather than localising international’s theme.
This is hinged on the fact that public interest in facility management as a business is at low ebb since last year’s event. People’s interest in facility management as a discipline is better than facility management as a business, where companies and people in agriculture, mining and quarrying, manufacturing, electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply, water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation, construction, trade, accommodation and food services, transportation and storage, information and communication, arts, entertainment and recreation, financial and insurance, professional, technical and scientific services, administrative and support services, public administration, education, human health and social services, and other services sectors are expected to have significant interest in the industry.
How to apply CK

Beyond the identification of knowledge, attributing the knowledge and contextualising the knowledge within corporate systems, our model reveals that FM companies need to identify significant issues they encountered while dealing with B2B, B2C and B2G customer segments after the last year’s event to the present.
The issues should be aggregated and important themes identified. This should be done within the attribution component of the tool. While exploring the attribution component, companies need to pool their knowledge together based on the specific solutions and products offered.
For instance, a company that possesses capabilities and competencies in delivering power solutions should be allowed to produce at least five themes from the issues it had with clients. This approached should be taken towards identification of important themes for other hard solutions, soft and supply solutions in the industry.
The last component is contextualism. The identified themes should be linked with the sectors stated earlier. The sector with the highest number of themes should be prioritised in terms of final theme selection, and professionals and regulators who will be invited to the event.

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