Worker incentives to learn in gatekeeper systems: lessons for the implementation of knowledge management systems

Behind most KM initiatives is the desire to make knowledge possessed by some employees of a firm more widely available to other employees of the film. Such a diffusion of knowledge can lead to the spread of useful skills and concepts for repeated application throughout the firm and can increases the likelihood of innovation. The assimilation of knowledge requires its application and if complex requires the employee´s commitment to developing their experience with the new skills and engaging in a process of learning. To the degree that a worker cannot immediately successfully apply the knowledge drawn from the KMS successfully, they are making a ´long-term´ investment in the development of their own human capital by using the KMS. This implies that the usefulness to the firm of a KMS will be dependent upon the incentives provided to employees to invest in their own human capital. In this paper we develop a model of the role a KMS can play within an organization and the decisions impacting learning made by employees that would draw upon the KMS to develop their own human capital. We build a conceptual model around the learning behavior of gatekeeper workers with general knowledge who control the flow of work to ´specialists´ who have a more specialized body of knowledge. We then, as an example, formulate a mathematical model of the patient referral process in a managed care organization (MCO) in which primary care physicians (PCPs) serve as gatekeepers to specialists. Using this example from the healthcare industry we demonstrate how a firm must adjust incentives to take into account decisions about learning done by individual employees.