Knowledge Management in Action ( Case Study from Agate Studio)

Today, in my Knowledge management class ( Extension Program, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia), I bring a guest lecturer who implementing KM in their company. It is important to bring practitioner, because there are many assumptions that KM is  ‘just’ s concept that  hard to do, therefore KM has not been widely adopted in the company. Our guest lecturer is Arief  Widhiyasa, CEO of Agate Studio. In a brief profile of the company: Agate Studio is a game development company that was founded in 2009 with a current staff of about 80 people that spread across 3 cities : Bandung, Jakarta and Yogyakarta. Several Game Applications that they have made were Football Saga, Flames, Potret Hantu, shopping paradise, sexy witch, etc. Some of the games, Agate received several achievements such as winners of the Image cup, INAICTA, indigo, and a variety of national and international awards.

Why use a case study in game industry as a best practice, because this industry is an industry full of innovation, creativity, teamwork, and also spirit of  continuous learning. From presentation and class discussions, some ideas and lesson lesson related to the implementation of KM are:

1. The founders of Agate understand that they must be come a learing company. Although in the beginning they were composed of student but the learning spirit made the company continues to grow. They have been Searching all the information about gaming industry through experts, communities, books, search engines, and various sources. Now, sprit of learning has become a live style for all staff in Agate.
2. Establishing a culture of sharing knowledge begins from the leaders first. Simple thing to do is regularly held internal ‘Idea” competition. Staff who has a brilliant idea will get reward from company and their idea will be as candidate for next project.
3. How to get the staff  who have one dream, one mission, and one value ? The key is in the rekruitmen system. The HR team do filter by mapping a person’s personality according to the adaptation level position and their job description.

From the perspective of KM solutions, Agate is building the KM fundamental in form of corporate culture. The outcome of KM fundamental will be support KM process that facilitate the process of knowledge discovery, knowledge capture, knowledge sharing and application