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Knowledge Management Definition and Solutions - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership on 2009-11-30
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What is knowledge management (KM)?
Unfortunately, there's no universal definition of knowledge management (KM), just as there's no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it's best to think of KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets.
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Web Analytics, SEO, and Site Usability - ClickZ on 2009-11-30
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Pogo-Sticking and the Search Experience
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Strategy as if Knowledge Mattered | Fast Company on 2009-11-30
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1. Knowledge-based strategies begin with strategy, not knowledge. The new form of intellectual capital is meaningless without the old-fashioned objectives of serving customers and beating competitors.
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Knowledge-based strategies begin with strategy, not knowledge. The new form of intellectual capital is meaningless without the old-fashioned objectives of serving customers and beating competitors.
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2. Knowledge-based strategies aren't strategies unless you can link them to traditional measures of performance.
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the hard truth is that if knowledge can't be connected to measurable improvements in performance --including improvements on the bottom line -- then the knowledge revolution will be short-lived, and deservedly so.
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The point of a knowledge-based strategy is not to save the world; it's to make money. It's for hard heads.
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3. Executing a knowledge-based strategy is not about managing knowledge; it's about nurturing people with knowledge.
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The trick is to balance the "hard" with the "soft" -- tapping the knowledge locked in people's experience.
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What good is a database if it doesn't include what the employees really know?
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What prompts the need to capture Best Practices? « Its all about KM on 2009-11-30
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There are a number of reasons that spur an organization to institutionalize a best practices capturing mechanism. Here we discuss five of the most prevalent reasons.
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In an effort to replicate this process improvement across all other units considerable effort is put into identifying these process changes and trying to replicate them, this is one of the main causes for companies to implement a best practices capturing methodology.
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corporate support teams that were initially responsible for inventing, discovering and transferring best practices. Now most of the individual business units are expected to handle this load.
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Internal benchmarking allows companies to identify hidden potential
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Necessary Art of Persuasion - Harvard Business Publishing on 2009-11-29
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To that end, persuasion consists of these essential elements: establishing credibility, framing to find common ground, providing vivid evidence, and connecting emotionally
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Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, on 2009-11-29
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Knowledge Management can be thought
of as the deliberate design of processes, tools, structures, etc. with the
intent to increase, renew, share, or improve the use of knowledge represented
in any of the three elements [Structural, Human and Social] of intellectual
capital.
(Seemann et
al, 1999)
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In this section, we survey various
knowledge management strategies that have been proposed.
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One of the most widely accepted and
widely quoted approaches to classifying knowledge from a KM perspective is the
“knowledge matrix” of Nonaka & Takeuchi. This matrix classifies knowledge
as either explicit or tacit, and either individual or collective.
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In Boisot's scheme, knowledge assets
can be located within a three dimensional space defined by axes from
"uncodified" to "codified", from "concrete" to
"abstract" and from "undiffused" to "diffused".
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knowledge assets
that are highly abstract, highly codified and undiffused, are seen to be the
most ordered and so have the lowest rate of entropy production and therefore
the maximum potential for performing value-adding work.
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Knowledge assets at the
opposite extreme of the I-Space (least abstract, least codified and most
diffused) have the highest level of entropy production and, therefore, have the
least potential for performing useful value-adding work.
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Strategy as if Knowledge Mattered | Page 2 | Fast Company on 2009-11-29
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4. Organizations leverage knowledge through networks of people who collaborate -- not through networks of technology that interconnect.
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5. People networks leverage knowledge through organizational "pull" rather than centralized information "push."
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"Just in time" learning, which takes place in the moment of actual need, not only creates the most value; it also makes the biggest impression on the learner and the organization.
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Ultimately, learning is up to each individual -- it's not something that management can require.
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The essence of successful knowledge-based strategies is a company's capacity to raise the aspirations of each employee.
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Rob Cross on 2009-11-29
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Organizational network analysis (ONA) can provide an x-ray into the inner workings of an organization --- a powerful means of making invisible patterns of information flow and collaboration in strategically important groups visible.
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the ONA identified mid-level managers that were critical in terms of information flow within the group.
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Second, the ONA helped to identify highly peripheral people that essentially represented untapped expertise and underutilized resources for the group.
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Third, the ONA also demonstrated the extent to which the production division (the sub-group on the top of the diagram) had become separated from the overall network.
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Moreover, connections in marketing and finance are sparse, while the manufacturing subgroup is tightly knit.
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That can be good or bad. It may be that the manufacturing people have developed communication practices that the team as a whole could use to its benefit. It's also possible that those people rely on one another so heavily that they are preventing integration. Again, only follow-up interviews can reveal which scenario is true.
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CoP: Best Practices on 2009-11-29
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By participating in such a communal memory, they can do the job without having to remember everything themselves.
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Members of a community are informally bound by what they do together–from engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problems
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When communities of practice cut across business units, they can develop strategic perspectives that transcend the fragmentation of product lines.
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- A community of practice is different from a business or functional unit in that it defines itself in the doing, as members develop among themselves their own understanding of what their practice is about. This living process results in a much richer definition than a mere institutional charter. As a consequence, the boundaries of a community of practice are more flexible than those of an organizational unit. The membership involves whoever participates in and contributes to the practice. People can participate in different ways and to different degrees. This permeable periphery creates many opportunities for learning, as outsiders and newcomers learn the practice in concrete terms, and core members gain new insights from contacts with less-engaged participants.
- A community of practice is different from a team in that the shared learning and interest of its members are what keep it together. It is defined by knowledge rather than by task, and exists because participation has value to its members. A community of practice's life cycle is determined by the value it provides to its members, not by an institutional schedule. It does not appear the minute a project is started and does not disappear with the end of a task. It takes a while to come into being and may live long after a project is completed or an official team has disbanded.
- A community of practice is different from a network in the sense that it is "about" something; it is not just a set of relationships. It has an identity as a community, and thus shapes the identities of its members. A community of practice exists because it produces a shared practice as members engage in a collective process of learning.
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Relationships to Official Organization
Relationship |
Definition |
Challenges typical of the relationship |
Unrecognized |
Invisible to the organization and sometimes even to members themselves |
Lack of reflexivity, awareness of value and of limitation |
Bootlegged |
Only visible informally to a circle of people in the know |
Getting resources, having an impact, keeping hidden |
Legitimized |
Officially sanctioned as a valuable entity |
Scrutiny, over-management, new demands |
Strategic |
Widely recognized as central to the organization's success |
Short-term pressures, blindness of success, smugness, elitism, exclusion |
Transformative |
Capable of redefining its environment and the direction of the organization |
Relating to the rest of the organization, acceptance, managing boundaries |
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they know what is relevant to communicate and how to present information in useful ways
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They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
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They can retain knowledge in "living" ways
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They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge
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This collaborative inquiry makes membership valuable, because people invest their professional identities in being part of a dynamic, forward-looking community.
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They provide homes for identities.
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Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations.
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Communities of practice structure an organization's learning potential in two ways: through the knowledge they develop at their core and through interactions at their boundaries.
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while the core is the center of expertise, radically new insights often arise at the boundary between communities.
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Legitimizing participation. Organizations can support communities of practice by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring is acknowledged.
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Negotiating their strategic context. In what Richard McDermott calls "double-knit organizations," people work in teams for projects but belong to longer-lived communities of practice for maintaining their expertise.
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Organizations must therefore develop a clear sense of how knowledge is linked to business strategies and use this understanding to help communities of practice articulate their strategic value.
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Being attuned to real practices. To be successful, organizations must leverage existing practices.
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Fine-tuning the organization.
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Because communities of practice must be self-organizing to learn effectively and because participation must be intrinsically self-sustaining, it is tricky to use reward systems as a way to manipulate behavior or micro-manage the community. But organizations shouldn't ignore the issue of reward and recognition altogether; rather, they need to adapt reward systems to support participation in learning communities, for instance, by including community activities and leadership in performance review discussions. Managers also need to make sure that existing compensation systems do not inadvertently penalize the work involved in building communities.
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They do not require much management, but they can use leadership. They self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational environment. The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without overwhelming them with organizational meddling.
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What's Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge? - HBS Working Knowledge on 2009-11-28
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