rrobert_ah 's List: KM in Practice

• By participating in such a communal memory, they can do the job without having to remember everything themselves.
• 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.
• • 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.

• 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
• They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
• they know what is relevant to communicate and how to present information in useful ways
• They can retain knowledge in "living" ways
• They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge
• This collaborative inquiry makes membership valuable, because people invest their professional identities in being part of a dynamic, forward-looking community.
• They provide homes for identities.
• Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations.
• 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.
• while the core is the center of expertise, radically new insights often arise at the boundary between communities.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Being attuned to real practices. To be successful, organizations must leverage existing practices.
• Fine-tuning the organization.
• 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.
• Providing support.
• 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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• Our preliminary work indicates that some people have tacit skills that can be codified and taught to others. Until managers can make that happen, though, we advise them to seek out those in their organizations who consistently do a good job applying newly gained knowledge
• watch how these individuals work, and look for common techniques.

• For those who manage well, there is a bright and prosperous future. For   those who are managed, the future—certainly the income prospects—are not so   bright.
• Right now, you may not in fact be managing people. You are, however,   managing your time, managing content, and perhaps managing other resources.
• As a knowledge manager, you should look to your manager for the broad   strategic direction and you should look to yourself for the ability to   manage your day. You must develop this crucial skill because, if you’re   waiting to be told what to do, then your job is in serious danger of being   automated or outsourced.

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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.

   
• 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.
• 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.
• Internal benchmarking allows companies to identify hidden potential

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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

• 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)
• In this section, we survey various knowledge management strategies that have been proposed.
• 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.
• 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".
• 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.
• 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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• 4. Organizations leverage knowledge through networks of people who collaborate -- not through networks of technology that interconnect.
• 5. People networks leverage knowledge through organizational "pull" rather than centralized information "push."
• "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.
• Ultimately, learning is up to each individual -- it's not something that management can require.
• The essence of successful knowledge-based strategies is a company's capacity to raise the aspirations of each employee.

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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.
• 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.
• 2. Knowledge-based strategies aren't strategies unless you can link them to traditional measures of performance.
• 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.
• The point of a knowledge-based strategy is not to save the world; it's to make money. It's for hard heads.
• 3. Executing a knowledge-based strategy is not about managing knowledge; it's about nurturing people with knowledge.
• The trick is to balance the "hard" with the "soft" -- tapping the knowledge locked in people's experience.
• What good is a database if it doesn't include what the employees really know?

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