Knowledge management

See also:

KM magazines

Vision paper

KM Vendors

Knowledge management is a high-fallutin' buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse has watered down KM's popularity as a category. To vendors, KM became "whatever I want to sell you," be it document-tracking or warehousing good ideas or building web pages or reinforcing innovation or focusing on intellectual capital.

Knowledge is like the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is there: it doesn't exist unless people interact with it. Nurturing innovation and rewarding the sharing of ideas fertilizes seedling ideas. Setting up processes to highlight what's worthy and weed out useless undergrowth help grow heathly trees.

While it may carry a different name in the future, knowledge management anchors one end of the eLearning continuum and is vital to improving organizational performance.

"Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody -- either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action." -- Peter F. Drucker in The New Realities (The same might be said of learning.)

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Come together

Tom Barron, drawing on the ideas of GartnerGroup's Clark Aldrich and others, presents an astute view of the impending merger of e-Learning and Knowledge Management in A Smarter Frankenstein, lead article in the August 2000 issue of Learning Circuits.

Take an eLearning course. Chunk it into discrete learning bites. Surround it with technology that assesses a learner's needs and delivers the appropriate learning nuggets. Add collaborative tools that allow learners to share information. What do you get? Something that looks a whole lot like knowledge management.

Just In Time	Embedded Help Performance Support EPSS Wizards	Knowledge Management Traditional KM Combined eLearning/KM
Just in Case	Classroom Replication Self-paced courseware Virtual classes	Simulations Skills-building sims Games
	Connvergent (Discrete-path)	Divergent (Infinite-path)

The training function is accustomed to limiting its scope -- offering a curriculum that provides grounds for assessment. KM is open-ended, encouraging participants to share whatever works without an intermediary to translate things into lessons. Oil and water? The accelerating pace of business is already obsoleting the authoring function -- there's not enough time for lengthy development cycles; intitutive authoring systems are replacing middleman authors by taking content directly from the expert's mouth.

An obstacle I've personally never overcome to my satisfaction is countering the hoarding of knowledge by those who believe knowledge is power, or are perhaps too self-motivated to contribute to the good of their organizations.

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What to Blogs have to do with it?

Weblogs (AKA Blogs) are important. If you're not familiar with Blogs, read Rebecca Blood's excellent Weblogs: A History and Perspective.

1. Blogs are a free authoring tool that enables anyone with a net connection to publish content on the web. The doors are open.

2. You cannot keep up with the raw flow of information being posted to the web without a lot of help. The Blogs of people you trust point the way to the good stuff. For example, I read Camworld because it has proven worthy of my time; I've grown to trust Cameron Barrett -- I know where he's coming from.

3. In time, organizations will encourage in-house Blogging.

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Knowledge Management is a case of the blind men and the elephant. “KM” refers to one or more of these activities:

• creating and populating a repository of in-house knowledge
• measuring the dollar-value of chunks of knowledge
• facilitating the transfer of knowledge
• creating a knowledge sharing environment
• building a corporate culture focused on innovation and knowledge creation

At a minimum, do these things:

Databases:

1. Corporate yellow pages
2. Best practices system that captures lessons learned
3. Competitive intelligence

Infrastructure:

1. Groupware
2. Empowered Chief Knowledge Officer

Culture:

1. Top-down belief
2. Spirit of sharing and collaboration
3. Experimentation encouraged

Tacit & Explicit Knowledge

Nonaka's Knowledge Creation Spiral

“In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. When markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products. These activities define the ‘knowledge-creating’ company, whose sole business is continuous innovation.” (source: Ikujiro Nonaka, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1991)

	Explicit Knowledge	Tacit Knowledge
	You can write it down. Easy to share.	It’s tough to explain. Tough to share.
	Left brain, pragmatic – learned. Think classroom.	Right brain, idealistic – internalized. Think watercooler.
Theory of organization =	Machine for processing information	Living organism with a purpose
Knowledge =	Formal, systematic, quantifiable	Know-how and ingrained mental models and perspectives. Subjective, hunches, intuitive, highly personal.
Metrics =	Quantifiable: increased efficiency, lower costs, improved ROI	Qualitative: increased effectiveness, embodies company vision, expresses management aspirations and strategic goals, builds organizational knowledge network.
Impact =	Increases immediate capabilities	Profoundly shapes how we perceive the world around us.
Communicated =	Via words, textbooks, CBT	Via figurative language and symbolism, metaphor, analogy, modeling.

Other sources

The Economics of Knowledge, Eric E. Vogt. "Knowledge is a perspective shared by a community which allows for some effective action. ...the economics of knowledge dictate that we think in terms of creating collection systems that allow for the instantaneous sharing of these new perspectives. Collection systems allow us to listen to the needs and concerns of customers. Collection systems allow us to tap into the global flow of creative ideas and fuel the imagination of our knowledge community."

Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). David Weinberger has the most level-headed approach to knowledge management you'll find anywhere. He's also a laugh riot. JOHO is one of my favorite reads on the Web.

Weinberger? He's a commentator on NPR, and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
"Jay of InternetTime.com, has put a link to JOHO on his site,
www.meta-time.com. We hereby declare www.meta-time.com
to be the new Finest Site on the Web."

Knowledge Management News, Brad Hoyt. Sporadic ever since Brad joined a start-up but worth the wait. Pointers, reflections, jobs, events.

University of Denver: Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

Karl Erik Sveiby's impressive "library" of on-line resources

ASTD on KM -- an overview of what's going on in the field

E&Y Center for Business Innovation -- a great resource

Scient sells KM as something that strengthens them and their customers

The Knowledge Management Paradox: How to Manage Your Most Strategic Asset, CPT

BRINT -- exhaustive and exhausting links and essays. More is more?

Thinking Business -- the document tracking end of KM

Five Basic Principles of the Mind

1. Minds are limited.
2. Minds hate confusion.
3. Minds are insecure.
4. Minds don't change.
5. Minds lose focus.

Jack Trout

In 25 years, knowledge will double every three months.What will that do for learning requirements?

Doug Engelbart

Meg Wheatley

“Information and knowledge are the thermonuclear competitive weapons of our time. Knowledge is more valuable and more powerful than natural resources, big factories, or fat bankrolls.”

Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital

Jack Welch of GE: “We soon discovered how essential it is for a multibusiness company to become an open, learning organization. The ultimate competitive advantage lies in an organization’s ability to learn and to rapidly transform that learning into action.”

And, in GE’s “boundaryless” learning culture, “The operative assumption is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action – fast.”

"If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more profitable."

Lew Platt

Leverage the Value-Hierarchy of Knowledge

Different skills produce different levels of impact.

Often, the value added is the information subtracted.

A hired hand is not a hired mind. Routine, low-skill work, even if it’s done manually, does not generate or emply human capital for the organization.  Unleashing the human capital already resident in the organization requires minimizing mindless tasks, meaningless paperwork, unproductive infights. The Taylorized workplace squandered human assets in such activities.

“Informate” = change the work to add more value to customers.

Outsourcing frees resources to continue developing high-return expertise.

Capitalize means providing opportunities for learning. People need to feel they’re “in the game,” and not “being kicked around by it.”

How to Capitalize on High-Value Knowledge

Structural capital – “company property” – builds on corporate yellow pages, knowledge maps, speedy transfer. Do enough and no more; many overinvest. HP and others find that “demand-driven” approach is more effective than “pushing” information into people’s emailboxes. Avoid overinvesting by making it okay not to know everything – leverage the expertise of specialists. When a manager brings in a problem, the experts teach her how to apply the lessons of a module to solve it.

Customer capital, the relationships of the company with its customers, is measured by market share, customer retention and defection, and profit per customer. This is the most valuable capital of all – it’s where the money is – but ironically, it’s also the least well managed. Tom Stewart has a wonderful line, “The customer today can call the tune because he knows the score.” The goal is to maintain an increasingly intimate relationship. Empowered customers deal directly with companies’ databases.

Ten Principles for Managing Intellectual Capital

1. Companies don’t own human and customer capital. Companies share the ownership of human assets with employees. They share ownership of customer capital with suppliers and customers. An adversarial relationship with employees destroys wealth.
2. To create human capital it can use, a company needs to foster teamwork, communities of practice, and other social forms of learning.
3. To manage and develop human capital, companies must unsentimentally recognize that some employees, however intelligent or talented they are, aren’t assets. Invest in proprietary and strategic knowledge workers; minimize all other costs.
4. Structural capital is most easy to control because companies own it, but customers are where the money comes from.
5. Structural capital serves two purposes: to amass stockpiles of knowledge that support the work customers value, and to speed the flow of that information inside the company. Just-in-time knowledge is more efficient that knowledge stored in the warehouse. 
6. Substitute information and knowledge for expensive physical and financial assets.
7. Knowledge work is custom work. Mass production does not yield high profits.
8. Analyze your value chain to see what information is most crucial. The knowledge work is generally downstream, close to the customers.
9. Focus on the flow of information, not the flow of materials. Information once supported the real business; now it is the real business.
10. Human, structural and customer capital work together.

Source: Thomas Stewart, Intellectual Capital