Effective Knowledge Management

Every individual and organization manages knowledge in one form or another. An expert mentoring a junior employee, two employees trading their experiences at the water cooler, an intranet repository of best practices, and a continuous learning program are all examples of knowledge management. The critical difference between knowledge management in disparate organizations is how effectively each expands knowledge creation and dissemination beyond a select few to everyone who needs it. It is not that most organizations do not practice knowledge management, but that they practice it in an individual and ad hoc manner, usually incidental to the organization’s core business goals and processes.

Knowledge management is a discipline whose implementation in each company will be as individual and unique as the company itself. The ingredients for effective knowledge management exist within every company today, but generally lack the structure and directed effort required to enable them to realize their full potential.

Although each company’s implementation will be unique, three fundamental elements must be addressed in any knowledge management program:

People and culture are the foundation of every knowledge management initiative, no matter how big or how small. A culture focused on creating and sharing knowledge, one which rewards contributors and provides them with incentives, is a prerequisite to effective knowledge management. Knowledge management initiatives must pay at least as much attention to deployment - promoting, training, encouraging and supporting - as they do to the actual development of the initiative itself.

Knowledge management committees and teams must focus on cooperation throughout the organization. Knowledge management is multi-disciplinary, and benefits from the involvement of subject matter experts, information management professionals, executives, managers and every day users, as well as dedicated knowledge management professionals.

We firmly believe that the human element is essential in successful knowledge management. While information technology offers the means to achieve previously unattainable economies of scale, technology alone cannot adequately transform knowledge artifacts into knowledge content.

To contribute to a knowledge-focused culture, business processes must support the entire knowledge lifecycle. These business processes must be the actual business processes where knowledge is created and consumed in the delivery of a product or service; these differ from “knowledge management processes” that are disconnected from and incidental to the work people do. Knowledge management initiatives must begin by examining core business processes and asking questions such as:

• What knowledge is needed?
• When is it needed?
• Why is some knowledge more valuable or useful than others?
• When should knowledge be captured?
• What is most important to capture?
• What are the incentives for and disincentives to capturing and sharing knowledge?

Effective knowledge management must always be grounded in the realities of business needs and priorities, and must be evaluated by how well it promotes the continual creation and dissemination of relevant knowledge.

Just as in information management, systems and technology are indispensable to achieving the economies of scale which allow proprietary knowledge to be fully leveraged. Systems and technology touch every part of the knowledge lifecycle:

• Effective information management and access to knowledge artifacts enables further knowledge creation. This is achieved not only by making these artifacts available, but by allowing different types of knowledge artifacts to be linked together in ways which were previously impossible or cost prohibitive.
• Automation and workflow improve the speed and quality of knowledge capture.
• Communication and collaboration tools allow real-time knowledge sharing, refinement and creation, as well as access to that knowledge which has not yet been expressed as knowledge content but is still in the heads of individuals.
• Access technologies such as search engines, taxonomies, databases and portals make knowledge content and artifacts available when they are needed. By integrating points of access into business processes, the right information can easily be found at the right time.

In looking at the systems and technology within an organization, it is important that knowledge management is not restricted to some strict and arbitrary definition of "knowledge." For various reasons, there is a tendency to draw boundaries between information management and knowledge management. But boundaries become barriers, and it is one of the goals of knowledge management to break down barriers. The more the existence of these boundaries is formalized, the more likely they are to impede both the creation and sharing of knowledge.