What does it mean to practice Knowledge Management?
What is it that people actually do when they say they practice Knowledge Management? And why? They generally have two objectives. First they nurture the creation of new knowledge in order to speed up innovation and gain a competitive advantage. Second, by sharing existing knowledge they try to increase efficiency, i.e. prevent the wheel from being invented twice.
Christian van ‘t Hof further discussed three main activities related to the practice of knowledge management to achieve the two objectives mentioned earlier, namely:
- Cultivating the corporate repository (intranet, wiki, etc.)
- Connecting Experts through Yellow Pages (knowledge mapping)
- Building communities of practice
Yup, that’s it.
Dave Snowden’s Knowledge Management Principles
Here are the seven Knowledge Management Principles according to Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge:
- Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.
- We only know what we know when we need to know it.
- In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
- Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents.
- Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
- The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
- We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.
Note about point 3: In this podcast, Snowden mentioned that people will share if other people really need it, but if we asked them to share their knowledge and codify them into a database on the basis that other people may need it, chances are people are not going to do it.
Source: Cognitive Edge
Knowledge Management and Six Sigma
KM arena can learn from Six Sigma the value of a rigorous project approach, how to use analytical and quality tools, and the benefits of maintaining a full-time staff on key projects and communities. Baker said, “Our experts are members of the business and functional groups. So, they don’t go away. They’re there. They help the teams that operate day-to-day, and they work out the plan to continue the improvements. But they don’t disappear; they are still in the business unit or in the function.” Also, Six Sigma is a model for measurement and results focus. Gain the fast financial return on easier projects in order to fund long-term capacity building. “The Six Sigma people don’t need to hear this, but the KM people do – that you need to focus on a key business issue to get quick results, because as Bill said, you want to leverage KM as a long-term capability of the organization,” O’Dell said. “But to do that, you’ve got to prove its value.”
Source: Knowledge Management and Six Sigma: Exploring the Potential of Two Powerful Disciplines
Organizational Storytelling
Organizational storytelling aims to make organizations aware of the stories that exist within their walls-and then to use those stories in pursuit of organizational goals. One of the founders of the movement is Steve Denning, an Australian who began his career as lawyer in Sydney and later became a midlevel executive at the World Bank. “I was a left brain person,” he says. “Big organizations love that kind of person.”
Then one day, in a World Bank shake-up, he was booted from a job he loved and banised to the organizational equivalent of Siberia: a department known as “knowledge management,” corporate jargon for how a company organizes its vast reserves of information and experience. Denning became the department’s chief. And-grudgingly at first-he underwent a transformation. (Sounds like a hero’s journey, doesn’t it?) As he sought to understand what the World Bank knew-that is, what knowledge required management-Denning discovered that he learned more from trading stories in the cafetaria that he did from reading the bank’s official documents and reports. An organization’s knowledge, he realized, is contained in its stories. And that meant that if he was really going to be the top knowledge hocho at the bank, he had to go well beyond the L-directed lawyer exceutive approach he’d learned in the first twenty-five years of his career. So he made the World Bank a leader in knowledge management by making it a pioneer in using stories to contain and convey knowledge.
Source: A whole new mind/ by Daniel H. Pink (p. 105-106)
Library System
I have been looking for a simple library management system recently.
Some popular proprietary system: by SirsiDynix (Dynix, Horizon, Symphony, Unicorn) and by Innovative Interfaces (Millenium).
Some popular Open Source Integrated Library System: Koha and Evergreen.
One library management system (for a small one) and if you don’t need it to work as an OPAC/Online Public Access Catalogue is BookDB2. It’s a stand-alone program which is suitable for your home library. You can also import from your LibraryThing. And it’s a free software.
Steps in developing taxonomy
What are the steps involved in developing taxonomy for knowledge management?
- Determine requirements: define scope, purpose, target audience, business objectives
- Identify concepts: perform content inventory, do user interviews (i.e. knowledge audit)
- Develop draft taxonomy: try not to have more than 10 large subjects
- Review with users and subject matters experts: Conduct usability studies
- Refine taxonomy: review the feedback from the usability studies at step 4
- Apply taxonomy to content: taxonomies can be used as a navigation scheme and also applied against documents, users need to be trained to apply the taxonomy properly (manuals need to be provided for users)
- Manage and maintain taxonomy: assign a team responsible for management, maintenance, and further development of the taxonomy.
