Scientometrics, Knowledge Management, and Social Network Analysis

The best way to coax ideas is to be systematic. Imagine that what follows is like a bunch of keys. Work through them one by one. Some may not be helpful but others may unlock entrepreneurial potential.

1. Reinvent the Familiar
2. Improve the Familiar
3. Reduce Loss
4. Solve Problems
5. Take What Nobody Wants
6. Make the Expensive Cheap
7. Get the Price Right
8. Add Value
9. Invent A Name
10. The Master Key (i.e. Social Acceptance)

Source: How to be a Successful Entrepreneur

Following are some extract for Marina du Plessis article titled “Drivers of Knowledge Management in the Corporate Environment”

….the value that knowledge management adds lies in:

• Creating collaboration forums where knowledge can be created and shared, that can act as a catalyst for decisions and actions to be taken based on knowledge shared or created in these forums, in order to maximise opportunities.
• Retaining knowledge created and shared through collaboration forums and making it available for reuse later in a different context.
• Mining of internal business information and external information (including customer oriented information), turning it into knowledge through the use of knowledge management tools, e.g. business intelligence, whereby trends relating to the business and its external environment can be identified and acted upon.
• Increasing individual, team and organisational efficiency through the use of collaboration forums.
• Centralising access to knowledge, thus providing one view of a particular subject or area, e.g. customer knowledge.

Based on the above, the overarching objective of knowledge management according to the
author is thus to create, share, harvest and leverage knowledge in order to:

• Initiate action based on knowledge.
• Support business strategy implementation and realisation of business objectives.
• Create an intelligent enterprise through.
  1. Retention of corporate and individual knowledge.
  2. More accurate prediction of important opportunities.
  3. Growth of the corporate knowledge base.

• Increase competitive advantage.
• Create an innovative culture and environment.
• Entrench collaboration as a work practice.
• Improve work efficiency, i.e. increased organisational capacity through:
  1. Improved decision making.
  2. Improved customer service.
  3. Improved solution of business problems.
  4. Increased productivity.
  5. Improved leveraging of corporate and individual knowledge.

Full article here.

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:

1. Cultivating the corporate repository (intranet, wiki, etc.)
2. Connecting Experts through Yellow Pages (knowledge mapping)
3. Building communities of practice

Yup, that’s it.

Source: The Practice of Managing Knowledge

Here are the seven Knowledge Management Principles according to Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
4. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents.
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
7. 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

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 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)

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.

I’ve seen this diagram before, but was reminded again of it through digg today. I wonder what role knowledge management plays in the network of companies shown below.

Source: zoharma

What are the steps involved in developing taxonomy for knowledge management?

1. Determine requirements: define scope, purpose, target audience, business objectives
2. Identify concepts: perform content inventory, do user interviews (i.e. knowledge audit)
3. Develop draft taxonomy: try not to have more than 10 large subjects
4. Review with users and subject matters experts: Conduct usability studies
5. Refine taxonomy: review the feedback from the usability studies at step 4
6. 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)
7. Manage and maintain taxonomy: assign a team responsible for management, maintenance, and further development of the taxonomy.

Source: Taxonomy Development for Knowledge Management.

I stumbled upon two articles which describe the “history” of knowledge management.

The first one is an article written by Larry Prusak back in 1999 titled “Where did knowledge management come from?” In the article Prusak discussed the history of knowledge management and offered insights into what knowledge management means today and where it may be headed in the future. 

The second one is a six-part series of blogs written in 2004 by Bill Ives:

• Introduction
• Early Days
• Emergence of Media, Devices, and Techniques
• Print Changes Everything
• Print Has its Limits
• Digital Age Offers Scalability with New Possibilities for Dialogue

Happy reading.