As mentioned elsewhere in these pages, Knowledge Management is a relatively recent term, but it isn’t a new idea. It’s more a matter of recognizing common strands in what might otherwise be thought of as separate disciplines.
Some of those disciplines are shown on the left, but it‘s not intended to be a comprehensive list. Once you start connecting the dots, it seems like everything is Knowledge Management. It does to us, anyway.
Human Communications: Spreading the Word
Establishing the right
organizational culture is the most important element in a successful KM program. After that, Communications is the deal-breaker. It doesn’t matter how good a knowledge base is, if people don’t know it’s there.
Disseminating
knowledge is one of the four fundamental processes of KM, but in that context, we’re really talking about the actual knowledge content. Before people begin using the content, they need to be sold on the idea and informed about the
process.
If your KM strategy is based on a “pull” approach (in which people come to a website or database to find things), you need to be sure everyone knows the way. If you’re using a “push” approach, you need to understand your
audience as individuals, so you can reach them when appropriate. You don’t want to diminish the impact by pushing too much information, but you don’t want to send so little that the audience forgets about you.
Like Goldilocks, you
want it to be “just right.” You want communications that are engaging, friendly, interesting, but above all, useful.
Communications is necessary for the ongoing success of any KM program, and is absolutely essential at start-up. Whether face-to-face meetings, print campaigns, electronic mail or all of the above, communications should be given a high priority.
Library Science: Managing the Assets
The American Library Association defines Library Science as “the knowledge, demands and skills by which recorded information is selected, acquired, organized and utilized in meeting the information needs of a community of users.” No surprises, there.
You don’t build a library just by filling a room
with books, and you don’t build a knowledge base by putting gazillions of documents up on your Intranet. The principles of Library Science still apply.
Knowledge Managers must select things that are of interest (and value) to their
communities, and then get their hands on the items needed. (Especially in business contexts, acquisition is often harder than selection. Like pulling teeth.)
Once acquired, the items in the collection must be organized in a way that
makes them readily available, and also qualified in a way that separates fact from hearsay. Typically, KM has to deal with information that is relatively informal and unstructured. There are no universally accepted classification
schemes, and the items collected will have lots of rough edges.
Like a neighborhood library, the most successful KM programs are the ones that seek feedback from their communities, so their collections can be
continuously refined. The goal is not to produce a codex of all Knowledge, but to focus on the challenges of the moment. In a knowledge base, less is usually better than more, and that takes a lot of intelligent pruning.
Organizational Dynamics: Building Communities
There’s an element of personal risk in sharing your knowledge, as well as in admitting that you need the knowledge of others. It’s a leap of faith, in which an individual trusts that others will accept his or her ideas, and treat
them with respect. This leap is much easier to take within a community of friends than among a group of strangers.
This is what’s behind something that’s come to be called a Community of
Practice (CoP), an organizational concept that underlies a lot of the thinking on KM. Generally speaking, Communities of Practice are groups that learn. They are self-aggregating structures that come together when people are
united by a common set of skills and a common set of problems. They are social as well as professional; they make their own rules and they transcend both traditional organizational boundaries and employer relationships. People
can change jobs many times, yet maintain their allegiance to a community regardless of their current paycheck. CoPs are tribal in nature, and they thrive on storytelling: the most ancient and effective form of knowledge transfer.
These communities can’t be created by organizational mandate, but they can be nurtured and encouraged. They are natural incubators for KM practices, and should be leveraged whenever possible. Etienne Wenger has written that CoPs represent an organization’s most versatile and dynamic knowledge resource, and should be seen as the foundation of its ability to
know and to learn.
That’s another important element in successful KM: understanding the organizational matrix within which you seek to establish a knowledge culture
. Initiatives that recognize and build on pre-existing communities have a huge advantage over those that don’t.
Change Management: Laying the Foundation
Nothing is more important to the success of a KM program than a culture
that encourages people to share what they know.
It’s said that knowledge is power, and to many of us, giving knowledge away seems like pretty strange behavior. Trying to instill knowledge sharing
is a struggle, since it reverses 25,000 years of human evolution. Human beings are pretty defenseless in the wild, and it’s not surprising that we want to keep our backs to the wall.
Writing in the California Management Review, Spring 1998, Georg von Krogh considers this a matter of “care:” some organizations have high-care cultures and some have low-care cultures. High-care cultures are
characterized by trust, empathy, access to help, lenience in judgment and courage, while low-care cultures must deal with distrust, a lack of empathy, little access to help, authoritative judgment and cowardice. Knowledge
sharing will happen naturally in high-care cultures, and will never happen in low-care cultures.
If the culture doesn’t support the right behavior, it doesn’t matter what
you do under the banner of KM. It doesn’t matter how sexy the interface, or how effective the process map. People will pay lip service to the program, smile and nod during the presentations and ignore the whole thing.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done; organizations change all the time. It does mean that an honest assessment of the cultural realities must be part of any KM program. It’s likely that a change management program will need
to be part of the picture. There’s no point sowing the seeds of KM on rocky and impenetrable ground.
Interface Theory: Designing the Interface
This, quite literally, is the most visible part of Knowledge Management.
Whatever the underlying technology, and whatever the supporting platform, users will come through the door with no training, no time to be trained, but very definite expectations. They’ll expect the Knowledge
system to be intuitive and friendly, faster than lightning, available from any place at any time, completely up to date, customizable according to their changing interests and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Any
perceived failing of the interface will become a reason for abandoning the whole thing. “I’d be happy to share my knowledge, sir, but the system is too (confusing, slow, inaccessible, out of date, rigid, etc.)”
Interface design is a subject about which we either need to say a whole lot, or just a little, and we’re going for the latter option. If you want to dig deeper, we’d recommend Internet resources like Usable Web, philosophical rambles like Stephen Johnson’s Interface Culture and most especially the books of Edward Tufte. He’s one of our heroes.
Process Design: Weaving the Fabric
There’s a debate in KM circles about how to get people to share what they know. If you want to encourage the open flow of information, what
incentives should you put in place? Should you be rewarding people for contributing kn
owledge, or for re-using knowledge? Should you incent them with Cadillacs or steak knives? Like most everything else in KM, the answer is “it depends.”
One school of thought says incentive plans are missing the point. Companies shouldn’t provide an extra reward for sharing, they should simply pay people for doing their jobs. However, they should design those jobs so
that knowledge artifacts are produced as a matter of course.
If you want to build in these kinds of KM activities, what exactly are we talking about? At Knowledge Street, we like the four-function model of KM that was outlined by Jeff Angus, Jeetu Patel and Jennifer Harty in 1998. This model considers KM to be a matter of Gathering, Organizing,
Disseminating and Refining, although each of these processes has sub processes too. If you want to weave KM into the fabric of your organization, you need to find places where these fundamental processes can be brought to bear.
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