Knowledge Management Forum

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Learnability evaluation tool

2008-04-10T05:47:00.003+02:00

Hi, I work on a 'tacit knowledge transfer model'. The first step in its four stage process is 'preparation'. I need to evaluate the learnability of the knowledge recipient after the preparation phase. Have any of you come across such an instrument, which will help in assessing the preparedness of the knowledge recipent to accept new knowledge. The factors of this learnability are 'receptivity, need realization, dispassion about status-quo, motivation, and self restraint'
PB Venkat
BITS, Pilani, India

Corporate Knowledge

2007-09-20T13:24:00.000+02:00

What is the structure of Corporate Knowledge? Why is it important?

Dharshini Bandara
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology

Knowledge vs. Information

2007-09-20T07:24:00.001+02:00

Why is it important to understand knowledge vs. information qualities when
implementing KM projects?

Dharshini Bandara
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology

Critical success factors for KM

2007-09-20T06:37:00.000+02:00

If we consider critical success factors for Knowledge Management can we include "Establish cross-functional teams" as a critical success factor?

Dharshini Bandara
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology

Tacit Knowledge

2007-09-12T04:53:00.000+02:00

What is Tacit Knowledge?
What are the methods you can use to obtain Tacit Knowledge?

collaboration tool

2006-07-15T09:20:00.000+02:00

Folks, as told by all in many forums, we are yet another organisation trying to establish KM thru intranet portal and I have feeling we are fighting a losing battle. I have joined this forum hoping to gather some new ideas to get our people to use KM and contribute. I will be more than happy to share my learning. Cheers

Virtual Working Facilties

2006-07-14T15:02:00.000+02:00

Virtual Working Facility, which helps any organization to structure its unstructured data. In short what we do is to help Industrial Age organizations (static, physical location centric operations) to migrate and develop into next generation agile Knowledge Age dittos. For this major development to happen in a productive and organized manner two major innovations had to emerge.

Let me share more details on WorkACE with you.

The first one is a new corporate and management philosophy called “QXS”. You can read and hear more about it from the below links. In short it however means that in the mobile, global and virtual organizations of the future we need to teach people how to become self-managing and paying attention to what matters most. That is done by constantly raising the awareness of the three most important things for achieving success, which are the level of Quality, the level of eXcellence and the level of Systems that we produce and use.

http://www.qxsys.com/betasite/Presentations/QXS_Philosophy_v1.zip

The second major new thing needed is new working facilities. We see that the only way to stay and become more productive ton the future is for the organization to go VIRTUAL. In short this means that the ‘office’ of the company is put on a server and thus easily accessible for every stakeholder of the organization. We have created such new facilities and we call them ‘WorkACE’. WorkACE is the first Virtual Working Community in the world and we are 100% sure that this is the way every organization has to work in the future if they want to stay competitive. WorkACE is a virtual working facility in which we organize people, processes and knowledge into one comprehensive and SAFE database. In doing this we are structuring the organization, its stakeholders and processes in a way that no other ICT company has been able to do before. WorkACE is a very dynamic system in which the stakeholders define their own daily processes and then work against them. It means that EVERYTHING they do will (send emails, chat, upload files etc) will automatically become related to people, processes, contacts etc but at the same time stay safe and organized.

http://www.qxsys.com/betasite/Presentations/Corporate_Presentation_v2.zip

Now, WorkACE has many inbuilt features like, Knowledge Management(a must for any organization to become agile and knowledgeable), Project Management,
Work Flow Management, Document Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, e-Process, e-HR, Time Sheet Management, WebMail, WebChat, and a lot many features.

Knowledge Management Success

2006-07-14T04:16:00.000+02:00

Knowledge management has often proved to be an excercise in futility. Studies have reported the failure rate of knowledge management initiatives to range from 50 - 70%. With this in mind, there is ample room for the study of sound approaches to knowledge management.

I am conducting a graduate research study into knowledge management utilizing the perspectives of the technology, organization, people, and content model. I would greatly appreciate your participation in a research survey I have prepared. The survey should take no more than 5 - 10 minutes.

If you have had a leading role in an organizational knowledge managment initiative and are able to draw conclusions based upon your experiences please visit the link below. Thank you for your time.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=639812311921

- Nick Picadura
Hawaii Pacific University

Retaining Knowledge

2006-05-23T17:12:00.000+02:00

Organizations have three challenges in the subject matter:

1. Encouraging employees to continue with the organization.
2. If they decide to leave, ensuring that the knowledge doesn't leave with them.
3. If the knowledge still leaves, ensuring that it doesn't land up in the competitors' basket.

I will narrate the initiatives taken in the organizations known to me to meet each of these challenges.

Encouragement for a knowledge worker primarily comes from the job satisfaction. Both positive and not so positive means are adapted by organizations. The positive means are:

Employee opinion survey and actions based on the result.
Daily monitoring of employee's mental health by asking each employee to drop a token to indicate as to how he felt today, 'smiley' or 'frownie'?
Other conventional methods such as value based pay, challenging job assignments, supporting the employees family and social needs.

The negative means are policing the job seeker, making bar club agreements with potential destination companies etc. These means don't work to ensure results but only develops distrust.

Organizations which have been attempting to retain knowledge through job transfers and formal training sessions have started realizing the futility of such means and have embarked upon socialization. The popular techniques are; office hour games, informal meetings, OBLs (out-bound learning sessions) etc.

The third challenge that the organizations' knowledge doesn't land up in competitors' basket is normally managed through a legal agreement. But it has hardly any validity in the judicial court for knowledge is still considered to be a personal possession. One of the organization's CEO attempted a novel method. Any employee who leaves the organization if proves that he is not accepting an offer from the competitor will get 3 years pay, on the contrary if he does accept the offer from the competitor the employee has to pay three year pay to the his organization upfront. This two way agreement brought fairness and just to the whole process.

The introduction of paper publication as a part of the annual KRA is suggested recently. The idea emerges from the academics, wherein an expert gains credit for the number of papers he publishes or the number of knowledge he shares with others. Contrary to this in profession, an expert feels discredited when he shares his knowledge. The reason for this is fear of loss of identity. If adequate recognition can be given to the employee to preserve his identity, then the academic situation can be replicated in business environments. I have come across organizations which name the theory or process devised by the employee by his name and the same is patented. Obviously the employee is compensated for this appropriately. This patenting process also prevents the employee from selling the same process to outsiders after resignation / retirement. The whole process ensures reward, recognition and protection of knowledge.

The Role of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management

2005-03-22T10:09:00.000+01:00

Some industry buzzwords gain market acceptance, while others end up on the scrapheap. Business intelligence (BI) has gained acceptance (even though there are many definitions for it), but knowledge management (KM) has had a mixed reception. Knowledge management has struggled because organizations have often tried to implement large enterprise-wide knowledge management projects and failed, and also because of the complexity bringing together the many components and technologies involved.

Business intelligence applications in the past have simply analyzed detailed data warehouse data and produced high-level summarized data, or measurements, about business performance. The recent trend, however, is toward the use of business performance management (BPM) applications that put these measurements into a business context, i.e., they relate the data measurements to business goals and objectives. Putting performance measurements into a business context improves the business decision-making and action-taking processing because the results become actionable. Read on."

Bestselling Knowledge Management Books

2004-12-29T15:33:00.000+01:00

Questions on KM

2004-09-22T09:31:00.000+02:00

According to Laurie Orlov, an analyst from Forrester, KM is a broad term that frames a firm’s desire to do a better job in the creation, transfer, and codification of what employees, partners, and customers know.

Orlov argues that KM has become "Too broad to be meaningful, too encompassing for projects to be successful, and too subject to interpretation by vendors and consultants to be easily purchased, managed, or finished in anything less than a year".

She then recommends firms to aks themselves 6 specific questions. Does your firm need to do a better job of:

Sharing solutions to customer problems in a call center?
Helping groups or teams collaborate and share work?
Locate people with specific skills or create communities?
Managing unstructured content repositories?
Providing customized access to existing information?
Documenting, modeling and executing business processes?

Do you agree KM has become "Too broad to be meaningful" and can you think of another specific KM-question?

8 Intranet Trends

2004-09-01T10:23:00.000+02:00

Shiv Singh, Portal Practice Lead at Avenue A/Razorfish answers the question of what you should be worrying about as an intranet manager. How can you create greater business value through your corporate intranet? Is your intranet going to be most impacted by a new technology, a new business idea or something else? Or is it all just about information retrieval?
1. Intranets return to the domain of the departments
2. The records management and the legal departments get involved
3. All employees become intranet publishers
4. The corporate telephone directory loses its luster
5. The new killer app -- the knowledge management tool
6. Real time information delivery becomes a priority
7. Information retrieval remains unsolved but there's hope
8. Employees demand a more aesthetic user experience

Singh wisely finishes by saying that 'There is never any magic answer to the question of where and how you should invest your intranet budget. Each organization is uniquely different and a variety of factors such as your organizational culture, your existing portfolio of applications and your business priorities drive those decisions. But keep these intranet trends in mind because irrespective of the nature of your business and the design of your current intranet, some of these trends are probably coming your way and you are going to need to respond to them'.
Article

(Managing) Deep Smarts

2004-08-30T12:43:00.000+02:00

Deep Smarts are those people who can see the whole picture and yet zoom in on a specific problem others haven’t been able to diagnose. Almost intuitively, they can make the right decision, at the right level, with the right people. Their insight is based more on know-how than on facts; it comprises a system view as well as expertise in individual areas. Deep smarts are not philosophical—they’re not “wisdom” in that sense—but they’re as close to wisdom as business gets.

Drawing on their forthcoming book Deep Smarts, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap argue in the September 2004 Issue of the Harvard Business Review that the best way to transfer such expertise to novices and make individual knowledge institutional isn’t through PowerPoint slides, a Web site of best practices, online training, project reports, or lectures.

Rather, the sage needs to teach the neophyte individually how to draw wisdom from experience. The novice needs to discover the expert’s know-how through guided practice, guided observation, guided problem solving, and guided experimentation — all under the direction of a knowledge coach.

Companies have to be willing to dedicate time and effort to such extensive training, but the investment more than pays for itself.

5 reasons why people don't share

2004-06-29T17:43:00.000+02:00

Found this at the Society for HRM site: Five Reasons People Don't Share by Pamela Babcock:
1. People believe K. is power.
2. People are insecure about the value of their K.
3. People don't trust each other.
4. Employees are afraid of negative consequences.
5. People work for other people who don't tell what they know.
Seemed a good useful summary to me so thought I'd share it :))