connecting people; improved access to documents; retention of knowledge; learning from experience; creation of best practices; innovation; provision of knowledge to customer-facing staff. -- *location: Page 10* --- When we communicate to the business about KM, we need to avoid using KM terminology and instead talk about business issues. -- *location: Page 11* --- We can think of an organization as a large-scale entity that needs to solve three broad types of business problem in order to function effectively. -- *location: Page 11* --- The different parts of the organization need to be able to coordinate their activities, maintain shared objectives, avoid mistakes in handoffs, and keep track of how they are making progress on common tasks. -- *location: Page 11* --- bringing together knowledge from different parts of the business to develop better ways of working, using the knowledge you already have, but which is scattered and siloed. -- *location: Page 11* --- ensuring effective communication of knowledge between teams and workgroups. Here you can use task flows, shared calendars, shared knowledge bases, checklists and standard templates, as well as the processes and policies that guide their use. -- *location: Page 11* --- making sure that important shared documents and other forms of information content are made easily accessible to those who need them, -- *location: Page 12* --- knowledge inventory audits to identify high-priority information for sharing, and taxonomies and information architecture to ensure they are easily findable. -- *location: Page 12* --- The organization needs to be able to retain key capabilities such as skills, stakeholder/partner relationships, experience and expertise as people come and go, and to keep track of its plans, decisions, activities and commitments. -- *location: Page 12* --- ensuring that critical knowledge about key decisions, plans and activities is documented, and embedded into process and procedure, rather than relying solely on ‘tribal knowledge’. Here you would combine records management approaches, plus systematic capture of knowledge, with an -- *location: Page 12* --- ownership structure, ensuring that someone is accountable for the continuity of each knowledge topic. -- *location: Page 12* --- addressing the risk of loss of critical knowledge and capability as people retire, and ensuring that this knowledge is retained, made available to, and used by the remaining and replacing workforce. Here you use approaches from the knowledge retention component. -- *location: Page 12* --- The organization needs to be able to respond appropriately to changes in its external environment, adapt its practices accordingly, and internalize what it learns. -- *location: Page 12* --- making sure your employees and teams get up to speed quickly in new jobs or when dealing with new areas of work (new projects, new markets, new products, new geographies). -- *location: Page 13* --- involves ensuring your projects and business activities do not repeat the mistakes of the past, and that you can replicate (and improve on) the successes. -- *location: Page 13* --- comparing and learning from the disparate practices across the organization, to find the ones that work best in given circumstances. -- *location: Page 13* --- arming your customer-facing staff with the knowledge they need to close the deal, or to delight the customer, or it might involve providing self-help material for your users and customers. -- *location: Page 13* --- systematically collecting, analysing and disseminating information about your organization’s external and internal environment, to support decision making, strategies and plans. Here, dashboards, data -- *location: Page 13* --- visualization and analytical tools may help. -- *location: Page 13* --- – this business challenge requires bringing together the knowledge of all relevant staff, together with external knowledge, to build new ways of doing things, new products, and new lines of business. -- *location: Page 13* --- For a knowledge worker, the raw material of their work is knowledge. Knowledge management can provide the supply chain through which that raw material is sourced, assembled and supplied. -- *location: Page 14* --- The elements of roles and accountabilities, such as CoP leaders, knowledge managers, and knowledge owners. The process elements, such as after-action review, lessons capture, knowledge asset creation etc. The technology elements, such as portals, collaboration tools, search engines, lesson management systems etc. The governance elements, such as KM expectations and policy, metrics and incentives, formats and protocols, taxonomies, and support. -- *location: Page 15* --- Conversation and content – connecting and collecting -- *location: Page 15* --- Any complete KM framework needs to enable, promote, facilitate and otherwise support both conversation and content. -- *location: Page 16* --- Conversations are a far richer medium than content, while content is more scalable, can reach far more people, and has a longer l -- *location: Page 16* --- Knowledge can be transferred more effectively through conversations but more efficiently through content. -- *location: Page 16* --- Table 1.2 The four transactions of knowledge as interfaces between tacit knowledge and codified knowledge To tacit knowledge To codified knowledge From tacit knowledge Discuss Document From codified knowledge Find and review Synthesize -- *location: Page 17* --- Push is the transfer of knowledge driven by supply (publishing, presenting, teaching, blogging, tweeting or loading material to a knowledge base or wiki), and pull is the transfer of knowledge driven by demand (asking a question on a forum, or searching an intranet). -- *location: Page 18* --- Ensure that you take a complete view of KM, including: the elements of people, process, technology and governance; the four transactions of discussion, capture, synthesis and finding/reusing; and the two drivers of push and pull. -- *location: Page 20* --- The core strategy is a ‘trials and pilots’ approach (6) to develop the long-term KM framework, combined with an opportunistic approach (3) to deliver short-term wins. -- *location: Page 23* --- KM is not introduced with a business focus; KM is never embedded into the business; you fail to secure senior management support; you don’t focus on high-value knowledge; you fail to show measurable benefits; the four enablers of KM are not given equal attention; only parts of the KM solution are implemented; you make KM too difficult for people; KM is not implemented as a change programme; the KM team ‘preaches only to the converted’; the KM team fails to engage with key stakeholders; the KM team have the wrong competences. -- *location: Page 31* --- Table 12.1 An empty KM framework template Discuss Document Synthesize Find/review People Process Technology Governance -- *location: Page 130* --- In KM a major purpose of communities and networks is to provide shared access to the tacit knowledge which people hold in their heads. -- *location: Page 136* --- whereby people voluntarily identify lessons and new knowledge, and add them into a lessons database, wiki or knowledge base. We believe you capture only a small proportion of the knowledge this way, because people are often not aware of what they know, or are not aware of other people’s needs and how their knowledge could help. -- *location: Page 148* --- A much better alternative is to use dialogue- and questions-based processes, led by a facilitator, to first identify what people know, and then probe for the detail that makes the knowledge re-usable. -- *location: Page 149* --- The reactive approach triggers documentation of knowledge as a result of a notable operational success, near miss or failure -- *location: Page 149* --- The scheduled approach, common within project-based organizations and customer support teams, is to schedule knowledge-capture and documentation processes within routine business processes or project activities. -- *location: Page 150* --- The primary role for knowledge synthesis is that of the ‘knowledge owner’: the person accountable for managing the contents of the knowledge base for a particular area of knowledge, and for ensuring the knowledge is synthesized, findable, up to date and useful. -- *location: Page 160* --- Other items relate specifically to the lack of a ‘culture of seeking’. -- *location: Page 168* --- ‘Don’t incentivize knowledge sharing. Incentivize knowledge seeking, and sharing will follow.’ -- *location: Page 168* --- Managers can set expectations for knowledge seeking. The technical director in one organization we worked with mandated that no project would be approved if it could not demonstrate learning from other projects. -- *location: Page 169* --- Making knowledge findable means making sure it is well tagged for search and well structured for browsing. -- *location: Page 169* --- Knowledge also needs to be accessible, as there is nothing more frustrating than to see that a knowledge resource exists, and then not to be able to access it because the folder it sits in is protected. -- *location: Page 169* --- Your people should be aware that the knowledge resources exist for their use. At induction and orientation, they need to be provided with an introduction to the knowledge resources and to the key tools -- *location: Page 170* --- the community directory, the yellow pages – and told that they are expected to use these resources as well as contribute to them. -- *location: Page 170* --- The resources themselves need to be ‘ambiently findable’, which means that by their very nature, they pop up when you start looking, or when you are engaged in a task that requires them -- *location: Page 170* --- For example, in a project management portal, at the project initiation stage, as soon as the project type is selected, links could appear to the relevant synthesized knowledge on projects of that type, while an Artificial Intelligence system in a law firm might automatically send relevant precedents to a lawyer opening a new piece of work with a client. -- *location: Page 170* --- The enterprise taxonomist is responsible for developing and implementing enterprise-wide taxonomies – the controlled vocabularies that connect related knowledge and information content together. -- *location: Page 171* --- before-action review. Here, finding and reviewing knowledge resources is incorporated into a discussion process. -- *location: Page 172* --- A much more systematic process for ensuring knowledge re-use is the KM planning process (Milton, 2005, p. 117), the outcome of which is a KM plan. -- *location: Page 173* --- By far the most efficient and effective way to structure the evidence collection is to use the knowledge resources audit -- *location: Page 185* --- The key learning was to ‘go where there is pull for KM’. -- *location: Page 345* ---