IS5600 6

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IS5600 - 6
Knowledge Management
Some slides adapted from Chris Wagner, 2005
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Knowledge Management

• Example 1
• I have been searching for a solution to a problem
  for 6 months. Eventually, I find the answer in an
  academic journal and the author is my
  colleague from two-doors away down the corridor!

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Knowledge Management

• Example Two
• I am the senior partner of a global headhunting
  firm. We have reasonable information management
  (industry analysis, market research, resumé
  databases) but do nothing to tap into the vast
  knowledge resources held in the brains of our
  consultants. Each time a consultant leaves, our
  firms collective brain is drained. What can I do
  to manage our knowledge resources better?

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KM Fundamentals ??

• What is knowledge ?
• Why is it important?
• What do we have to do in order to understand our
  knowledge resources
• How are we going to be able to manage our
  distributed knowledge resources?

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KM

• Knowledge is
• Information that is contextual, experiential,
  relevant, and recontextualisable for action
  taking
• A representation of skilled practices
• Knowledge can be
• Tacit or explicit
• Operational or strategic
• Emergent or static
• Communicated explicitly, implicitly or not at all

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How do we conceptualise knowledge?

• As a formal organisational resource?
• As a community resource?
• As an individual resource?
• As something that can be codified in documents?
• As something that is best explained
  person-to-person?
• Or as something that is totally inexplicable?!

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Knowledge Needs, Validity Use

• What are the knowledge needs of employees?
• How quickly does knowledge change, degrade,
  become invalid
• When is its use by date?
• How can knowledge be communicated?
• What does knowledge recontextualisation involve
  and cost?

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Does your organisation (try to) manage
knowledge?How?
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Knowledge Organisation and Delivery

• Hierarchies
• Communities
• Markets
• Codification-based systems
• Personalisation-based systems

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Knowledge Hierarchies

• Specific knowledge that is customised for target
  users and often reused
• Hierarchies imply a consistent storage mechanism
  that is easily searchable
• High creation costs
• Accuracy, completeness and integrity (of
  knowledge and source) are important
• Quality is high, but validity is often short

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Knowledge Communities

• Knowledge is shared among community members, with
  trust-supported sharing
• Community norms are influential
• A coordinator will facilitate the communitys
  access to knowledge
• Feedback mechanisms will validate the knowledge
• Quality is variable, and validity is often longer
• Short-validity knowledge requires too much effort
  to update on a regular basis.

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Knowledge Networks

• It can be very informal
• Practice Area Networks PANs
• Groups of people with ideas to share that form
  voluntarily
• May be industry specific or focused on a specific
  topic
• DIY Do it Yourself
• With management support, but not control
• Help people to help themselves

Source http//www4.cio.com/article/27088/Do_It_Yo
urself_Knowledge_Management
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Knowledge Markets

• A market will focus on capture, not creation of
  knowledge
• Each individual employee acts alone
• With little formal KM, there is little
  validation/organisation
• This reduces creation costs, but increases search
  and recontextualisation costs
• This is a chaotic bazaar, where quality is an
  unknown factor
• Buyer beware answers.google.com

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Codification-Based Delivery 1

• Expert System
• Formally codified knowledge automated
  search/dissemination
• Knowledge Repository
• Text database of documents quite easy to locate
  knowledge
• Document Repository
• Text database of documents, but no specific
  knowledge examples

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Codification-Based Delivery 2

• Exemplars and Templates
• Text database of best practices for specific
  tasks
• Exemplars are examples that illustrate best
  practices
• Templates involve step-by-step scripts
• Tips, Stories, Opinions, Principles, Heuristics,
  Patterns
• Example/scenario-based text similar to
  exemplars/templates, but less structured

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Personalisation-Based Delivery

• Expert Directory
• Managed and validated database of people formally
  recognised as being experts
• People Directory
• Organised list of people with espoused interest
  in a particular area, but little
  validation/verification of their knowledge

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Personalisation-Based Delivery

• Reference centre
• Chauffeured access point to knowledge
• Knowledge comes from a designated expert
• QA Forum
• Web-based discussion site or blog
• Community Calendar
• Shared calendar of events of interest to the
  community

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KM, KS and Communities

• KM needs sharing of ideas.
• A notoriously difficult barrier to effective KM
  implementation.
• KS needs to be rewarded KS failure must also be
  rewarded.
• KS needs to be easy, not time/energy consuming.
• Sharing is often easier in communities.
• Do some communities find it easier to share than
  others?

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Systematic Knowledge Processes

• Does the firm have systematic processes for
• Capturing, organizing and sharing
• external and internal knowledge?
• Are there processes for enhancing knowledge
  creation and innovation?
• Are there procedures governing the protection of
  knowledge assets?
• Does senior management actively promote and
  engage in a knowledge sharing culture?
• Are knowledge contributions measured or linked to
  financial performance indicators?

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Knowledge and Privacy

• http//www.aclu.org/pizza/

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Business Knowledge Internal

• Management Technical Information for
  Decision-making
• Management information, in-house research,
  technical and product materials
• Rules Guidance for Operations and Management
• Description of objectives, process work flow,
  practice guidance (process description goals,
  quantitative and qualitative requirements, timing
  requirement, important matters), document
  templates and examples, authorizations and
  controls, rewards and punishments
• Management Experiences and Intelligence
• Best practices, case facts, expert channels

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Business Knowledge External

• Macro-economy, Industries and Markets
• customers, competitors, technologies, products,
  market intelligence
• Commercial Knowledge
• finance, trading, investments, accounting, taxes,
  certifications, trade marks and patents, legal
  services, business consulting, public
  relationship, exhibitions, environmental
  protection, advertising, design and printing,
  packaging, software, asset trading and
  dispositions
• Business Operations and Management
• theories and methodologies, best practices, case
  facts (successes / failures)

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Business Knowledge Major Types

• Working Guidance and Experiences, Document
  Templates and Examples, Document Records
• Laws and Regulations, Business Intelligence, News
  and Information
• Management Data, Business Analysis and Reports
• Theories and Methodologies, Practice Approaches
  and Case Facts
• Expert Channels and Knowledge Channels

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People, Knowledge Technology

• In order to execute a knowledge based strategy,
  we need to think how to nurture people with
  knowledge
• Knowledge is most effectively applied through
  networks of people who collaborate with one
  another not through networks of technology
• KM is a primarily human-human process, supported
  by technology. Treating KM as a technical problem
  and finding a technical solution is likely to
  result in failure.
• KM strategies are more likely to be successful if
  they are driven by human needs for help in
  solving problems, not by knowledge being pushed
  at people.

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KM and Reward Structures

• Both creators and users of knowledge should be
  rewarded.
• Mistakes are also a source of knowledge so
  reward their reporting
• Knowledge sharing should be recognised
  financially and publically
• Failure to use/share knowledge should be
  penalised
• Rewards can be designed at both individual and
  team levels
• Time must be allocated to knowledge creation and
  sharing.

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KM, Top Management and Hiring Policies

• If people oppose KM blindly and try to destroy
  knowledge management efforts underway in the
  organisation, then dont promote or encourage
  them!
• Dont let KM initiatives be held back by old
  culture and old thinking
• All employees from the CEO downwards need to
  abandon the old and adopt the new
  enthusiastically if KM is to be successful

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KM Initiatives and Alignment
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Same Purpose Different Paths
Employees write up consulting reports
KM team locates all such valuable sources
Documents are stored on a corporate portal
Indices, categoriz-ation, context is added
Users are provided with intelligent search
Knowledge portal is modified as use changes
Employees share advice via discussion boards
KM team locates all such discussions
Advice is categorized, reformatted
Web links to discussion board and categories
Old discussions are archived, while repeated
questions are transformed into FAQs
Collection of e-mail enquiries
KM program searches for patterns (text mining)
FAQs and answers stored in knowledge base
Knowledge base either makes suggestions about
best answers, or automatically answers 80 of
e-mail inquiries.
Knowledge is updated based on new inquiries
Collection of numerical transaction data
KM team searches for patterns (data mining)
Patterns are stored in rule form (knowledge base)
Patterns are reported as business rules, or can
be used to intelligently search through databases
(profiling)
Knowledge is updated based on new records
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The Case of Siemens 1

• Famous KM case
• Siemens ShareNet
• Siemens worldwide adoption of KM
• Strong org culture (German)
• Strong sense of employee involvement
• Not for the rewards, so much as the kudos
• Sophisticated reward point system
• Redeemable for gifts, trips, etc.
• Active answering of questions raised by others

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Siemens 2

• An Italian office of Siemens was looking for
  information that would help in a project bid.
• They found the information on Siemens global KM
  system
• The knowledge had been created/recorded by
  Chinese employees.
• They got the project.
• Overall, ShareNet helped Siemens gain 120M of
  projects (1998-2005)

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Other Resources

• Knowledge Maps
• Conversational Knowledge
• Google
• Now search results depend on networks of links
  between pages and page currency, not just keyword
  counts anymore.

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(No Transcript)
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Conversational Knowledge 1

• Blogs, Wikis, Email, Skype,
• Conversations become persistent,
  google-searchable, part of your knowledge network

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Conversational Knowledge 2

• Id like all of you to download Skype (if you
  dont have it already) and then to have a Skype
  conversation with 1-2 other IS5600 students.
• Try both the audio and textual tools
• And then cut/paste the text conversation into
  your blog!

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8 Lessons for KM Implementation

• 1. Overcommunicate!
• Org change is huge, so there is a continuous need
  to communicate at all levels. Keep everyone in
  the loop. Ensure that they realise what this
  project will do for them and why they need it.
  Help them to build up a new comfort zone.
• 2. People
• You need the right people for the project. With
  the wrong people, you are asking for trouble.

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• 3. Ensure that end-users are involved in solution
  design
• Dont exclude the end-users till the project is
  ready to run. Involve them. Build their buy-in!
  Make them content experts who identify the right
  kind of content that is needed.
• 4. Content gaps, redundancies and dirt
• What we dont have, what we have in duplicate,
  and what we have in the wrong format. It all has
  to be fixed and the sooner the better for KM
  users.

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• 5. Incentivise user adoption
• Reward employees who venture outside the comfort
  zone and try the new KM stuff.
• 6. ROI Measures and Requirements
• Tricky, but an ROI measure is important.
• What are we looking for? How will we measure it?
  Intangible and tangible measures.
• Measure the efficiency of the KM processes
  (content coverage and quality)
• Measure the KM impact
• Work speed, resolution times, agent productivity,
  

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• 7. Understand End-User Needs
• How do end-users actually work? Are we helping
  them or hindering? Different end-users in
  different departments do the same thing in
  different ways (culture), so a new KM solution
  has to be flexible.
• 8. What is the goal of this KM initiative?
• What are we trying to achieve? Are we getting
  there? Will KM actually prevent us from doing
  some of what we do currently? How do we work
  around that?

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Discussion Bobs Story

• What is his working environment?
• What are his knowledge tools?
• What benefits can the company achieve through
  people such as Bob?
• What are Bobs incentives to share knowledge?
  (and his sources)
• Would this work in Hong Kong?