Knowledge Management

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Knowledge Management

• Aligning Knowledge Management and Business
  Strategy
• B. Nugroho Budi Priyanto

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Strategic Visioning issues

• What is the industry context in which your
  business operates?
• What is the level and nature of turbulence within
  it?
• How profound is the uncertainty in your business?

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Knowledge transfer vs integration

• Knowledge transfer assumes
• The two transacting individuals posses certain
  shared knowledge in order to effectively
  communicate
• Sufficient time is available to engage in such
  transfer
• Knowledge that is transferred remains valid by
  the time a transfer is completed

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Knowledge transfer vs K. integration
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Levels of Uncertainty
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The responsiveness quadrahedron
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Business models and technology influence
strategic choice
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Codification vs Personalization

• Codification
• More focused on technology that enables storage,
  indexing, retrieval, and reuse.
• Suited companies that repeatedly deal with
  similar problem and decision.
• Personalization
• Focused on connecting knowledge workers through
  networks.
• Better suited to companies that face one-off
  problems and depend more on tacit knowledge and
  expertise than on codified knowledge

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KM strategies codification and personalization
(1)
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KM strategies codification and personalization
(2)
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KM strategies codification and personalization
(3)
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KM strategies codification and personalization
(4)
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Knowledge maps to link knowledge to strategy

• Effective KM strategies using such
  knowledge-maps can help companies build a
  defensible competitive knowledge position.

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Knowledge Classification

• Core knowledge
• Required to play the game
• Creates barrier to entry
• You must have it, distinguishes it from its
  competitors
• Advanced knowledge
• Competitively viable
• Differentiate its product from the competitor
• Innovative knowledge
• Allows a company to lead its entire industry
• Clearly differentiates it from competitor

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A high-level Zack Framework-based strategic
knowledge gap analysis
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Creating knowledge map to evaluate corporate
knowledge
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Aligning knowledge and business strategy
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The process of articulating the link between
business and knowledge strategies
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A recap on strategic alignment
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Assessing Focus

• The challenge of business and KM is to address
  the three-way strategic alignment between
• Business
• Knowledge, and
• Technology used to support the first two

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Some first questions that often surface (1)

• How can we turn the knowledge we have into
  something that adds value to markets in which we
  operate?
• What do we know or think we know about different
  aspects of our customers? Are we actually doing
  something with what we know about them?
• How can we generate meaningful knowledge, rather
  than simply flooding our organization with
  indiscriminate information?
• How can we create a knowledge-supportive
  organizational culture in which everybody is
  convinced of the contribution that knowledge can
  make to the success of the company?
• Can we cut costs, reduce time to market, improve
  customer service, or increase margin by more
  effectively sharing knowledge and leveraging what
  we already know? Could such knowledge be applied
  to the activities of other divisions of our
  company, in other locations, and in foreign
  manufacturing sites? How can we ever transfer
  them and then make them work?

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Some first questions that often surface (2)

• Are there any fundamental errors in what we think
  we know as a company? What will be the
  consequences of these errors? How can these be
  proactively fixed?
• How can we manage our people, who will
  increasingly become knowledge workers or
  professionals, motivating them to generate
  knowledge and share it with their peers?
• Which of these people actually play critical
  roles in developing and testing new knowledge and
  information that gets used here?
• Are exciting ideas emerging within the company
  but failing to be commercialized? If these ideas
  are not reaching the market, what incentives,
  structures, or management processes seem to be
  blocking them? How can valuable knowledge that
  exists within the company be actually applied and
  benefited from?

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Some first questions that often surface (3)

• Maybe our company has more money than ideas. Are
  there opportunities to form partnerships with
  companies that may be more in the flow of
  innovative ideas and knowledge? Given different
  cultures, how can this ever work?
• Is the not invented here syndrome so strong
  that we are missing attractive business
  opportunities? Could knowledge-based
  collaboration (i.e., integration of external
  knowledge) with a wider range of innovative
  companies increase our value?
• How does tacit knowledge skills, intuitive
  abilities, employee experience affect the
  generation and transfer of explicit forms of
  knowledge in our company?

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How business can be missing vital opportunities
by adopting the wrong high-level KM strategy
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Critical success factors

• There is now silver bullet
• A working definition of knowledge is needed
• Saleability requires value demonstration
• Tacit knowledge cannot be ignored
• Focus on the future, not the past
• Respect confidentiality
• Secure management support

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Lessons learned

• An effective KM strategy begins with a vision
• Shift from strategic programming to strategic
  planning
• Data extrapolation is a fallible predictor
• Create internal competitive, and industry-wide
  knowledge maps to give you a reality check
• Focus on one but dont choose between
  codification and personalization
• Balance exploitation and exploration
• Determine the right diagnostic questions to ask
• Mobilize initiatives to help you sell your KM
  project internally