What is Knowledge Management?

• Knowledge management (KM) – “Is a practice concerned with increasing awareness,

fostering learning, speeding collaboration and innovation, and exchanging insights”

• Create value from an organization’s intellectual assets

• Housed in Information Technology or Human Resource Management departments

• Knowledge asset classification – Either explicit or tacit

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What is Knowledge Management? (continued)

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What is Knowledge Management? (continued)

• Capture and document work-related tacit knowledge of others – Turn it into explicit knowledge that can be shared

with others

• Frequently used processes exist for capturing explicit knowledge– Shadowing and joint-problem solving

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Knowledge Management Applications and Associated Benefits

• Deliver benefits by: – Fostering innovation– Leveraging the expertise of people across the

organization– Capturing the expertise of key individuals before

they retire

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Foster Innovation by Encouraging the Free Flow of Ideas

• Organizations must continuously innovate– To evolve, grow, prosper, and stay fit

• Encouraging the free flow of ideas among employees, contractors, suppliers, and other business partners– Can lead to the discovery of a wealth of new

opportunities to be evaluated and tested

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Leverage the Expertise of People Across the Organization

• Enable employees to share and build on one another’s experience and expertise– New employees or employees moving into new

positions are able to get up to speed more quickly

• Workers can share thoughts and experiences about what works well and what does not– Avoid a costly and time-consuming “reinvention of

the wheel”

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Capture the Expertise of Key Individuals as They Retire

• Three to four million employees will retire each year for the next 20 years

• Many organizations are using knowledge management to capture valuable expertise before it simply walks out the door

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Best Practices for Selling and Implementing a KM Project

• Challenges exist in trying to establish a successful KM program

• Associated with human nature and the manner in which people are accustomed to working together

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Connect the KM Effort to Organizational Goals and Objectives

• Clearly define how effort will support specific organizational goals and objectives

• Sell the project to others and elicit their support and enthusiasm

• Determine if the project is worthwhile

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Identify Valuable Tacit Knowledge

• Not all tacit knowledge is equally valuable

• “Point of a KM program is to identify and disseminate knowledge gems from a sea of information”

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Start with a Small Pilot Involving Enthusiasts

• Less risky than trying to take on a project very large in scope

• More control over the outcome– If the outcome is not successful, the organization is

not seriously impacted

• Address the business needs of a group of people who are somewhat informed about KM and are enthusiastic about its potential

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Get Employees to Buy In

• Create a work culture that places a high value on tacit knowledge

• Especially difficult to get workers to surrender their knowledge and experience in a highly competitive work environment

• Most powerful incentive for experts to share their knowledge is to receive public recognition from senior managers

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Technologies That Support KM

• Increasing need for knowledge to be quality filtered and distributed in task-relevant and timely manner

• Be aware of the wide range of technologies that can support KM efforts

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Communities of Practice

• Group whose members share a common set of goals and interests – Regularly engage in sharing and learning

• Develop around topics that are important to its members

• Origins and structures of CoPs vary widely

• Software from Socialcast

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Social Network Analysis (SNA)

• Technique to document and measure flows of information– Between individuals, workgroups, organizations,

computers, Web sites, and other information sources

• Many software tools support social network analysis– NetMiner, UCINET, and NetDraw

• Many knowledge management applications

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Web 2.0 Technologies

• Web 2.0 – Changes in technology and Web site design to

enhance information sharing, collaboration, and functionality on the Web

• Many organizations are using Web 2.0 technologies to capture the knowledge of longtime employees

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A Manager Takes Charge: JetBlue PilotsWeb 2.0 Technologies

• JetBlue University – Corporate university responsible for the orientation

and training of all the airline’s employees

• Murry Christensen– Director of Learning Technologies at JetBlue

University– Initiated a pilot project to evaluate a social network

portal – Portal enables university to use Web 2.0

technologies to share best practices

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A Manager Takes Charge: JetBlue PilotsWeb 2.0 Technologies

(continued)• If pilot project proves successful:

– JetBlue plans to expand the use of the portal across the entire enterprise

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Business Rules Management Systems

• Decision logic– Also called business rules– Includes policies, requirements, and conditional

statements that govern how the systems work

• Traditional method of modifying the decision logic

• Business rule management system (BRMS) – Software used to define, execute, monitor, and

maintain the decision – Enables business users to make changes and

updates to the decision logic without requiring involvement from IT resources

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Business Rules Management Systems (continued)

• BRMS components include: – Business rule engine– Enterprise rules repository – Software to manage the various versions of rules as

they are modified– Additional software for reporting and multi-platform

deployment

• Use of BRMS leads to faster and more accurate implementation of necessary system changes

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Enterprise Search Software

• Enterprise search – Application of search technology to find information

within an organization– Indexes documents from a variety of sources

• Uses the index to present a list of relevance-ranked documents

• Software vendors– Autonomy, Endeca, Google, IBM, Kazeon, Microsoft,

Oracle, Recommind, and StoredIQ

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Enterprise Search Software (continued)

• Compliance enterprise search software – Used by:

• IT and Human Resources organizations to enforce corporate guidelines

• Legal counsel to gather up all e-mails and documents related to upcoming litigation

• Governance officials to ensure that all guidelines for the storage of information are being followed

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Enterprise Search Software (continued)

• “Electronic discovery (e-discovery) refers to any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case”– “We can’t find it” is no longer an acceptable excuse

for not producing information relevant to a lawsuit

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Enterprise Search Software (continued)

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Summary

• KM – Increasing awareness, fostering learning, speeding

collaboration and innovation, and exchanging insights

– Used to encourage the free flow of ideas, leverage the expertise of people across the organization, and capture the expertise of key individuals before they retire

• Recommendations to help sell and implement a KM project

• Technologies that support knowledge managementInformation Technology for Managers 26