Knowledge Management

• "You cannot manage knowledge like you cannot manage love, patriotism or your children. But you can set up an environment where knowledge evolves.“

Laurence Prusak

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Knowledge Management..

..focuses on the processes and the people involved in creating, sharing, acquiring, storing, and leveraging knowledge.

How do you create knowledge?

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What is Knowledge?

• "Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody -- either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action."

(Peter F. Drucker)

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What is knowledge ?

Information is that a tomato is a fruitKnowledge is not putting it in a fruit salad....

“Knowledge is information that is contextual, relevant and actionable.”

(Turban)Involves learning from information and applying this to a real-life

context

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• How can knowledge be nurtured in organizations? • How is trust built throughout an enterprise? • How is a knowledge-oriented corporate culture

created? • How can employees be encouraged to make efficient,

productive, and innovative decisions? • How do some global companies build successful

knowledge projects, while others fail? • How can managers harness the experience and

wisdom within their organizations more effectively? 5

Some Questions – www.laurenceprusak.com

The Nature of Knowledge

Knowledge is something I create inside myself through my engagement with the world. Knowledge never exists independent of this process of my being in relationship with an event, and idea or another person. Knowledge is created in relationship, inside thinking, reflecting human beings.

Margaret Wheatley 2001

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How do we acquire knowledge?

• How do you acquire knowledge?

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Organisational Learning- one definition• ...a conscious attempt on the part of organisations to

improve productivity, effectiveness and innovativeness in uncertain economic and technological market conditions.

• The greater the uncertainties, the greater the need for learning.

• Learning enables quicker and more effective responses to a complex and dynamic environment.

• In turn, effective learning is associated with increased information sharing, communication, and understanding.

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Organisational Learning• Learning involves adapting to changing

circumstances in a way that is beneficial to the learning entity....

• Knowledge enables such positive adaptation...• Learning as a process of inquiry (Dewey) –

intertwining of thought and action that leads from doubt to the resolution of doubt

• Leads to action... Doubt ...Further inquiry – acquiring info – experimenting- acquiring knowledge ...

• And thus further learning

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Organisational Learning (Argyris and Schon)

• Organisational inquiry is done by an individual within the rules and constraints of an organisation, and on behalf of an organisation

• Organisational learning can be single loop- error detection and correction or double loop – our basic assumptions, rules, procedures etc. are wrong and we have to change these

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• How is the nuclear debate changing since the tsunami?

• Are other countries learning anything?

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Organisational Knowledge

• change in thinking and acting that changes organisational practices..

• Strategies for approaching complex tasks• Routines• Practices• Policies• Procedures• Systems of belief that underlie action

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Examples of Knowledge Based Assets

• Intellectual Property– Patents, Copyrights

• Employee Know How– Internal procedures and practices– Ways of working– Customer Relationships– Supplier Relationships– Only some of these are written down, a lot more is locked

inside the minds of employees.

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Ways of learning.....how do I learn?

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Nonaka – Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

Task: Making a bread-making machine

• How do you knead bread?

• How would you learn how to knead bread?

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• Tacit Knowledge – in your head, what you do without knowing how you do it....

• Explicit knowledge- objective, rational, technical knowledge that is easy to document- what you can quite clearly say how you do something e.g. Explicit set of rules to follow...

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Explicit Knowledge Objective, rational, technical Formal, structured. Easily documented Easily transferred / taught / learned / communicated

Explicit Knowledge consists of anything that can be documented, archived and codified often with the help of IT

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Tacit Knowledge

• Derived from experience.• Resides in individuals.• Hard to transfer / teach / learn• Master / Apprentice

'the idea that certain cognitive processes and/or behaviors are undergirded by operations inaccessible to consciousness'

Barbiero, Daniel (n.d.) 18

Examples

• Explicit– Patents– Business Plans– Marketing Research– Customer Lists

• Tacit– How to deal with

individual customers.– How to work around

the company systems.– Hard to even write

down examples.

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More Nonaka ..............• “Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are not totally

separate but mutually complementary entities.

Without experience, we cannot truly understand. But unless we try to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, we cannot reflect upon and share it organizationally. Through this dynamic interaction between the two types of knowledge, personal knowledge becomes organizational knowledge. And the organizational knowledge or intellectual infrastructure of an organization encourages its individual members to develop new knowledge through new experiences.”

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What does Knowledge Management Involve?

• KM focuses on identifying knowledge and making it explicit so that it can be shared in an organisational context.

• Creating a knowledge culture geared towards learning, innovation, experimentation, scrutiny and reflection.

• Capturing core knowledge of relevance to particular problems.

• Making knowledge explicit (so that it can be interpreted and used it another context.)

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Expected Benefits from KM• Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of

ideas • Improve customer service by streamlining

response time • Boost revenues by getting products and services

to market faster • Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing

the value of employees' knowledge and rewarding them for it

• Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary processes

(cio.com)

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A KMS should facilitate ..• Knowledge generation and creation• Knowledge sharing & communication• Knowledge access• Knowledge use and reuse• Knowledge archiving • Knowledge renewal

4 Basic Functions/Activities1. Externalisation - capturing knowledge in an

external repository and organising it by some framework in an effort to discover similar knowledge.

Technologies: imaging systems, databases, workflow technologies, document management systems using clustering techniques etc..

2. Internalisation – identifying knowledge, usually explicit, relevant to someone’s needs

-mapping a particular problem, situation or point of interest against the body of knowledge captured using externalisation.

3. Intermediation – matching a knowledge seeker to a best source of knowledge by tracking the interests and experience of a large group of individuals.

• Technologies: groupware, intranets, workflow and document management systems,

4.Cognition – applies the knowledge exchanged by the previous there processes. Human cognition recognises where and how knowledge an be used.

Related Ideas

• Communities of Practice

• Apprenticeship

• Social network analysis- it’s now what you know, it’s who you know

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Why KM now?

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KM Caused BIG Problems

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Individual Barriers to KM• Knowledge is power, sharing knowledge can

diminish this power.• Fear of making yourself redundant.• “I learnt the hard way”• No way of communicating what you know.• No understanding that what you know may be

valuable to others.• Lack of time.

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Organizational Barriers to KM• Requires changes of organizational culture• Perception that technology alone will solve the

problem.• Need to empower workers, thus be willing to lose

control.• No clear goals on what should be achieved.• Effort required at beginning before payback is

apparent.• No high level support.• Treating knowledge like something that can be

produced, measured, catalogued, warehoused, traded and shipped

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Question

Do you think most people like sharing knowledge?

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How can we learn from the web?• Google

• Facebook?????

• Linkedin

• Wikipedia

• Blogs...

• Any others?32

Technology for Knowledge Management

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Reference..

• Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration by Andrew McAfee.

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Gathering Data versus Sharing Knowledge• Most information systems are focused on

gathering data in a well structured way. • Organising it and presenting it.

• Problem is that a lot of “knowledge” is hard to structure.

• “Knowledge” is constantly changing.• “Knowledge” is often about making connections

in an non-obvious way.

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“Traditional” Electronic Communication• Channels– Digital information can be created and distributed by

anyone.– Visibility of this information is low.– E.g. e-mail, person to person instant messaging

• Platforms– Digital information is normally produced by a small

group (or subject to approval of a small group)– Visibility is high

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• Goal of knowledge management systems has been to extract tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from people throughout the organisation (anyone can contribute) and put it in a widely available database (anyone can access).

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What do the following technologies have in common?

BeboYouTube Flicker

Google DocsGoogle Calender Wikis Blogs

Mash-ups DoodleDel.ic.uous

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Web 2.0

• From Wikipedia:– The term "Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second

generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

– Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

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Key Concepts of Web 2.0

• Content is produced by many.• Applications sit on a web server and are

accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

• Usage is not prescribed, rather it evolves.

• What is web 3.0?

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Enterprise 2.0

• A lot of companies have looked at the success of Social Networking and wondered if they could bring it into the Enterprise.

• The term Enterprise 2.0 is used to describe those platforms or technologies which can be used within an Enterprise to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing

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SLATES

• McAfee (2006) suggests the term SLATES can be used to describe the different components of Enterprise 2.0.

• Search• Links• Authors• Tags• Extensions• Signals

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Search

• Old Way:– Navigate based on menus and predefined page

layouts

• New Way:– Search

• The internet is actually easier to search than most intranets.

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Links

• Old Way:• A few decide what is important and how we

should access it.

• New Way:• Within an Enterprise everyone has the ability to

link to other information.• Links provide a guide to what is important and

provide structure to on-line content.• The “best” pages are the one with the most links.

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Authoring

• Old Way:– Only certain people have ability to create and

manage content.

• New Way:– Both Blogs and Wikis facilitate people adding

content easily.– Used with an organisation they allow the intranet

to become the creation of many rather than of the few.

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Tags: Categorising Content

• Old Way:– Documents are given keywords based on a well

defined Taxonomy.

• New way– Let users attach tags (simple one word

descriptions) to content.

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Extensions

• Use data mining techniques to automate the work of categorisation and pattern matching.

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Signals

• Technology which signals users when new content is added.

• Can be e-mail alerts or RSS feeds.• Users no longer have to surf to check for

changes.

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Conclusion

• Knowledge is hard to mange.• Knowledge management is important and

becoming increasingly so.• There is a distinction between tacit and explict

knowledge.• Barriers exist at both the organisational level and

the individual level.• New technology is enabling people to connect

and communicate in new ways.

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Problems for Managers

• If knowledge is inside someone’s head what happens when they leave?

• How can you share knowledge across an organisation?

• Knowledge changes as it grows, it needs to be refreshed constantly.

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Knowledge is different than other Assets.

• Is knowledge a diminishing resource?• Can it be quantified?• What is the knowledge economy?• How do we learn

(i) as individuals(ii) as organisations(iii) as a society

What is wisdom?

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