Knowledge Management

leveraging knowledge for sustainable advantage

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Knowledge management addresses how ideas, information and intellectual property are developed, disseminated and deployed within an organization, or between organizations.

In an intelligent organization, the complementary capabilities of people and technology are deployed to the full. We support both technological and organizational aspects of managing knowledge.

Knowledge Management Principles

veryard projects > kmoi > knowledge > principles

	Connect Knowledge Management with Business Value	Asset Management of Knowledge Knowledge LifeCycle - Depreciation
	Connect Knowledge with Practice	Embed Knowledge in Products and Practices Refresh Knowledge from Practice and Practitioners
	Use Technology Wisely	Technical Infrastructure for Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management Issues

veryard projects > kmoi > knowledge > issues

	Fixed Decomposition of Knowledge	Component-Based Knowledge - Compartmentalization - Specialization
	Firm Attachment to Knowledge	Regarding knowledge as an end in itself. Refusal to let go of knowledge.
	Knowledge Leakage and Depreciation	Shelf-life and spoilage. The angels' share.
	Techology Rules?	Products over practices.

Applications of Knowledge Management

veryard projects > kmoi > knowledge > applications

Best Practice Sharing
Software Reuse as Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management Pitfalls

veryard projects > kmoi > knowledge > pitfalls

Symptoms

In our work with a large technology company, we found the following symptoms of poor/absent knowledge management.

Blocks in information dissemination. Islands of good practice, not spread throughout the organization.
Blocks in knowledge incorporation. New ideas not getting into training materials and methodology, not getting productized.
Loss of competitive advantage, especially in services.

Barriers to Knowledge Sharing

Some kinds of knowledge sharing are easier to get than others. In most organizations, there is an improvement ceiling: you cannot even think of going any higher/better than this. External consultancy is usually required to recognize the existence of this ceiling, and to help raise the ceiling.

Interpersonal conflicts can also get in the way of knowledge sharing. In the run-up to Year 2000, we were working with an organization that employed a high proportion of contractors on a millennium compliance programme. These contractors had been informed when they joined the project that they were expected to work as if on a production line. But it was clear that any ideas for making the process more effective or efficient would be discouraged. The main source of this discouragement was those staff who had been working there the longest (typically in project leading / supervising positions), who may have felt most threatened by this influx of contractors with their potentially disruptive ideas.

Disconnects in Organizational Learning

A model of organizational learning has been developed by the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, showing the connexions between organizational learning and individual learning.

Kim's model is a statement of an ideal learning system; real organizations typically fall short of this ideal at many points, where individual learning fails to connect into organizational learning. Kim identifies seven such disconnects, of which the first four are derived from March & Olsen.

Source: D.H. Kim, 'The link between individual and organizational learning'
Sloan Management Review, 35 (1), Fall 1993, pp 37-50

Role-constrained learning	An individual learns something, but does not have the opportunity to convert this knowledge into action, because she does not have access to the relevant activities and resources.
Audience learning	The individual affects organizational action in an ambiguous way
Superstitious learning	The link between organizational action and environmental response is severed. Thus, actions are taken, responses are observed, inferences are drawn, and learning takes place, but there is no real basis for the connexions made between organizational action and environmental response.
Learning under ambiguity	The individual affects organizational action, which affects the environment, but the causal connexions among the events are not clear. Operational learning without conceptual learning.
Situational learning	No process to extract lessons from situation
Fragmented learning	No process to convert individual knowledge into collective knowledge
Opportunistic learning	Collective action not based on collective knowledge

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