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