6.2 KM IN PRACTICE - PROCEDURES AND PRACTICES
6.2.1
KNOWLEDGE AUDIT
The
idea of an information auditory much predates KM as we have defined KM here.
Accompanying, or more accurately a component of, the Information Resources
Management (IRM) movement of the 1970’s was a strong emphasis upon the
information or knowledge audit. The foremost exponent of the information or
knowledge audit was Forrest (Woody) Horton. Some of the reasons for and
benefits of an information audit include:
·
First of course, the elucidation of what
information the organization possesses: where it is located? how is it
organized? how can it be accessed? who is responsible for it? etc.
·
The identification of duplicate or
partially duplicated information and information gathering and maintenance,
with the potential realization of cost savings.
·
The identification of information being
gathered and maintained that is no longer salient or necessary, with the
potential realization of cost savings.
With the development of KM, there ensued
a shift to amuch greater emphasis upon knowledge embodied in people. Indeed,
Moulton, L. [2008] advocates a three-stage process for a knowledge audit that
starts with people and emphasizes knowledge embodied in people.
The first stage focuses on people, “their
knowledge and expertise and their connections to others” [Moulton, L., 2008, p.
80]. The ideal result is a “map” of:
- ·
Who is connected to whom, formally and
informally?
- ·
What are their formal roles and job
descriptions, and informal relationships and roles?
- ·
Where do expertise, methods, differing
views of the organization reside?
- ·
What are the successful knowledge sharing
engagements and practices?
- ·
What are the barriers to information and
knowledge transfer?
- ·
What are the cultural behaviors that are
dictating successes or failures to share and leverage knowledge?
Clearly,
the techniques used in creating a knowledge audit or knowledge map are those borrowed
from social network analysis and anthropology, and appropriately so, since
Knowledge Management is interdisciplinary by nature, spanning boundaries of
thought and interests.
The
second stage focuses on programs, projects, and products. How does information
flow in and around them? Are there communities of practice even if interest
groups are not so named? The third stage focuses on documentation and how
information is captured explicitly. The KM era notion of an information audit,
in contrast with the earlier IRM era, is definitely focused on people first. In
fact, Moulton’s third stage of the knowledge audit is essentially the
traditional information audit, with a Stage one and a Stage two added in front.
Powell,T. [2004b] provides a “Knowledge Matrix” that serves as a very useful
checklist for a knowledge audit.
6.2.2
TAGS, TAXONOMIES, AND CONTENT MANAGEMENT
The
KM field call a taxonomy a classification scheme, or a classificatory or
syndetic structure. But most writers in the KM domain come from the business
world and are unaware of that terminology, and use the word “taxonomy” that
they remember from their high school and college science courses.) Stage III of
the development of KM, described above, can well be called the Taxonomy Stage.
The
tag and taxonomy stage of KM consists primarily of assembling various
information resources in some sort of portal-like environment and making them
available to the organization. This can include internally generated
information, including lessons learned databases and expertise locators, as
well as external information, the open web and also deep web information
subscribed to by the organization. The area of managing content is still in its
early days and will clearly expand and develop as organizations see the need
for preserving, organizing, and re-using knowledge objects.
The
obvious consequence of this plethora of data and information from multiple
sources is great terminological inconsistency and confusion, and that, in turn,
drives the appeal of syndetic data structures and taxonomies that can assist
the user in locating information or knowledge and result in better and more
effective searching. There is now an industry sector whose role is to provide
software and expertise to assist
organizations in developing their taxonomic systems. Most of those
organizations are represented among the vendors at the KM World Conference.KM
World, a controlled circulation, i.e., free, magazine publishes a very useful
annual compilation of vendors and products, particularly in the CMS domain, but
including KM broadly as well.
6.2.3
LESSONS LEARNED DATABASES
Lessons
Learned databases are databases that attempt to capture and to make accessible
knowledge that has been operationally obtained and typically would not have
been captured in a fixed medium (to use copyright terminology). In the KM
context, the emphasis is typically upon capturing knowledge embedded in persons
and making it explicit. The lessons learned concept or practice is one that
might be described as having been birthed by KM, as there is very little in the
way of a direct antecedent.
Early
in the KM movement, the phrase typically used was “best practices,” but that
phrase was soon replaced with “lessons learned.” The reasons were that “lessons
learned” was broader and more inclusive, and because “best practice” seemed too
restrictive and could be interpreted as meaning there was only one best
practice in a situation. The major international consulting firms were very
aware of this and led the movement to substitute the new term. “Best Practices”
succeeded by “Lessons Learned” was the most common hallmark phrase of Stage I
of KM development.
A
wonderfully instructive example of a “lesson learned” is recounted by the KM
consultant Mazzie,M. [2003]. The story derives from his experience in the KM
department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Wyeth had recently introduced a new
pharmaceutical agent primarily for pediatric use. They expected it to be a
substantial success because, unlike its competitors, it needed to be administered
only once a day, which would make it much easier for the caregiver to ensure
that the child followed the drug regimen. Sales of the drug started well but
soon turned disappointing. One sales rep (what the pharmaceutical industry used
to call detail men), however, discovered the reason for the disappointing sales
and the solution. The problem was that kids objected strenuously to the taste
of the drug, and caregivers were reporting to prescribing physicians that they
couldn’t get their kid to continue taking the drug. The solution was orange
juice. A swig of orange juice quite effectively masked the offensive taste. If
the sales rep informed the physician that the therapy should be conveyed to the
caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously first
thing in the morning, then there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine.
There are also lessons learned in this story about motivation for information
sharing (discussed later).
The
implementation of a lessons learned system is complex both politically and
operationally. Many of the questions surrounding such a system are difficult to
answer. Who is to decide what constitutes a worthwhile lesson learned? Are
employees free to submit to the system unvetted? Most successful lessons
learned implementations have concluded that such a system needs to be monitored
and that there needs to be a vetting and approval mechanism before items are
mounted as lessons learned. How long do items stay in the system? Who decides
when an item is no longer salient and timely? Most successful lessons learned
systems have an active weeding or stratification process. Without a clearly
designed process for weeding, the proportion of new and crisp items inevitably
declines, the system begins to look stale, and usage and utility falls. It is
the same phenomenon that school librarians have observed for decades. Materials
need to be current and relevant. Deletion, of course, is not necessarily loss
and destruction. Using stratification principles, items removed from the
foreground can be archived and moved to the background, but still be available.
6.2.4
EXPERTISE LOCATION
If knowledge resides in people, then one of the
best ways to learn what an expert knows is to talk with one. Locating the right
expert with the knowledge you need, though, can be a problem. The basic
function of an expertise locator system is straightforward, it is to identify
and locate those persons within an organization who have expertise in a
particular area. Such systems were commonly known as “Yellow Page” systems in
the early days of KM, the name coming from the telephone book yellow pages, the
section of the phone book, or a separate volume of the phone book, organized
for subject search. In recent years, the term expertise locator or expertise
location has replaced yellow pages as being rather more precise. After all the
yellow pages metaphor with its implication of subject search could apply to
many areas of KM, such as for example lessons learned and content management.
There
are now three areas which typically supply data for an expertise locator
system, employee resumes, employee self identification of areas of expertise,
typically by being requested to fill out a form online, or by algorithmic
analysis of electronic communications from and to the employee. The latter
approach is typically based on email traffic, but it can include other social
networking electronic communications such as Twitter and Facebook. Commercial
packages to match queries with expertise are available. Most of them have
load-balancing schemes so as not to overload any particular expert. Typically,
such systems rank the degree of presumed expertise and will shift a query down
the expertise ranking when the higher choices appear to be becoming overloaded.
Such systems also often have a feature by which the requester can flag the
request as a priority, and the system will then try to match higher priority
requests with higher presumed (calculated) expertise rank.
6.2.5
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE (COPS)
Communities
of Practice (CoPs) are groups of individuals with shared interests that come
together in person or virtually to tell stories, discuss best practices, and
talk over lessons learned [Wenger, E., 1998a,Wenger and Snyder,
1999].Communities of practice emphasize the social nature of learning within or
across organizations. Conversations around the water cooler are often taken for
granted, but organizations find that when workers give up a company office to
work out of their home, that the natural knowledge sharing that occurs in
social spaces must be replicated in an online form.
As
an alternative, workers are called in for periodic meetings for the express
purpose of learning from each other [McInerney, C., 2000], or they’re
encouraged to participate on online forums. In an information society where
knowledge is considered an important resource for individuals and
organizations, processes to share knowledge should be considered integral to
any strategic or tactical plan. Many large firms, especially those in the
pharmaceutical industry, have adopted internship and leadership programs for
the express purpose of helping promising new associates learn about how the
company operates and to teach them that today, learning is an ongoing part of
work.
In
the context of KM, CoPs are generally understood to mean electronically linked
communities. Electronic linkage is not essential of course, but since KM arose
in the consulting community from the awareness of the potential of Intranets to
link geographically dispersed organizations, this orientation is understandable
and inevitable.
The
organization and maintenance of CoPs is not a simple and easy undertaking. As
Durham, M. [2004] points out, there are several key roles to be filled, which
she describes as manager, moderator, and thought leader. They need not
necessarily be three separate people, but in some cases they will need to be.
For a CoP, some questions that need to be thought about are:
- · Who
fills those roles? manager, moderator, and thought leader.
- · How
is the CoP managed?
- · Are
postings open, or does someone vet or edit the postings?
- · How
is the CoP kept fresh and vital?
- · When
and how (under what rules) are items removed?
- · How
are those items archived? (Stratification again)
- · Who
reviews the CoP for activity? Identifies potential for new members, or suggests
that the CoP may have outlived its usefulness?
source:
Knowledge Management (KM)
Processes in Organizations
Theoretical Foundations and Practice
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