What is Knowledge Management (IT Spin)

This is a blurb from one section of my coming book around practical implementations of KM.

Perform an Internet search on Knowledge Management (KM) and you'll find thousands of hits promoting different Knowledge Management Systems.  Ninety Nine percent of those application results are going off the hype of KM and only offer basic Information Management.  So what is KM?  Knowledge Management is a corporate thought process and not an application.  It's creating a Knowledge-aware organization where corporate intellects are extracted from its members, organized in a comprehensible structure, effectively presented to all roles that require that piece of knowledge, and finally expiring outdated knowledge pieces.  The process is integral!  Changing the behavior of the organization to capture and retain know-how is Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management is not the electronic system selected to improve information management.

All too often, organizations know they are failing at managing their intellectual assets and opt to bring in a Knowledge Manager to institute knowledge practices throughout the enterprise.  Every Knowledge Manager has experienced walking into an organization and quickly learning that their organization doesn’t comprehend the fundamentals of KM, and KM practices are challenging to implement at an enterprise level.  Knowledge Managers make the mistake assuming the organization understands key concepts of KM and create roadmaps where little or no buy-in from executive management is the norm.  Knowledge Management is an organizational behavior change and the magnitude of impacts must come from the President Level and/or majority of line-of-business VP’s.  If only one line-of-business pushes KM strategies, the probability of success is diminished.  Have hope, each chapter provides small roadmaps to achieve small wins; eventually guiding your organization down the path of becoming a knowledge-aware organization.

Knowledge Managers are notorious for promoting the social aspect of KM, which other organizational leaders rarely comprehend.  Most KM cohorts argue the social structure is KM and should be pushed.  The more you push the more resistance you’ll receive and your built-up animosity is the beginning of the end, ultimately resulting in you leaving the organization.  The company then disregards KM as a strategy since it offered zero value and the KM team looked upon as non-strategic.  In the United States, we lag European & Asian corporations with understanding the impact/value of KM.  So how do you promote KM within your organization that gains buy-in from the decision makers?  To answer that question, let’s define traditional approaches of academic KM.

Knowledge Management is best described with an Information Technology (IT) skew.  Yes IT, even though IT is rarely taught in the academic KM curriculum.  Understand that Knowledge Management combines many strategies into one business strategy.

• Library Science teaches classification of artifacts.  Artifacts are everything in the organization that is viewable as an asset.  This includes documented corporate intellect, policies & procedures, training documents, how-to’s, financial statements, troubleshooting guides, expert locators, data records, Intranet content, etc.  The term “Artifacts” is used to generalize all corporate items with the ability for classification and ultimate presentation targeted towards end-users.  The classification of how all artifacts will be organized is an essential KM component.  This is termed the Taxonomy.
• Content Management is the how artifacts are captured from users’ tacit know-how and managed through a lifecycle for presentation and ultimately expiration.  Artifact capture, review, and approval are key components for managing content.
• Business Intelligence is a reporting corporate strategy to measure Key Performance Indicators and corporate data to assist with quickly adapting to required change.  Web-based dashboards show snapshots of current states for how the corporation is performing and display red-flag indicators when processes are out of compliance and/or predetermined thresholds are met.
• Social Networking is rarely performed electronically within organizations.  Social Networking relies upon an Expert repository allowing key skill sets and interest specific to each corporate employee.  This allows users to submit questions around skills needed and past project experiences to locate experts who can guide the submitters to resolving their needs.
• Communities of Practices (CoP’s) are portals organized around macro concepts where all information regarding the concepts is located.  It is a one-stop-shop for contextual information.  Human Resource employees could open their CoP and have access to everything to perform their duties; web application, knowledge-base, employee forms, assigned tasks, active projects, Instant Messaging, HR Experts, HR social network, list of policies & procedures, etc.  CoP’s should host items needed for employees to perform their job and eliminate their need to search outside of their community.
• Enterprise Search strategies provides intelligent search engines that allows users to search across many document repositories, web portal, application data, etc  while presenting the results that are role based and weighted.  Most corporate search engines perform a mass search of all Intranet portals and file servers, presenting massive result sets.  An effective search strategy interrogates numerous repositories, weights the return results based upon the users role in the company, and organizes the results based upon the corporate Taxonomy.  The features don’t stop there.  The search engine should display the number of results for each Taxonomy category and allow one-click filtering for each category.  A bread-crumb trail tracks the path the user followed through the filtering process and allows quick changes in the result set filters.
• Business Process Management (BPM) is a widely confused concept.  It is the electronic management of corporate processes.  It is conceptually bigger than workflow automation since workflows are by definition a model with the set of relationships between all the activities in a goal, from start to finish.  Business Process Management entails modeling workflows, establishing processes to dynamically assign activities, initiate electronic activities, track manual and electronic tasks, and report on the series of actions directed to some end.  Business Process Management may be as simple as automating and managing the new customer process or collaborating and approving documents.  Or it can be complex automation of manufacturing supply chain management processes or manage the complete employee on-boarding process from position requisition to automating the background check, drug screen request, and imaging of the employees’ computer equipment.

You may not fully grasp the overviews bulleted above, but each is covered in detail in future chapters.  Each of those bullet subjects have been incorporated within organizations without the use of Information Technologies.  Library Science has classified books and content for centuries; scientists have used taxonomy methods to group species, chemicals, plants, etc.  Content Management was accomplished with paper documents, manual collaboration, approval signatures, and finally housed in massive file cabinets organized by some form of classification.  Business Intelligence has improved the manufacturing industry for over a century prior to computer systems becoming prevalent.  The Japanese tracked metrics to learn achievable efficiencies to dominate the world manufacturing industry after WWII.    Social Networks were round table face-to-face discussions for all relevant users to share expertise with each other.  These networks were as small as water cooler conversations or formal auditorium symposiums with hundreds of attendees.  Communities of Practices were similar to Social Networks but differed by its goal.  Hard copy manuals housed artifacts gleaned during Social Networks and distributed between community members.  Prior to Search Engines, the military filed After Action Reviews and published best practices and lessons learned in articles distributed to individuals who may need the information in the future.  Publishing’s were highly dependent upon taxonomies derived from Library Science.  Business Process Management has always been around, examples are the building of structures built during the Mayan, Egyptian, Roman, and Asian empires.  Processes were derived and mapped out with several branching paths and based upon new information (Business Intelligence) the proper pre-defined path was taken.  Corporations followed the same Business Process Management strategies through the industrial revolution as we strive for today.  The primary difference is our current ability to automate manual processes where decision paths are automatically decided and the systems navigate workflows down the proper paths.

The rest of this book will provide examples using current applications and processes that will help you understand how to implement the bulleted components of KM, documented within this chapter.  Any line-of-business expert or business analyst should quickly understand the concepts and quickly start impacting KM change within their organization.  A few of the chapters will be better understood with some technical expertise.