Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Within a company, knowledge is the ability to turn information and data into effective action.(1) Within any organization, a great amount of knowledge is embedded in individuals, and is shared between individuals. Other knowledge resources include legacy databases, operational data of many kinds, even email.

Recognizing that knowledge is a corporate asset, knowledge management (KM) is the process of capturing, sharing, and making accessible a company's collective knowledge and expertise.

Information within companies used to be centralized. As Botkin points out (2), the 1960s were characterized as the database age, with data on centralized mainframes. In the 1970s and 1980s, DSSs (Decision Support Systems) coughed up information to managers and top-level individuals within a company. Throughout these years, we thought more about information access than information management.

Now, in the 1990s and beyond, networked workers have distributed access to increasing wealths of information. The knowledge landscape and its elements have both changed. Workers are valued for what they know and are able to do. But, they have to be connected to the resources they need (information, people with expertise, etc.).

KM uses technology and other processes to facilitate identifying and sharing knowledge. As many writers point out, technology is the enabler, not the solution. And having Lotus Notes, or some other groupware available on your intranet, does not mean that a knowledge-hoarding culture automatically changes into a knowledge-sharing one. Technology is the means by which content can be captured, stored, and delivered to people who need it, when they need it. But the company culture has to establish, encourage, and reward sharing.

KM practices focus on facilitating the transfer of information and knowledge within the company in order to achieve company and work objectives. Individual workers need to see the system as benefiting them as well, and knowledge-sharing needs to be well-established as the work norm and incorporated into the company's reward system.

Common KM practices include expertise databases of various types. On a company level, they may be called company yellow pages; some enterprises refer to knowledge mapping. On the individual level, the activity may be called an information audit. What is common to all such projects is the intent to make explicit and usable to all company elements expertise held by individuals and groups.

More sophisticated techniques include knowledge mapping software programs, currently under development by various companies. Some of these rely on artificial intelligence agents to relate and visually provide groupings of expertise. Some years back, WEBSOM (Web Self-Organizing Map) <http://websom.hut.fi/websom/milliondemo/html/root.html> was a prototype of this kind of effort.

Commercially, KM is a growing business. "What you really need is something like an EKG machine that listens to the ideas flowing through your business in a fairly passive manner," notes David Gilmour. Tacit Knowledge Systems <http://www.tacit.com/> believes it has found a powerful answer in its KnowledgeMail software, an automated approach to mining employee email for keywords and expertise, with built-in privacy safeguards.

IBM is developing an Intelligent Miner for Text <http://www.ibm.com/software/data/iminer/fortext/> Autonomy has a host of products: Knowledge Server, Knowledge Building, along with its Portal-in-a-Box <http://www.autonomy.com/knowledge/index.html>. Megaputer Intelligence <http://www.megaputer.com/> offers both data mining and text mining products (software that digs into text or data within the company to uncover information relationships).

Sophisticated KM departments will talk about the company's knowledge architecture, i.e., its knowledge networks and the full array of KM tools that facilitate the growth of knowledge. Well-established KM departments will also point to ways of measuring that the KM effort is working; they do this by collecting information on, for example, the number of solutions worked out in an online environment; estimates of time saved hunting for information; and tracking that new employees are coming up to speed faster.

How pervasive is this new trend? Recent surveys by the Conference Board and the American Management Association show that at least one half of U.S. companies, and up to 72 percent of overseas firms, have some kind of knowledge management initiative planned or underway.(3) Many large organizations (e.g., Ford Motor Company, Chevron, Coca-Cola, General Motors, IBM Corporation, Chevron, Lotus Development, Ernst & Young, even the U.S. General Services Administration) have Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) now. Recognizing that work is a largely learning environment in today's world, an alternative term is Chief Learning Officer (CLO).

Knowledge Management offers some Web Resources I put together to respond to inquiries by some of the individuals I interviewed during this project.

(1) Wayne Applehans, and Alden Globe, Managing Knowledge: A Practical Web-Based Approach, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1998, p. 18.

(2) Jim Botkin, Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company. Boston: Free Press, 1999.

(3) Dede Bonner, "Enter the Chief Knowledge Officer," Training & Development, vol. 54, no. 3, February 2000, p. 36+

last rev. 4/13/0

On-the-Job Lessons

Investigating Information Age Realities in the World of Work

Sabbatical Project Report homepage


	Knowledge Management Within a company, knowledge is the ability to turn information and data into effective action.(1) Within any organization, a great amount of knowledge is embedded in individuals, and is shared between individuals. Other knowledge resources include legacy databases, operational data of many kinds, even email. Recognizing that knowledge is a corporate asset, knowledge management (KM) is the process of capturing, sharing, and making accessible a company's collective knowledge and expertise. Information within companies used to be centralized. As Botkin points out (2), the 1960s were characterized as the database age, with data on centralized mainframes. In the 1970s and 1980s, DSSs (Decision Support Systems) coughed up information to managers and top-level individuals within a company. Throughout these years, we thought more about information access than information management. Now, in the 1990s and beyond, networked workers have distributed access to increasing wealths of information. The knowledge landscape and its elements have both changed. Workers are valued for what they know and are able to do. But, they have to be connected to the resources they need (information, people with expertise, etc.). KM uses technology and other processes to facilitate identifying and sharing knowledge. As many writers point out, technology is the enabler, not the solution. And having Lotus Notes, or some other groupware available on your intranet, does not mean that a knowledge-hoarding culture automatically changes into a knowledge-sharing one. Technology is the means by which content can be captured, stored, and delivered to people who need it, when they need it. But the company culture has to establish, encourage, and reward sharing. KM practices focus on facilitating the transfer of information and knowledge within the company in order to achieve company and work objectives. Individual workers need to see the system as benefiting them as well, and knowledge-sharing needs to be well-established as the work norm and incorporated into the company's reward system. Common KM practices include expertise databases of various types. On a company level, they may be called company yellow pages; some enterprises refer to knowledge mapping. On the individual level, the activity may be called an information audit. What is common to all such projects is the intent to make explicit and usable to all company elements expertise held by individuals and groups. More sophisticated techniques include knowledge mapping software programs, currently under development by various companies. Some of these rely on artificial intelligence agents to relate and visually provide groupings of expertise. Some years back, WEBSOM (Web Self-Organizing Map) <http://websom.hut.fi/websom/milliondemo/html/root.html> was a prototype of this kind of effort. Commercially, KM is a growing business. "What you really need is something like an EKG machine that listens to the ideas flowing through your business in a fairly passive manner," notes David Gilmour. Tacit Knowledge Systems <http://www.tacit.com/> believes it has found a powerful answer in its KnowledgeMail software, an automated approach to mining employee email for keywords and expertise, with built-in privacy safeguards. IBM is developing an Intelligent Miner for Text <http://www.ibm.com/software/data/iminer/fortext/> Autonomy has a host of products: Knowledge Server, Knowledge Building, along with its Portal-in-a-Box <http://www.autonomy.com/knowledge/index.html>. Megaputer Intelligence <http://www.megaputer.com/> offers both data mining and text mining products (software that digs into text or data within the company to uncover information relationships). Sophisticated KM departments will talk about the company's knowledge architecture, i.e., its knowledge networks and the full array of KM tools that facilitate the growth of knowledge. Well-established KM departments will also point to ways of measuring that the KM effort is working; they do this by collecting information on, for example, the number of solutions worked out in an online environment; estimates of time saved hunting for information; and tracking that new employees are coming up to speed faster. How pervasive is this new trend? Recent surveys by the Conference Board and the American Management Association show that at least one half of U.S. companies, and up to 72 percent of overseas firms, have some kind of knowledge management initiative planned or underway.(3) Many large organizations (e.g., Ford Motor Company, Chevron, Coca-Cola, General Motors, IBM Corporation, Chevron, Lotus Development, Ernst & Young, even the U.S. General Services Administration) have Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) now. Recognizing that work is a largely learning environment in today's world, an alternative term is Chief Learning Officer (CLO). Knowledge Management offers some Web Resources I put together to respond to inquiries by some of the individuals I interviewed during this project. (1) Wayne Applehans, and Alden Globe, *Managing Knowledge: A Practical Web-Based Approach, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1998, p. 18. (2) Jim Botkin, Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company. Boston: Free Press, 1999. (3) Dede Bonner, "Enter the Chief Knowledge Officer," Training & Development, vol. 54, no. 3, February 2000, p. 36+ last rev. 4/13/0 On-the-Job Lessons* Investigating Information Age Realities in the World of Work Sabbatical Project Report homepage