Professional Documents
Culture Documents
(DISTANCE MODE)
DBA 1735
IV SEMESTER
COURSE MATERIAL
Dr
Dr.. R. SEN AP
SENAP ATHI
APA
Professor and Head
Department of Management Studies
Adhiparasakthi Engineering College
Melmaruvathur – 603 319
Reviewer
DR.T.V
DR.T.V.GEETHA
.V.GEETHA
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Anna University Chennai
Chennai – 600 025
Editorial Board
Dr.T
Dr.T.V
.T.V.Geetha
.V.Geetha Dr.H.P
Dr.H.P eer
.H.Peer
eeruu Mohamed
Professor Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Management Studies
Anna University Chennai Anna University Chennai
Chennai - 600 025 Chennai - 600 025
Dr.C
.C.. Chella
Dr.C ppan
Chellappan Dr.A.K
Dr.A.K annan
.A.Kannan
Professor Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Anna University Chennai Anna University Chennai
Chennai - 600 025 Chennai - 600 025
Copyrights Reserved
(For Private Circulation only)
ii
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author has drawn inputs from several sources for the preparation of this course material, to meet the
requirements of the syllabus. The author gratefully acknowledges the following sources:
1. Knowledge Management-Classic and Contemporary Works, Edited by Daryl Morey, Mark Maybury
and Bhavani Thuraisingham, Universities Press, Hyderabad, Reprint Edition, 2007.
2. Knowledge Management for Competitive Advantage by Harish Chandra Chaudhary, Excel Books, First
Edition, 2005.
4. Unleashing the Knowledge Force, by Ganesh Natarajn and Uma Ganesh, Tata McGraw-Hill, First Reprint,
New Delhi, 2007.
5. Knowledge Management by Sudhir Warier, Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, Second Reprint Edition,
Noida, 2007.
6. Knowledge Management-Design and Implementation Edited by Tapas Mahapatra and Shalini Khandelwal,
The ICFAI University Press, Hyderabad, First Edition, 2005.
7. Knowledge Management by Shelda Debowski, John Wiley & Sons Australia Ltd, First Edition, 2006.
8. Knowledge Management for Business Strategy Edited by N.M.Shanthi, The ICFAI University Press,
Hyderabad, First Edition, 2006.
9. The Knowledge Management Toolkit by Amrit Tiwana, Pearson Education, Second Edition, New Delhi,
2006.
10. Knowledge Management Edited by Nasreen Taher, The ICFAI University Press, Hyderabad, First Edition,
2005.
11. Knowledge Management by Elias M. Awad and Hassan M. Ghaziri, Pearson Education, Delhi, Second
Impression, 2008.
Inspite of at most care taken to prepare the list of references any omission in the list is only accidental and
not purposeful.
Dr. R. SENAPATHI
Author
v
DBA 1735 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
UNIT I INTRODUCTION
Knowledge Attributes – Fundamentals of knowledge formation – Tacit and Explicit knowledge – Knowledge
sourcing, abstraction, conversion and diffusion.
Knowledge Management and organizational learning, architecture – important considerations – collection and
codification of knowledge – Repositories, structure and life cycle – Knowledge Management infrastructure –
Knowledge Management applications – Collaborative platforms.
Developing and sustaining knowledge culture – Knowledge culture enablers – implementing knowledge culture
enhancement programs – Communities of practice – Developing organizational memory.
Knowledge Management tools, techniques – Knowledge Management and measurements – Knowledge audit –
Knowledge careers – Practical implementation of Knowledge management systems – Case studies.
REFERENCES
1. Key issues in the New Knowledge Management –Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy,
Butterworth – Hienemann.
2. Knowledge Management – Classic and contemporary works Edited by Daryl Morey & others Universities
Press India Private Limited.
3. Knowledge Management, Shelda Debowski, John Wiley & Sons.
4. Knowledge Management, Sudhir Warier,Vikas Publishing House Private Limited.
5. Knowledge Management System Theory and practice,Edited by Stwart Barnes Thomson Learning.
6. Handbook on knowledge management,Edited by CW. Hol Sapple Springer.
vii
CONTENTS
UNIT I
OVERVIEW OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1.1. INTRODUCTION 1
1.2. LEARNING OBJECTIVES 2
1.3. THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT 2
1.3.1 Definitions of knowledge management 3
1.3.2 Objectives of knowledge management 5
1.3.3 Motivation for knowledge management 6
1.3.4 Knowledge management cycle 8
1.3.5 Domains of knowledge management 9
1.3.6 Uses of knowledge management 11
1.3.7 Nature of knowledge management 12
1.4. DICIPLINES OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT 13
1.5. EVOLUTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT 14
1.6. SHORT HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT 15
1.7. AREAS FOR RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT 16
1.8. KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY 19
1.8.1 Background of knowledge management 21
1.8.2 What is knowledge economy? 21
1.8.3 Impact of knowledge in the knowledge economy 22
1.8.4 Characteristics of knowledge economy 23
1.8.5 Key drivers of knowledge economy 23
1.8.6 Growth of IT industry in knowledge economy 25
1.8.7 Implications of knowledge economy 26
1.9. INDIA AS A KNOWLWEDGE ECONOMY 27
1.10. TECHNOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT 28
1.10.1 Electronic technology for knowledge management 29
1.10.2 Information technology for knowledge management 31
1.10.3 Knowledge management technology 32
1.11. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT MATRIX 37
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1.12. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY 38
1.12.1 The need for knowledge management strategy 38
1.12.2 Development of organizational KM strategy 39
1.13. PRIORITISING KNOWLEDGE STRATEGIES 40
1.14. KNOWLEDGE AS A STRATEGIC ASSET 41
1.14.1. Asset value of knowledge 43
UNIT II
KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND PROCESSING
2.1 INTRODUCTION 47
2.2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES 47
2.3 PERSPECTIVES ON KNOWLEDGE 47
2.3.1 Data, Information and knowledge 48
2.3.2. Defining knowledge 51
2.4 KNOWLEDGE ATTRIBUTES 51
2.5 FUNDAMENTALS OF KNOWLEDGE FORMATION 53
2.5.1 Knowledge formation 53
2.5.2 Flows of knowledge 53
2.6 ORGANISATIONAL KNOWLEDGE 54
2.7 TACIT AND EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE 56
2.7.1 What is tacit knowledge? 56
2.7.2. What is explicit knowledge? 59
2.7.3 Typical application of tacit and explicit knowledge 62
2.7.4 Basic beliefs between tacit and explicit knowledge approaches 62
2.7.5 Comparison of properties of tacit Vs explicit knowledge 62
2.7.6 Advantages and disadvantages of tacit
Vs explicit knowledge approaches 63
2.7.7 Four modes of knowledge conversion 64
2.8 ORGANISATIONAL KNOWLEDGE CREATION 65
2.8.1 Knowledge sourcing 66
2.8.2 Knowledge abstraction 68
2.8.3 Knowledge conversion 69
2.8.4 Knowledge diffusion 69
2.8.5 Knowledge development and refinement 69
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UNIT III
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
3.1 INTRODUCTION 73
3.2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES 73
3.3 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND
ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING 73
3.4 HE CONCEPT OF ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING 74
3.4.1 Definitions of organizational learning 76
3.4.2 Benefits of organizational learning 77
3.4.3. What is learning organizations? 77
3.4.4 Orientation for effective knowledge dissemination 78
3.4.5 Characteristics of learning organization 81
3.4.6 Characteristics of the traditional Vs learning organization 81
3.4.7 Facilitators of organizational learning 82
3.4.8 The five learning disciplines 82
3.5 ARCHITECTURE FOR ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING 84
3.6. CATURING AND CODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE 87
3.6.1 Capturing tacit knowledge 88
3.6.2 Other knowledge capture techniques 94
3.7 KNOWLEDGE CODIFICATION 99
3.7.1 Codifying knowledge 100
3.7.2 Codification tools and procedures 100
3.8 KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE 104
3.9 REPOSITORIES 110
3.9.1 Content of knowledge repository 111
3.9.2 Features of knowledge repository 111
3.9.3 The design of knowledge repository 112
3.9.4 The knowledge refinery 113
3.9.5 Repository life cycle 113
3.9.6 Repository structure 114
3.10 KNOWLEDE MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS 114
3.11 COLLABORATIVE PLATFORMS 117
3.11.1 Features of platforms 118
3.11.2 Tools for collaborative platform 119
3.11.3 Collaborative knowledge applications 122
3.12 CASE STUDY 123
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UNIT IV
KNOWLEDGE CULTURE IN ORGANISATION
4.1 INTRODUCTION 127
4.2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES 129
4.3 ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE 129
4.3.1 Knowledge cultures 130
4.3.2 Improving knowledge culture 131
4.4 KNOWLEDGE CULTURE ENABLERS 133
4.5 IMPLEMENTING KNOWLEDGE CULTURE
ENHANCEMENT PROGRAMS 137
4.6. MAINTANING THE KNOWLEDGE CULTURE 139
4.7. COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE 141
4.7.1. Defining communities of practice 141
4.7.2. Communities of practice in organizations 142
4.7.3. Importance of communities to organizations 145
4.7.4. Developing and nurturing communities of practice 146
4.8 DEVELOPING ORGANISATIONAL MEMORY 149
UNIT V
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT - LOOKING AHEAD
5.1 INTRODUCTION 153
5.2. LEARNING OBJECTIVES 154
5.3. KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES 154
5.3.1. Knowledge capture and creation tools 154
5.3.2. Knowledge sharing and dissemination tools 159
5.3.3. Knowledge acquisition and application tools 166
5.3.4. Strategic implications of KM tools 170
5.4. KNOWLEDGE MANAGENMENT AND MEASUREMENT 171
5.5. KNOWLEDGE MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES 179
5.5.1. Intangible asset measurement 179
5.5.2. Intangible asset monitor 181
5.5.3. IC Rating 183
5.5.4. Balanced scorecard 183
5.5.5. Implementation barriers 187
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5.6. KNOWLEDGE AUDIT 187
5.6.1. Aims and objectives of knowledge audit 188
5.6.2. Key tasks of K-audit 189
5.6.3. Process mapping 190
5.6.4. Outcomes of knowledge audit 191
5.6.5. Components of knowledge audit 191
5.7. KNOWLEDGE CAREERS 194
5.7.1. Organisational knowledge role classification 195
5.8. CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT CAREERS 196
5.8.1 The qualities and attributes of CKO 197
5.8.2 Knowledge management analyst 198
5.8.3 Knowledge architect 198
5.8.4. Knowledge strategist 199
5.8.5. Knowledge manager 200
5.8.6. Research analyst 201
5.8.7. KM consultant 202
5.8.8. Media specialist 202
5.8.9. Senior market intelligence librarian 203
5.8.10 Knowledge engineer 203
5.8.11 KM specialist 204
5.8.12 Intranet developer 204
5.8.13 KM director 205
5.8.14 Director of ontologies 205
5.8.15 Ontologist 206
5.8.16 NLP specialist 207
5.8.17 Knowledge development manager 207
5.9 CASE STUDIES 208
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
UNIT I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Information is not knowledge. That was realized clearly during the Information Age
when organizations found themselves drowning in huge in-house stores of unusable data.
The fundamental difference between knowledge management as it was practiced in the
past and how it has evolved today is that corporations are now using network technologies
to enable employees to find and use knowledge and, in the process, contribute to a more
direct impact on customer satisfaction and corporate value.
Companies that effectively use knowledge break it down into its basic components.
Knowing why represents having a basic understanding of the reasons for facts, conditions,
job responsibilities, client requirements, etc. Knowing what means knowing the cause of
a problem or condition. Knowing where provides a spatial reference to understanding.
Knowing how provides the critical element for problem solving, the knowledge of how to
get something done. Knowing when provides a temporal reference and is closely tied to
timing and opportunity development.
KM Viewpoint 1.1
In 1996, teams of leading heart surgeons from five New England medical centers observed
one another’s operating room practices and exchanged ideas about their most effective
techniques in collaborative learning experiments. The result was a 24% drop in their overall
mortality rate for coronary bypass surgery. The concept of Knowledge Management proves
to be a life-saver here!
based documents (reports) available internally within the organization, and also, the related
NOTES information procured from the external resources. A logical extension of this concept is
into the entire organization, in the form of Enterprise Knowledge Management (EKM).
Among the areas of greatest concern for the modern knowledge worker (from CIO down
to the Content Manager), is identifying, collecting, securing and maintaining the information
(aka knowledge base) of the organization. Without a process to ensure this system’s
usefulness, there are invariably holes which are only found when a user tries to obtain that
(missing) information.
Let us see the other useful definitions of KM to have a still broader outlook of KM.
Arun O. Gupta, Senior Director Business Technology, Pfizer Ltd describes “KM as
a practice that addresses the need for information that is required for making
effective decisions”. If this information is structured, the same can be translated into
knowledge by applying a set of predefined rules. For example, comments on discussion
boards can be converted into useful FAQs.
The perception of KM differs from one industry vertical to another. In software service
companies, knowledge management can be a highly effective practice as it helps capture
knowledge across different skill sets. For instance, information regarding common queries
about specific technologies (if captured on the Intranet) can help solve common problems.
This, in turn, boosts productivity. As Indian software service organisations employ software
professionals in thousands, employee inputs can be extremely useful for organisational
growth.
Satish Joshi, Senior VP, Patni Computer Systems Limited says “For us, “KM is a set
of processes and tools which give us the ability to leverage and combine the
collective abilities of our knowledge workers.”
According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, “KM refers to the
strategies and processes of identifying, capturing, and leveraging knowledge to
enhance competitiveness”.
Internal and external pressures and rapid inflows of information make effective
operation of organizations extremely difficult (see Figure 1.2). The Internet and E-
Commerce have generated competitors that are on the other side of the world but only a
mouse click away. Employees are moving from organization to organization at alarming
rates, taking with them important knowledge of company operations that must be relearned
by new employees. The pace of technology, particularly information technology (IT)
continues to force management to consider organizational change associated with the
implementations of electronic commerce store-fronts, automated inventory procurement
and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Changes in government legislation and
regulatory practices provide a steady flow of new threats and opportunities. Customers
are demanding new products and services that are bundled to their preference. Subsequently,
companies are being forced to move faster and at new levels of personalized interaction.
Filtering through this barrage of information for relevant data or combinations of information
is a formidable undertaking. To address these challenges, organizations must develop
management methods that accept information as a valued resource, convert information
into organizational knowledge and generate value-added information from that knowledge.
4 NOTES
Competition
Global Employee
Opportunities Turn-over
Organization
Customer
Demands Technological
Change
Regulatory
Change
Employees
Partners
Suppliers
Environmental data
Observation
and Analysis
Problems
Information Opportunities
INFORMATION
Knowledge Storage Theory
Consolidation Processing Generation
Communication
Approach
Results Methods
Testing and
Application
An individual makes his or her way through the world being inundated with data and
information from the environment. To deal with this, an individual uses personal memory
as well as notes and paper files for storing information. The individual’s brain processes the
information with possibly the aid of a calculator or a small computer. Communication of
information is primarily internal from a knowledge management perspective. As individuals
we pride ourselves on our ability to learn from our triumphs and defeats through the effective
consolidation of knowledge. As the figure depicts, knowledge consolidated at the end of
one iteration through the knowledge management cycle provides new information that can
be used in yet another iteration.
Larger organizations have a difficult time emulating the knowledge management cycle
of an individual. Large companies and institutions receive proposals, queries and other
forms of information from a multitude of customers, channels, partners, government and
regulatory bodies. Information is stored in various formats and locations that include policy
documents, filing cabinets, internal process and product databases as well as external
customer and distribution databases, microfiche, audio tape and video tape. Portions of
the information in-flow are processed by individual brains only to be confounded by a
multitude of meetings in which the persons assigned to various roles change from quarter
to quarter. Various computer systems developed over the last ten years process portions
of information in silos that have a difficult time talking to one another for technical and
political reasons. Communication is achieved via a cornucopia of local area network,
Internet, mobile devices. Meetings must be scheduled several weeks in advance for
executives and many events must be cancelled and rescheduled due to conflicts. Knowledge
gained at the end of a product cycle is often lost and for this reason failure can recur and
success is not repeated as often as possible. Subsequently, large organizations are said to
be lethargic, lacking creativity and slow to react to meet a changing environment. The
chaos that results is largely due to the ineffective management of organizational knowledge.
The diagram (Figure 1.4) is organized in four parts to indicate four technical domains
for Knowledge Management. And the tools listed in the four technical domains can be
used to help institutions share, distribute, capture and create knowledge better.
NOTES
Knowledge Sharing: Group Collaboration Systems (GCS) foster the creation and
sharing of knowledge among people working in groups. Improved group coordination
and collaboration is enabled through e-mail, teleconferencing, data-conferencing,
videoconferencing, groupware, and Internet-based applications. Groupware and Intranets
represent the most prevalent examples.
Ultimately making the business more adept at change, with the aim of improving
competitiveness and profitability. To facilitate this vision, not only does the business have
structured data available in its strategic applications, it also has network drives and databases,
may be an Intranet, the information on individuals’ hard drives, external sources and, most
importantly, the knowledge, skills and experiences of its employees.
Knowledge management draws upon a vast number of diverse disciplines such as:
• Religion and Philosophy to understand the role and nature of knowledge and the
permission of individuals ‘to think for themselves’
• Psychology to understand the role of knowledge in human behavior. Psychology
too is concerned about different kinds of knowing as well as about how and why
people learn, forgets, ignore, act, or fail to act. It looks at natural cognitive processes
and raises questions of will and motivation that make it impossible to think of
knowledge in terms of mechanical transfer from donors to recipients.
• Business Theory & Economics to create strategies, determine priorities, evaluate
progress and to understand work, and its organization.
KM Viewpoint 1.3
When BP (now BP Amoco) decided to analyze, using a
knowledge perspective, why they had such differing performance
levels in their deep-water drilling rigs, they found wide differences
in local knowledge and practices, knowledge that was mostly tacit
and undocumented. As a result of their efforts to have this local
knowledge more globally practiced, BP achieved very significant
savings and subsequently achieved legendary status within
knowledge management circles.
The following table provides a bird’s eye view of the important phases of evolution of
Knowledge Management:
During the era of business process reengineering, cost accountants saw the
most knowledgeable workers as an unnecessary expense, a liability to be eliminated through
down sizing or early retirement. Many organizations made the strategic mistake of pushing
their intellectual assets out the door. Knowledge hoarding was then replaced by a culture
of knowledge hiding.
During the 1990s chief executives in the consulting trades realized that the foundation
of our economy had been shifting from natural resources toward intellectual assets. They
began evaluating how knowledge was being used in their organizations. The biggest shock
came with the discovery that 80 percent of corporate knowledge assets were not owned
by the companies. They went home every night with the employees. As a result, questions
such as how knowledge is acquired, used and delivered became paramount.
These early pioneers knew that their organizations had to adapt quickly. They spent
their time rethinking what they were doing, how they were doing it and why. They tore
down barriers and ancient processes and replaced them with a systematic approach to
knowledge sharing based on the fluid dynamics of a networked economy.
With the advent of networked resources, new ways to codify, share, store and
NOTES deliver knowledge enabled organizations to strategically use critical knowledge more easily
and cheaply. The challenge, however, became how to develop a successful knowledge
management model—there were too few examples from which to work. The result was a
new knowledge management industry that was born out of the few models that were
developed in those early days. Today, a group of leading edge companies like Lotus,
Open Text, Documentum and others have developed knowledge management tools that
enable corporations to manage and deliver strategic knowledge. It is no longer necessary
to reinvent the wheel, and since many of the tools available were created for management
consulting firms, it is possible to select and integrate a full-featured Knowledge Management
System that includes and integrates key components like document management and
collaborative software.
Retrieval and filtering of data / information. The rate of data and information
in-flow to organizations by way of card-readers, automated telemetry, telephone calls and NOTES
most notably the Internet is overwhelming. Most company wrestle every day with effective
and efficient methods of retrieve data and filtering out the salient information. This is an
area where both people skills and technology require improvement. Studies of the relative
strengths and weaknesses of systematic approaches to information retrieval and filtering in
the workplace would be of benefit. The education of knowledge workers in library science
research skills is needed. Intelligent user interfaces that can learn the profile of a user’s
interest and filter information based on that profile would greatly facilitate Internet searches.
Research into advanced methods of Knowledge Query and Manipulation (KQML) will
also facilitate the retrieval of information. Integrated with content management systems and
the Internet, these technologies will provide very powerful observation tools.
Building trust for the dissemination of knowledge. Success factors within most
organizations are closely guarded secrets. From an intellectual property perspective this
makes a great deal of sense. However, secrets between departments, work-units or project
teams within the same organization are counter-productive. Without trust between people
there cannot be a productive sharing of information that results in knowledge transfer. The
generation of a trusting environment is one that must extend from the top of the organization
to the grass roots. Trust building activities such as team social activities, induction programs,
job rotation, milestone celebrations, impromptu lunches and face-to-face communications
need to be encouraged.
For countries in the vanguard of the world economy, the balance between knowledge
and resources has shifted so far towards the former that knowledge has become perhaps
the most important factor determining the standard of living - more than land, tools and
labour. Today’s most technologically advanced economies are truly knowledge-based.
For the last two hundred years, neo-classical economics has recognised only two
factors of production: labour and capital. Knowledge, productivity, education, and
intellectual capital were all regarded as exogenous factors that are, falling outside the system.
New Growth Theory is based on work by Stanford economist Paul Romer and others
NOTES who have attempted to deal with the causes of long-term growth, something that traditional
economic models have had difficulty with. Following from the work of economists such as
Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Solow and others, Romer has proposed a change to the neo-
classical model by seeing technology (and the knowledge on which it is based) as an
intrinsic part of the economic system. Knowledge has become the third factor of production
in leading economies.
Technology and knowledge are now the key factors of production. Romer’s theory
differs from neo-classical economic theory in several important ways:
• Knowledge is the basic form of capital. Economic growth is driven by the
accumulation of knowledge.
• While any given technological breakthrough may seem to be random, Romer
considers that new technological developments, rather than having one-off impact,
can create technical platforms for further innovations, and that this technical platform
effect is a key driver of economic growth.
• Technology can raise the return on investment, which explains why developed
countries can sustain growth and why developing economies, even those with
unlimited labour and ample capital, cannot attain growth. Traditional economics
predicts that there are diminishing returns on investment. New Growth theorists
argue that the non-rivalry and technical platform effects of new technology can
lead to increasing rather than diminishing returns on technological investment.
• Investment can make technology more valuable and vice versa. According to Romer,
the virtuous circle that results can raise a country’s growth rate permanently. This
goes against traditional economics.
• Romer argues that earning monopoly rents on discoveries is important in providing
an incentive for companies to invest in R&D for technological innovation. Traditional
economics sees “perfect competition” as the ideal.
Enhancing human capital is critical for GDP growth. But sustained GDP growth doesn’t
just happen. In order to make investments in technology, a country must have sufficient
human capital. Human capital is the formal education, training and on-the-job learning
embodied in the workforce.
Various management writers have for several years highlighted the role of knowledge
or intellectual capital in business. The value of high-tech companies such as software and
We are now living in a knowledge economy where the principal economic resource
businesses have to offer their customer is knowledge. The nature of work in an organization
has changed enormously with the shift from an industrial economy where the focus is
production of commercial products to a knowledge economy where the main outcomes
are service and expertise. The shift to a knowledge economy has increased the complexity
of work activities. Employers have recognized the value of identifying and accessing a
diversity of expertise and knowledge from different sources to work on common goals.
People increasingly work closely with others to accomplish common goals, particularly if
they are working in service areas or are used as sources of expertise by others. The shift to
a knowledge economy has also led to increasing concern for building strong interpersonal
relationships with others. Many employees spend considerable time interacting with others:
collaborating with work colleagues, customers or people in other organizations through
face-to-face meetings, online network, emails and many other mechanisms.
The World Bank Institute offers a formal definition of a knowledge economy as one
that creates, disseminates, and uses knowledge to enhance its growth and
development. The knowledge economy is often taken to mean only high-technology
industries or information and communication technologies (ICTs). It would be more
appropriate, however, to use the concept more broadly to cover how any economy harness
and uses new and existing knowledge to improve the productivity of agriculture, industry,
and services and increase overall welfare.
A knowledge economy uses data as it raw material and transforms it using technology,
analysis tools, and human intelligence into knowledge and expertise. Fig. 1.5 illustrates the
main phases of this transformation process.
The term knowledge economy is a relatively new one, commonly used to refer to
aspects of the service sector of the economy. This, however, is a restricted view of the
term. To a significant extent, the linkages of the operations in the service sector lie in the
hardware part. Thus, chips, integrated circuitry, and technology used in biosciences, for
instance, are important aspects of knowledge economy. The space occupied by the
Information Technology (IT) industry within the content of the term knowledge economy is
significantly large, probably due to its being an early starter. However, a certain extent of
grayness is associated with the term knowledge economy, primarily because, so far, it has
not been adequately defined; nor have its boundaries been drawn with clarity.
According to Housel and Bell a knowledge based economy is the one where
knowledge is the main source of wealth, growth and employment, with a strong
reliance on information technology.
These characteristics, so different from those of the physical economy, require new
thinking and approaches by policy makers, senior executives and knowledge workers
alike. To do so, though, requires leadership and risk taking, against the prevailing and slow
changing attitudes and practices of existing institutions and business practice.
However, the ICT sector has a powerful multiplier effect in the overall economy
compared with manufacturing. A 1995 study of the effect of software producer Microsoft
on the local economy revealed that each job at Microsoft created 6.7 new jobs in
Washington State, whereas a job at Boeing created 3.8 jobs. Wealth-generation is becoming
more closely tied to the capacity to add value using ICT products and services.
The rate of technological change has greatly increased over the past thirty years.
Three laws have combined to explain the economics of information. Moore’s Law holds
that the maximum processing power of a microchip at a given price doubles roughly every
18 months. In other words, computers become faster, but the price of a given level of
computing power halves. Gilder’s Law - the total bandwidth of communication systems
will triple every 12 months - describes a similar decline in the unit cost of the net. Metcalfe’s
Law holds that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of
nodes. So, as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows exponentially,
while the cost per user remains the same or even reduces.
While Metcalfe’s Law has been applied to the Internet, it is also true of telephone
systems. Gordon Moore first formulated Moore’s Law in the early 1970s. There can be
no doubt that the cycle of technology development and implementation is accelerating and
that we are moving inexorably onward, out of the Industrial Age and into the Information
Age.
(d) Globalisation
ICT open up global markets and foster competition. With the advent of information
and communication technologies, the vision of perfect competition is becoming a reality.
Consumers can now find out the prices offered by all vendors for any product. New
markets have opened up, and prices have dropped. When businesses can deliver their
products down a phone line anywhere in the world, twenty-four hours a day, the advantage
goes to the firm that has the greatest value-addition, the best-known brand, and the lowest
“weight’. Software provides the best example: huge added value through computer code,
light “weight” so that it can be delivered anywhere at any time.
IT industry in India has grown, and has had an impact on various segments of the
economy. In addition to being a sunrise revenue-generating industrial sector, the IT industry
has established linkages with hardware manufacturing industries thereby giving a fillip to
that sector. The IT industry has also made its presence felt on the education sector from
where it draws one of its main resources. Further, this industry has helped generate
employment potentialities in the economy. The Business Process Outsourcing units are
further expected to play a major role in the generation of additional employment. This by
no means is a simple contribution. And yet these and other attributes have been emphasised
to the extent that the industry has acquired a larger than life image. It is only a short step
from here to attribute this industry with pan-economic relevance. As a proxy for the
knowledge economy, this industry is often identified as a solution provider for shortcomings
in the economy, which is quite far-fetched in the current scenario.
The impact of IT is best understood when the differences between industrial and
knowledge-intensive ventures are recognised. Industrial growth derives from investments
in large-scale infrastructure (such as railways, roadways, power grids and dams). Such
infrastructure supports the growth of physical-asset intensive industries (such as the steel
and transportation industries) that create and move physical entities (such as goods, water
and people). These ventures employ numerous workers with limited education and skills,
and can uplift large sections of society.
The evolving knowledge economy provides critical implications for policy makers of
local and national government as well as international agencies and institutions concerned
with the growth and development of an economy as well as the businesses concerned with
creating knowledge based organization. Following are some of the important implications
of knowledge economy.
5. India also has many of the other key ingredients for making itself as knowledge
NOTES economy such as macroeconomic stability, a dynamic private sector, institutions
of a free market economy, a well-developed financial sector, broad & diversified
science and technology infrastructure, a well-developed ICT sector, and global
provider of software services.
and e-community. These reflect a shift in orientation from working with papers to the use
of an electronic interface to perform organizational activities. Knowledge management has NOTES
flourished as the technological systems have increased in robustness, reliability and cost-
effectiveness.
The advent of the Internet brought with it further enabling technologies, including e-
learning, web conferencing, collaborative software, content management systems, corporate
‘Yellow pages’ directories, email lists, wikis, blogs, and other technologies. Each enabling
technology can expand the level of inquiry available to an employee, while providing a
platform to achieve specific goals or actions. The practice of KM will continue to evolve
with the growth of collaboration applications, visual tools and other technologies. Since its
adoption by the mainstream population and business community, the Internet has led to an
increase in creative collaboration, learning and research, e-commerce, and instant
information.
The availability of the World Wide Web has been instrumental in catalyzing the
knowledge management movement. Information technology may, if well resourced and
implemented, provide a comprehensive knowledge base that is speedily accessed,
interactive, and of immediate value to the user. However there are also many examples of
systems that are neither quick, easy-to-use, problem free in operation, or easy to maintain.
The Web, for example, frequently creates information overload. The development of tools
that support knowledge sharing in an appropriate and user-friendly way, particularly in
organization-wide knowledge sharing programs, is not a trivial task.
Most of the technological tools now available tend to help dissemination of know-
how, but offer less assistance for knowledge use. Tools that assist in knowledge creation
are even less well developed, although collaborative workspaces offer promising
opportunities, by enabling participation, across time and distance, in project design or
knowledge-base development, so that those most knowledgeable about development
problems — the people living them on a day-to-day basis – can actively contribute to their
solution. Some of the more user-friendly technologies are the traditional ones — face-to-
NOTES face discussions, the telephone, electronic mail, and paper-based tools such as flip charts.
Among the issues that need to be considered in providing information technology for
knowledge sharing programs are:
1. Responsiveness to user needs: continuous efforts must be made to ensure that
the information technology in use meets the varied and changing needs of users.
2. Content structure: in large systems, classification and cataloguing become
important so that items can be easily found and quickly retrieved.
3. Content quality requirements: standards for admitting new content into the
system need to be established and met to ensure operational relevance and high
value.
4. Integration with existing systems: since most knowledge sharing programs
aim at embedding knowledge sharing in the work of staff as seamlessly as possible,
it is key to integrate knowledge-related technology with preexisting technology
choices.
5. Scalability: solutions that seem to work well in small groups (e.g. HTML web
sites) may not be appropriate for extrapolation organization-wide or on a global
basis.
6. Hardware-software compatibility is important to ensure that choices are made
that are compatible with the bandwidth and computing capacity available to users.
7. Synchronization of technology with the capabilities of users is important so as to
take full advantage of the potential of the tools, particularly where the technology
skills of users differ widely. Knowledge sharing programs that focus on the
simultaneous improvement of the whole system, both technology tools and human
practices, are likely to be more successful than programs that focus on one or the
other.
One of the major risks in knowledge management programs is the tendency for
organizations to confuse knowledge management with some form of technology, whether
it is Lotus Notes, the World Wide Web, or one of the off-the-shelf technology tools that
are now proliferating. In the process, the essentially ecological concept of knowledge
management becomes degraded into a simple information system that can be engineered
without affecting the way the work is done. It is not that information systems are bad.
Rather, it is important to recognize that knowledge management is a different and better
way of working which affects people, and requires social arrangements like communities
to enable it to happen on any consistent and sustained basis.
There is an ongoing lively debate about the role that information technology can play
for knowledge management. On the one hand, information technology is used pervasively
in organizations, and thus qualifies as a natural medium for the flow of knowledge. A recent
study from the American Productivity and Quality Center shows that organizations embarking
in knowledge management efforts generally rely, for accomplishing their goals, on the setting
up of a suitable IT infrastructure. At the other end of the spectrum, leading knowledge
management theorists have warned about the attitude that drives management towards
strong investments in IT, possibly at the expense of investments in human capital.
The danger that this viewpoint sees is that IT-driven knowledge management strategies
may end up objectifying and calcifying knowledge into static, inert information, thus
disregarding altogether the role of tacit knowledge. Knowledge management strategies of
this type would bring back the ghost of the infamous, and none too far in time, re-engineering
days, when the corporate motto was “More IT, less people!”; they conjure grim
scenarios of organizations with enough memory to remember everything and not enough
intelligence to do anything with it.
Part of the problem here derives from a linguistic ambiguity: nowadays information
NOTES technologies are as much about creating direct connections among people through such
applications as electronic mail, chat-rooms, video-conferencing and other types of
groupware as they are about storing information in databases and other types of repositories.
As for information databases, they can also be fruitfully re-thought, in a knowledge
management perspective, as resources for the sharing of best practices and for preserving
the intellectual capital of organizations. Generally speaking, investments in IT seem to be
unavoidable in order to scale up knowledge management projects. The best way of applying
information technology to knowledge management is probably a combination of two factors:
on the one hand, the awareness of the limits of information technology, and of the fact that
any IT deployment will not achieve much, if it is not accompanied by a global cultural
change toward knowledge values; on the other hand, the availability of information
technologies that have been expressly designed with knowledge management in view.
The early Knowledge Management technologies were online corporate yellow pages
(expertise locators) and document management systems. Combined with the early
development of collaborative technologies (in particular Lotus Notes), KM technologies
expanded in the mid 1990s. Subsequently it followed developments in technology in use in
Information Management. In particular the use of semantic technologies for search and
retrieval and the development of knowledge management specific tools such as those for
communities of practice.
More recently social computing tools (such as blogs and wikis) have developed to
provide a more unstructured, self-governing approach to the transfer, capture and creation
of knowledge through the development of new forms of community, network or matrix.
However, such tools for the most part are still based on text and code, and thus represent
explicit knowledge transfer. These tools face challenges in distilling meaningful re-usable
knowledge and intelligible information and ensuring that their content is transmissible through
diverse channels, platforms and forums. Let us briefly understand the some of the
technologies that are currently associated with the field of knowledge management:
The impact of each technology varies enormously from situation to situation. Several
technologies recur in many knowledge management programs, partly because they are
generic and pervade many core activities and processes. Let us briefly review some of the
main technologies used in KM programs.
The ubiquitous Internet protocols make it easy for users to access “any information,
any where, at any time”. Further, browsers and client software can act as front-ends to
information in many formats and many of the other knowledge tools such as document
management or decision support. Remember too, that the basic functions of email, discussion NOTES
lists and private newsgroups often have the biggest short term impact.
KM Viewpoint 1.5
Booz Allen & Hamilton’s Knowledge Online is an Intranet that provides
a wealth of information (e.g. best practice, industry trends, database of
experts) to their consultants world-wide. Through active information
management by knowledge editors (subject experts and librarians) the
information remains well structured and relevant.
What groupware products like Lotus Notes add over and above Intranets are discussion
databases. Users such as Thomas Miller, a London based manager of insurance mutuals,
access their ‘organizational memory’, as well as current news feeds in areas of interest,
through one of Lotus’s key features, its multiple ‘views’. When writing new insurance
proposals, existing explicit knowledge can be assembled from the archive, guided by expert
systems front-end, while tacit knowledge is added through discussion databases.
A related technology is that of text summarizing, which British Telecom have found
can summarize large documents, retaining over 90 per cent of the relevant meaning with
less than a quarter of the original text.
There are an increasing number of tools, such as COPE and IDONS, that help
individuals and teams develop cognitive maps or ‘shared mental models’. These have
been used by companies such as Shell to develop future scenarios and resolve conflicting
stakeholder requirements. In addition, other mapping tools, such as those found in
Knowledge X, can represent conceptual linkages between different source documents.
Documents, and especially structured documents, are the form in which much explicit
knowledge is shared. With annotation and redlining facilities, they can become active
knowledge repositories, where the latest version and thinking is readily shared amongst
NOTES project eams.
KM Viewpoint 1.6
By using a document management system for the construction
of the Thelma North Sea oil platform, AGIP reduced construction
time by 9 months and reduced document handling costs by 60 per
cent. Suppliers like Dataware are repositioning their products as
knowledge management products and are also adding ‘knowledge
enriching’ functionality.
KM Viewpoint 1.7
Most expert systems are developed via specialized software tools
called shells. These shells come equipped with an inference mechanism
(backward chaining, forward chaining, or both), and require knowledge
to be entered according to a specified format. They typically come with
a number of other features, such as tools for writing hypertext, for
constructing friendly user interfaces, for manipulating lists, strings, and
objects, and for interfacing with external programs and databases.
These shells qualify as languages, although certainly with a narrower
range of application than most programming languages.
External External
Customers Sales and marketing processes
Feedback reports Lead-time Information
Questionnaires on quality & service Billing procedures
Customer profiling Internal
Payment history Logistics - Procurement & Inventory
Customer meetings and visits Quality processes
Annual reports & Financial analysis HR processes
Contact Analysis Financial processes
Customer Newsletter Lead time information for all the processes
Suppliers Six-sigma processes
Performance history Project Execution Methodologies
Product catalog Security policies: Network, data and
Vendor meetings/seminars personnel
Annual reports & Financial analysis Manufacturing processes
Internal
Employees
Knowledge on products/services
Technical expertise & Reusable components
Best practices from previous projects
Learning from previous assignments
Vertical industry experience
KM
Database
External External
Customer feedback reports Demographics
Product successes Legal policies: Customs & Tax information
Product failures Competitor analysis
Competitive forces Road shows/Meetings/Conferences
Customer meetings Research Publications
Internal Customers care policies
Tools information - various tools developed for Customer promotions
different purposes Corporate Vision and Culture
Best things and worst things Articles/quotes on the organization appeared
Postmortem reports in trade magazines
Internal
R&D - Research Publications
Learning from projects execution
Brand equity information
Organization structure & Who's who of the
organization?
Quality: SEI,ISO, PCMM
Project Postmortem reports
Induction programs
Networking with professional organizations
Idea generation/sharing session
There are a number of common situations that are widely recognised as benefiting
from knowledge management approaches. While they are not the only issues that can be
tackled with KM techniques, it is useful to explore a number of these situations in order to
provide a context for the development of a KM strategy. Beyond these typical situations,
each organisation will have unique issues and problems to be overcome.
Call centers have increasingly become the main ‘public face’ for many organisations.
This role is made more challenging by the expectations of customers that they can get the
answers they need within minutes of ringing up. Other challenges confront call centers,
including high-pressure, closely-monitored environment, high staff turnover, costly and
lengthy training for new staff. In this environment, the need for knowledge management is
clear and immediate. Failure to address these issues impacts upon sales, public reputation
or legal exposure.
Beyond the call center, many organisations have a wide range of front-line staff who
interacts with customers or members of the public. They may operate in the field, such as
sales staff or maintenance crews; or be located at branches or behind front-desks. In large
organisations, this front-line staffs are often very dispersed geographically, with limited
communication channels to head office. Typically, there are also few mechanisms for sharing
information between staff working in the same business area but different locations. The
has a depth of knowledge that is relied upon by other staff, particularly in environments
where little effort has been put into capturing or managing knowledge at an organisational
level. In this situation, the loss of these key staff can have a major impact upon the level of
knowledge within the organisation. Knowledge management can assist by putting in place
a structured mechanism for capturing or transferring this knowledge when staff retires.
The commonly employed strategy is to design and develop systems and practices to
obtain, organize, restructure, warehouse or memorize and distribute knowledge. This
strategy enables organizations to dramatically reduce cycle time and costs, increases sales
and effectively brings the knowledge of the organization to bear on customer needs. An
approach, based on this strategy, results in improvement operations or to develop and
deliver products and services tailored to the market requirements. Building of teams,
NOTES relationships and networks forms the basis for effective transfer, besides approaches of
encouraging collaborative knowledge transfer.
Many organizations especially those in the service industry adopt a strategy with
strong focus on their customer. This customer-focused knowledge strategy is directed
towards capturing, developing and transferring knowledge and understanding of customers’
diverse needs, preferences, and businesses. These efforts bring about a significant
improvement in sales and use the collective knowledge of the organisation to solve customer
problems. This strategy recognizes and facilitates learning from customers and understand
their needs better and development of effective solutions to take them.
The final strategy, innovation and knowledge creation emphasizes the creation of new
knowledge through basic and applied research and development. Organisations adopting
these strategies need to ascend the knowledge spiral and continually discover new and
better ways of functioning and innovating. They recognize that innovation is central to
growth and that unique knowledge and expertise enhances their competitive value in the
marketplace.
follows business strategy. The first activity in knowledge strategy is understanding the current
business strategy then progressing that strategy as the basis for organizational analysis. NOTES
The knowledge strategy should clearly articulate why the organization should share
its know-how, what the organization will share, with whom the organization will share and
how the organization will share.
A knowledge strategy should start from existing strategies, plans and modus operandi
of an organization. It should explicitly identify specific areas of inefficiency – lost
opportunities, or costly mistakes – where a good KM practice would improve productivity
and minimize risks. It should seek to support people throughout the organization in
performing their daily tasks efficiently and effectively. It should identify how knowledge
can create new opportunities – in innovative customer solutions, in business processes or
in new product and services.
A four-phased approach for prioritizing the knowledge strategy and moving projects
forward are as follows:
1. Envisioning business strategy: Identifying and developing a business strategy
and linking initial knowledge needs to the strategy. This phase uses strategy
workshops, SWOT analyses and scenario planning sessions to develop the initial
strategy.
2. Knowledge valuation: Analysing the current state of the organization, diagnosing
strategic gaps, evaluating the learning rate and assessing cultural issues. This phase
delivers an organizational assessment and gap analysis.
3. Creating knowledge strategy: This phase analyses impacts and develops
strategies for addressing gaps and redesigning processes. Strategic gaps are
prioritized and action plan developed and knowledge resources and practices are
aligned to the strategy.
4. Knowledge path building: This phase establishes plans and designs for building
a knowledge architecture to support full organizational participation. This phase
coordinates plans, people and information resources to integrate the knowledge
strategy into organizations, systems, product lines and business processes.
Business organizations are coming to view knowledge as their most valuable and
strategic asset, and bringing that knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities as their
most important capability. They are realizing that to remain competitive they must explicitly
manage their intellectual assets and capabilities. Today, knowledge is considered as the
most strategically important asset for every business organizations. Having unique access
to valuable assets in an organisation is one way to create competitive advantage, in some
cases either this may not be possible, or competitors may imitate or develop substitutes for
those assets. Companies having superior knowledge, however, are able to coordinate and
combine their traditional assets and capabilities in new and distinctive ways, providing
NOTES more value for their customers than can their competitors. That is, by having superior
intellectual assets, an organization can understand how to exploit and develop their traditional
assets better than competitors, even if some or all of those traditional assets are not unique.
Therefore, knowledge can be considered as the most important strategic asset, and the
ability to acquire, integrate, store, share and apply it has become the most important
capability for building and sustaining competitive advantage by any organisation. The
broadest value proposition, then, for engaging in knowledge management is that it can
enhance the organization’s fundamental ability to compete.
Sustainability may also come from an organization already knowing something that
uniquely complements newly acquired knowledge, providing an opportunity for knowledge
synergy not available to its competitors. New knowledge is integrated with existing
knowledge to develop unique insights and create even more valuable knowledge.
Organizations should therefore seek areas of learning and experimentation that can potentially
add value to their existing knowledge via synergistic combination.
Longer lead time explains the attraction of strategic alliances and other forms of external
ventures as potentially quicker means for gaining access to knowledge. It also explains
why the strategic threat from technological discontinuity tends to come from firms outside
of or peripheral to an industry. New entrants often enjoy a knowledge base different than
that of incumbents, and which can be applied to the products and services of the industry
under attack. This has been especially evident in industries where analog products are
giving way to digital equivalents. The strategic challenge is to develop sufficient knowledge
to support a shift to those new technologies and markets before non-traditional competitors
make significant inroads in those markets, while not abandoning its years of experience
and knowledge about physical imaging that is supporting its core business.
Knowledge is not static and what is innovative knowledge today will ultimately become
the core knowledge of tomorrow. Thus defending and growing a competitive position
based on strategic knowledge asset requires continual learning and knowledge acquisition.
The ability of an organization to learn, accumulate knowledge from its experiences, and
reapply that knowledge is itself a skill or competence that, beyond the core competencies
directly related to delivering its product or service, may provide strategic advantage.
How valuable is knowledge? The value is in the eyes of the beholder - opinions vary
widely. However, there are several directions you can approach this from:
Market value: what is specific knowledge assets worth on the open market e.g. a
team of experts, a customer database, and a license for a patent?
Cost: how much does it cost to train a new hire? How many person-days went into
developing your intranet content?
Replacement cost: if you had a disaster (a team leaving, your computer records
NOTES destroyed), what would it cost today to get back to where you started?
Liability cost: how exposed are you to legal liability e.g. for product traceability, for
long overlooked terms in extant contracts?
Many organizations do not have a handle on the value of their assets. They spend a
fortune monitoring and accounting for physical assets; yet ignore those assets - that according
to most surveys - are worth 5-10 time more than the assets recorded on the company’s
balance sheet. Knowledge aware organizations consider human capital as an asset. It is
one several components of intellectual capital - others are customer capital, structural
capital and intellectual property.
Benefits Potential
For most organizations the real value of knowledge management is in the benefits it
brings to the bottom line. These benefits range from increased knowledge worker
productivity, to faster time-to-market for new products, to better customer service. Typically
the benefits fall into the following categories:
Information and knowledge benefits - retrieving vital information faster, gaining access
to expertise, having all the required information accessible in one pace (e.g. through a
portal)
Intermediate benefits - minimizing duplication, sharing knowledge across organizational
boundaries, getting new hire up to speed faster
Organizational benefits - reducing costs, increasing productivity, growing asset valuation,
innovation
Customer and stakeholder benefits - better products and services, higher quality, better
value.
SUMMARY
Technology and knowledge are now the key factors of production. Various observers
describe today’s global economy as one in transition to a ‘knowledge economy’, or an NOTES
‘information society’. The knowledge economy usually involve the production of
knowledge-intensive goods (like software), and the large-scale capture, movement and
utilisation of information using sophisticated network infrastructure (such as computers,
cable, fiber and routers).
The various experts’ vision is that India will become a leader in the global knowledge
economy by 2010. This will be the result of a highly focused effort to achieve global
thought leadership in a few select fields that offer the highest potential for Knowledge
Process Outsourcing (KPO).
Business organizations are coming to view knowledge as their most valuable and
strategic asset, and bringing that knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities as their
most important capability. They are realizing that to remain competitive they must explicitly
manage their intellectual assets and capabilities.
SHORT QUESTIONS
LONG QUESTIONS
NOTES
UNIT II
After studying this Unit, you should be able to understand the following:
Unlike capital and labour, knowledge strives to be a public good. Once knowledge
is discovered and made public, there is zero marginal cost to sharing it with others. Secondly,
the creator of knowledge finds it hard to prevent others from using it. Instruments such as
trade secrets protection and patents, copyright, and trademarks provide the creator with
some protection.
There are different kinds of knowledge that can usefully be distinguished. Know-
what, or knowledge about facts, is nowadays diminishing in relevance. Know-why is
knowledge about the natural world, society, and the human mind. Know-who refers to the
world of social relations and is knowledge of who knows what and who can do what.
Knowing key people is sometimes more important to innovation than knowing scientific
NOTES principles. Know-where and know-when are becoming increasingly important in a flexible
and dynamic economy. Know-how refers to skills, the ability to do things on a practical
level.
Data may be regarded as a commodity, value is added to data when they are processed
into information and in turn information gains further value when it is applied in new contexts
becoming transformed into enterprise specific knowledge. Knowledge is also defined as
information to which experience, context, interpretation and reflection are added by
individuals so that it becomes a high value form of information. In these circumstances
knowledge can be utilized in novel ways - making predictions, for example – thereafter
being retained within the organization as organizational knowledge. Contextualized
knowledge is regarded as the outcome, or product, of a learning process, because it
becomes owned as organizational, such knowledge is sticky in the sense that it is both
localized and contextualized. And thus it is argued that organizational knowledge is
socially constructed because its added value derives from an intra-organizational social
process – the process of sharing. Information gains further value when it is used in new
contexts and is transformed into enterprise specific knowledge in the process.
NOTES
Often, the distinctions between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom continuum
are not very discrete, thus the distinctions between each term often seem more like shades
of gray, rather than black and white.
Data and information deal with the past. They are based on the gathering of facts and
adding context. Knowledge deals with the present. It becomes a part of us and enables to
perform. However, when we gain wisdom, we start dealing with the future as we are now
NOTES able to vision and design for what will be, rather than for what is or was.
Data: The numbers 100 or 5%, completely out of context, are just pieces of
data. Interest, principal, and interest rate, out of context, are not much more
than data as each has multiple meanings which are context dependent.
Wisdom: Getting wisdom out of this is a bit tricky, and is, in fact, founded in
systems principles. The principle is that any action which produces a result
which encourages more of the same action produces an emergent characteristic
called growth. And, nothing grows forever for sooner or later growth runs into
limits.
Now, if this knowledge is valid, why doesn't everyone simply become rich
by putting money in a savings account and letting it grow? The answer has to
do with the fact that the pattern described above is only a small part of a more
elaborate pattern which operates over time. People don't get rich because they
either don't put money in a savings account in the first place, or when they do,
in time, they find things they need or want more than being rich, so they
withdraw money. Withdrawing money depletes the principal and subsequently
the interest they earn on that principal. Getting into this any deeper is more of a
systems thinking exercise than is appropriate to pursue here.
Locke gave us the first hint of what knowledge is all about. Since that time, others
have tried to refine it. Davenport and Prusak define knowledge as, “a fluid mix of framed
experience, contextual information, values and expert insight that provides a
framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information.”
Notice that there are two parts to this definition:
• First, there is content: “a fluid mix of framed experience, contextual information,
values and expert insight.” This includes a number of things that we have within us,
such as experiences, beliefs, values, how we feel, motivation, and information.
• The second part defines the function or purpose of knowledge, “that provides a
framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information.”
Notice how this relates back to Locke’s definition — we have within us a framework
(one idea) that we use for evaluating new experiences (the second idea).
11. Knowledge relates to place and context. For example, your father’s knowledge
about farming is specific to a particular place and a particular time from say 1920 to NOTES
the 1990s. Some of what he knows about farming could be adapted to other
circumstances, but most of his knowledge pertains directly to paddy and cattle production
in that particular place. My knowledge and yours also is related intimately to the areas
where we grew up and where we live.
12. All information is not knowledge, and all knowledge is not valuable. The key is to
find the worthwhile knowledge within a vast sea of information.
2.5 FUNDAMENTALS OF KNOWLEDGE FORMATION
“Knowledge is power”, knowledge management helps us to share, learn and regenerate
the new knowledge. Knowledge is the most important asset and greatest competitive
advantage of many organizations today. Simultaneously, it can be observed that many
organizations realize it is highly problematic and complicated to collect, store, retrieve,
find, disseminate and reuse knowledge in modern fast changing organization.
Knowledge and information is expressed in commonly accepted idea, information
arguably becomes knowledge. Knowledge is intuitive, hard to communicate and difficult
to express in words and chunk of it’s not stored in database but in the minds of people who
work in formation of new knowledge.
It is supported by formal process and structures for its acquisition, sharing and
utilization. The role of information, knowledge and digital technologies that manipulate
them, have become the crucial factors in the economy. Hence, in the plan and policies,
activities of every organization require familiarity with basics of information and knowledge.
2.5.1 Knowledge Formation
One of the basic problems is understanding the characteristics of “Knowledge
formation”. From ancient times the senses have been thought to have the role of channels
through which knowledge arrives in to the organism from the environment. The concept of
the senses as “Windows to Knowledge” seemed so strong and irrefutable that attempts to
treat organism and environment as one system. The traditional concept of the senses as
transmitters of knowledge is based explicitly on the idea of two systems (organism and
environment) between which the transfer of knowledge occurs.
This relationship has been formulated in recent decades with the help of information
theory. Knowledge formation is based on information transmission carried out through
signals (Stimuli), in which the information is stored with help of a code.
Knowledge becomes obsolete as soon as it is formed or created. New knowledge
has to be created continuously in order for a company to survive in this competitive business
environment. In practical sense, knowledge management is the process of continuously
creating new knowledge, disseminating it widely through the organization, and embodying
it quickly in new products/services, technologies and systems.
Knowledge is what has been learned from experience or study. It is a broad concept
that usually includes insights, interpretations, and information. Knowledge can be
distinguished from information by its inclusion of interpretations, from beliefs by its higher
degree of validity, and from wisdom by its more transient veridical, knowledge consists of
assumptions about problems and their solutions. Notions of knowledge flows vary somewhat
in the literature; some authors have seen knowledge flows as transfer of skills and technology
between organizations. Some even understand knowledge flows as a multistage process
that might involve initiation, implementation, and integration or search and transfer.
Knowledge flows as the aggregate volume of know-how and information transmitted per
unit of time, including via telephone, e-mail, regular mail, policy revisions, meetings, shared
technologies, and reviews of prototypes.
Blumentitt et al contend that information can be captured and stored in digital form
whereas tacit knowledge repositories reside only in intelligent systems that are within
individuals.
Whatever the difficulties the argument for finding an effective means of capturing the
experiences and skills of any workforce is compelling and it may be that there will never be
more than guidelines since any successful knowledge management system will be essentially
unique to the organization in which it is operated. What is essential is that whatever any
organization takes from the literature an organizational concept of knowledge management
is developed alongside an understanding of how it can be used within that organization to
gain competitive advantage.
To make wider use of the tacit knowledge of individuals, managers are urged to
identify the knowledge possessed by various individuals in an organization and then to
arrange the kinds of interactions between knowledgeable individuals that will help the
organization perform its current tasks, transfer knowledge from one part of the organization
to another, and/or create new knowledge that may be useful to the organization. Let us
consider an example (See Box of KM – Viewpoint) of current practice in each of these
activities that are typical of the tacit knowledge approach. Most managers of organizations
today do not know what specific kinds of knowledge the individuals in their organization
know. As firms become larger, more knowledge intensive, and more globally dispersed,
the need for their managers to “know what we know” is becoming acute. Thus, a common
initiative within the tacit knowledge approach is usually some effort to improve understanding
of who knows about what in an organization - an effort that is sometimes described as an
effort to create “know who” forms of knowledge.
Toyota’s use of Quality Circles also provides an example of the tacit knowledge
approach to creating new knowledge. At the end of each work week, groups of Toyota
production workers spend one to two hours analyzing the performance of their part of the
production system to identify actual or potential problems in quality or productivity. Each
group proposes “countermeasures” to correct identified problems, and discusses the results
of countermeasures taken during the week to address problems identified the week before.
Through personal interactions in such Quality Circle group settings, Toyota employees
share their ideas for improvement, devise steps to test new ideas for improvement, and
assess the results of their tests. This knowledge management practice, which is repeated
weekly as an integral part of the Toyota production system, progressively identifies,
eliminates, and even prevents errors. As improvements developed by Quality Circles are
accumulated over many years, Toyota’s production system has become one of the highest
quality production processes in the world.
NOTES
Tacit Knowledge
Contextual
Mental Processes
Difficult to Transfer
Tangible
Explicit Systematic
Knowledge Ease of Transfer
Explicit knowledge refers to the contents that has been captured in some tangible
form and can be articulated into formal language, including grammatical statements (words
and numbers), mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals, etc. Explicit knowledge
can be readily transmitted to others. Also, it can easily be processed by a computer,
transmitted electronically, or stored in databases. An example of explicit knowledge with
which we are all familiar is the formula for finding the area of a rectangle (i.e., length times
width). Other examples of explicit knowledge include documented best practices, the
formalized standards by which an insurance claim is adjudicated and the official expectations
for performance set forth in written work objectives
Working from the premise that important forms of knowledge can be made explicit,
the explicit knowledge approach also believes that formal organizational processes can be
used to help individuals articulate the knowledge they have to create knowledge assets.
The explicit knowledge approach also believes that explicit knowledge assets can then be
Usually accompanying the views that knowledge can be made explicit and managed
explicitly is the belief that new knowledge can be created through a structured, managed,
scientific learning process. Experiments and other forms of structured learning processes
can be designed to remedy important knowledge deficiencies or market transactions or
strategic partnering may be used to obtain specific forms of needed knowledge or to
improve an organization’s existing knowledge assets.
In the 1990s, Motorola was the global leader in the market for pagers. To maintain
this leadership position, Motorola introduced new generations of pager designs every 12-
15 months. Each new pager generation was designed to offer more advanced features and
options for customization than the preceding generation. Using modular product architectures
to create increasingly configurable product designs, Motorola was able to increase the
number of customizable product variations it could offer from a few thousand variations in
the late 1980s to more than 120 million variations by the late 1990s.
In addition, a new factory with higher-speed, more flexible assembly lines was designed
and built to produce each new generation of pager. To sustain this high rate of product and
process development, Motorola formed teams of product and factory designers to design
each new generation of pager and factory. At the beginning of their project, each new team
of designers received a manual of design methods and techniques from the team that had
developed the previous generation of pager and factory. The new team would then have
three deliverables at the end of their project: (i) an improved and more configurable next-
generation pager design, (ii) the design of a more efficient and flexible assembly line for the
factory that would produce the new pager, and (iii) an improved design manual that
incorporated the design knowledge provided to the team in the manual it received - plus
the new and improved design methods that the team had developed to meet the product
and production goals for its project. This manual would then be passed on to the next
design team given the task of developing the next generation of pager and its factory. In this
way, Motorola sought to make explicit and capture the knowledge developed by its engineers
during each project and to systematically leverage that knowledge in launching the work of
the next project team. In addition to its tacit knowledge management practice of moving
new employees around to transfer knowledge of its production system, Toyota also follows NOTES
a highly disciplined explicit knowledge management practice of documenting the tasks that
each team of workers and each individual worker is asked to perform on its assembly
lines. These documents provide a detailed description of how each task is to be performed,
how long each task should take, the sequence of steps to be followed in performing each
task, and the steps to be taken by each worker in checking his or her own work. When
improvements are suggested by solving problems on the assembly line as they occur or in
the weekly Quality Circle meetings of Toyota’s teams of assembly line workers, those
suggestions are evaluated by Toyota’s production engineers and then formally incorporated
in revised task description documents. In addition to developing well-defined and
documented process descriptions for routine, repetitive production tasks, some organizations
have also created explicit knowledge management approaches to supporting more creative
tasks like developing new products.
In the Chrysler unit of DaimlerChrysler Corporation, for example, several “platform
teams” of 300-600 development engineers have responsibility for creating the next
generation platforms (A platform includes a system of standard component types and
standardized interfaces between component types that enable “plugging and playing”
different component variations in the platform design to configure different product variations)
on which Chrysler’s future automobiles will be based. Each platform team is free to actively
explore and evaluate alternative design solutions for the many different technical aspects of
their vehicle platform. However, each platform team is also required to place the design
solution it has selected for each aspect of their vehicle platform in a “Book of Knowledge”
on Chrysler’s intranet. This catalog of developed design solutions is then made available to
all platform teams to consult in their development processes, so that good design solutions
developed by one platform team can also be located and used by other platform teams.
Other firms have taken this explicit knowledge management approach to managing
knowledge in product development processes even further.
Fanuc Automation, one of the world’s leading industrial automation firms, develops
design methodologies that are applied in the design of new kinds of components for their
factory automation systems. In effect, instead of leaving it up to each engineer in the firm to
devise a design solution for each new component needed, GE Fanuc’s engineers work
together to create detailed design methodologies for each type of component the firm
uses. These design methodologies are then encoded in software and computerized so that
the design of new component variations can be automated. Desired performance parameters
for each new component variation are entered into the automated design program, and GE
Fanuc’s computer system automatically generates a design solution for the component. In
this way, GE Fanuc tries to make explicit and capture the design knowledge of its engineers
and then to systematically re-use that knowledge by automating most new component
design tasks.
Disadvantages
Disadvantages
1. Considerable time and effort may be required to help people articulate their
knowledge.
2. Employment relationship with key knowledge workers may have to be redefined
to motivate knowledge articulation.
3. Expert committees must be formed to evaluate explicit knowledge assets.
4. Application of explicit knowledge throughout organization must be assured by
adoption of best practices.
The four conversion patterns of knowledge are illustrated in Figure 1.2 below:
To tacit To explicit
knowledge knowledge
From tacit Socialisation Externalization
knowledge
From explicit Internalization Combination
knowledge
NOTES
The identification of knowledge gap between what is known and what needs to be
known is often the stimulus for the knowledge creation process. In response to the
identification of a knowledge gap, the organization commonly reviews existing sources of
guidance held by individuals or other organizational resources. This process of drawing
together as many informed knowledge sources as possible is called knowledge sourcing.
Sources to be tapped might include specialized and prior knowledge held by individuals
within the organization, expert guidance from people such as consultants, organizational
record or the firm’s intranet. Learning from previous experience is a significant source of
guidance, particularly where the problem under investigation has significant resourcing
implications.
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• Customer feedback
• Marketing expert’s opinion
• Previous promo schemes data and their success and failures
• Available secondary data
• ]Lessons from competitors similar schemes
• Contributions from employees concerned with such schemes
Following are the few sources of knowledge which are crucial for any organization
gain strategic competence.
Customer knowledge
In virtually every survey, customer knowledge tops the list as an organization’s most
vital knowledge. Yet most organizations do not know as much about their customers as
they think they do, nor do they integrate their various sources of customer knowledge that
the organization already has. Appropriate feedback system may be created to get this
valuable source of knowledge.
Knowledge in process
Knowledge in people
It is said that 90% organizational knowledge is in its people who is valuable and when
it is shared, it becomes even more valuable to the organization as a whole. An important
part of KM is therefore about creating an environment and culture in which this knowledge
is facilitated to be accumulated and people are encouraged to share their knowledge with
each other.
Organizational memory
Many organizations do not know what they already know. Knowledge gained is not
recorded for use at another time or place. Effective knowledge programs will therefore put
significant emphasis on capturing knowledge from every day work and from assignments.
NOTES Decision diaries, reflection time at meetings and After Action Reviews (ARRs) are commonly
adapted tools for this purpose. An ARR, for example, is a technique first developed in the
US Army to capture lessons from battle field engagements, while they are still fresh in
people’s minds which may be used for future. In this way, an organization can also conduct
formal post-assignment reviews to derive lessons and put the knowledge gained into an
accessible form for future assignments. Another useful technique is that of ‘knowledge
refining’ with which a series of memos, e-mails or meeting minutes are collected for their
relevant and reusable content, which is put into an evolving and structured knowledge
base.
Knowledge relationships
This is concerned with depth of personal knowledge arising out of relationship of two
people who worked together for a long time and know one another’s approach with
regard to what to do and what not to do in situations. When firms reorganize, this knowledge
is lost. With the growing need for collaboration with external partners and agencies,
organizations need to do more to capture this knowledge and provide forums where these
relationships cab be strengthened.
After analyzing the sources of knowledge, the general principles and concepts are
generated to guide the construction of the new knowledge. This process is called knowledge
abstraction. Knowledge abstraction helps to frame the insights gained from knowledge
sourcing and to extrapolate new knowledge from the basic guidelines and issues that have
emerged. Where the knowledge seekers are highly expert, they will rely heavily on their
own knowledge, with other sources simply validating or enriching that knowledge. Less
experienced seekers will rely more heavily on external sources.
Think back to the customer promo schemes mentioned before. The target population
might be clarified, some approaches ruled out, and some broad principles confirmed. The
abstraction of the various sources reduces the complexity of the factors to be considered,
and enables the ideas to be converted into outcomes using a sound framework.
The process of abstraction can take a long time – particularly if the knowledge involved
is politically sensitive, complex or involves working through group consensus (committees).
Unfortunately, many organizations do not provide sufficient to reflect and weigh the various
sources before abstraction. Failure to carefully build some clear frameworks to guide the
knowledge creation process can lead to faulty reasoning and poor outcomes. Knowledge
workers need to recognize the importance of reflection and consideration in the knowledge
creation process.
Codified knowledge relating to the customer marketing scheme might be in the form
of a marketing plan and implementation guidelines, whereas the embodied knowledge
would be drawn from the guidelines and insights of the project leaders and experts. Many
organizations typically rely on both the forms of knowledge conversion when creating new
knowledge.
Using the same example, the promotion of new promotional scheme might be
disseminated in various ways via the Intranet, published guidelines and presentations relating
to the scheme, and so on. The main goal is to share the knowledge with those who will
most benefit. A forum of all employees in an organization, for example, is of little value to
those who are not directly involved in the new scheme.
been acquired. Consider the promotional scheme again. A pilot study of the scheme may
NOTES reveal some significant issues relating to the created process. The pilot study thus generates
new knowledge to be converted and diffused.
SUMMARY
There are different kinds of knowledge that can usefully be distinguished. Know-
what, or knowledge about facts, is nowadays diminishing in relevance. Know-why is
knowledge about the natural world, society, and the human mind. Know-who refers to the
world of social relations and is knowledge of who knows what and who can do what.
Knowing key people is sometimes more important to innovation than knowing scientific
principles. Know-where and know-when are becoming increasingly important in a flexible
and dynamic economy. Know-how refers to skills, the ability to do things on a practical
level.
Tacit and explicit knowledge are the two components of organizational knowledge.
Tacit knowledge refers to the personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and
involves intangible factors, such as personal beliefs, perspective, and the value system.
Explicit knowledge refers to the contents that has been captured in some tangible form and
can be articulated into formal language, including grammatical statements (words and
numbers), mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals, etc. Knowledge creation is
a spiraling process of interactions between explicit and tacit knowledge.
Knowledge is an important element in the world of business and the ability to distribute
and duplicate knowledge across a range of people is the key to its value in organizations.
There is a need to understand the different phases of organizational knowledge creation
and to recognize that each phase is influenced by the access to sources of guidance, and
the encouragement to disseminate knowledge to others
SHORT QUESTIONS
NOTES
1. Define knowledge.
2. Illustrate by example the possible relationship between knowledge and data.
3. What is meant by organizational knowledge?
4. What is tacit knowledge?
5. What is explicit knowledge?
6. Compare the properties of tacit ant explicit knowledge.
7. What are the sources for knowledge?
LONG QUESTIONS
1. What are the differences between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge? Give
an example of each.
2. List down the various attributes of knowledge and support each with an example.
3. Describe how knowledge is formed in an organization?
4. Enumerate different application areas of tacit and explicit knowledge.
5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of tacit ant explicit knowledge?
6. Explain Nonaka’s knowledge creation framework.
7. Write a detailed account on knowledge abstraction, conversion and diffusion.
NOTES
NOTES
UNIT III
After studying this Unit, you should be able to understand the following:
can be from one’s own experience, from each other, and from customers, suppliers and
NOTES business patterns.
Organizational learning thus has the crucial and continuing responsibility for capitalizing
on knowledge as the source and base of a leading competitive edge. Organizational learning
as the means of acquiring and generating knowledge and skills (i.e., operational knowledge),
hence, becomes a key internal driver of the externally focused enterprise strategy. Hence,
each organization must build capabilities for managing knowledge and strengthening learning.
It is the connection between knowledge and learning which establishes organizational focus
and strategy.
(d) These factors identify some of the qualities of an effective learning organization
that diligently pursues a constantly enhances knowledge base. This knowledge NOTES
allows for the development of competencies and lead to incremental or
transformational change. In these instances, there is assimilation and utilization of
knowledge and some kind of integrated learning system to support such “actionable
learning”. Indeed, an organization’s ability to survive and grow is based on
advantages that stem from core competencies that represent collective learning.
These can be generalized as follows:
Knowledge acquisition. This stage deals with the development or creation of skills,
insights and relationships.
Knowledge sharing. This stage involves the dissemination of the learning throughout the
organization.
Knowledge utilization. This stage provides the integration of learning so that it is broadly
available and can be generalized to new situations.
Sources for learning include learning at the individual level of an employee, employee
ideas, research and development (R&D), customer input, best practice sharing and
benchmarking.
Learning at individual level
Learning at the individual level can be conceptualized as the process of obtaining and
retaining skills and information with relevant aptitude that leads to changes and improvements
in action and decision making. The process of organizational learning is, however, less well
understood than individual learning. All learning can be characterised as occurring at
the individual level. The focus of an organization should be on improving the learning, skills
and hence competitive advantage of individuals. However, to ensure their effectiveness,
individuals have to be able to fully integrate with and be able to maximise the benefits of
learning at the organizational level. In this way, the effective organization ensures that an
individual’s actions and learning are both supported by, and providing support to, the
organization as a whole. Acting together, the individuals that make up the organization are
able to learn, work and compete better than they could on their own.
Organizational learning is the development of new knowledge and insights that have
the potential to influence behavior. Organizational learning occurs when members of an
organization share associations, cognitive systems, and memories. Learning by organizations
relies on the people and groups to serve as agents for the transfer of knowledge. Over
time, what is learned is built into the structure, culture, and memory of the organization.
Lessons (i.e., knowledge) remain within the organization even though individuals may change.
The phrases organizational learning and learning organizations are used interchangeably.
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(g) Value-chaining
Organization need to build an index of their core competencies and learning investments
that need to be valued and supported. Learning investments include allocation of personnel
and money to develop knowledge and skill over time, including training and education,
pilot projects, developmental assignments, available resources, and so on. If a particular
organization is heavily focused on heavy engineering, it would have a natural bias in favor
of substantial learning investments in related areas. The value chain can be classified into
two categories: internally directed activities of a ‘design and make’ nature, and those more
externally focused of a ‘sell and deliver’ nature. The former include R&D, engineering, and
manufacturing. The latter are sales, distribution, and service activities.
An organization need to develop both individual and group skills. In this way, an
organization can assess how it is doing and improve either one of those skills. It can also
develop better ways of integrating individual learning programs with team needs by taking
a harder look at the value of group development.
NOTES
Element Characteristics of a learning Organization
Organization Structure Flat hierarchy, decentralized, Dynamic networks
Availability of information Systems in place to make information freely
available
Trust culture High level of trust, Self mastery practiced
Communication Decentralized communication processes
Innovation Innovation and risk taking encouraged
Managers style Facilitator, Coaching style
Learning systems Continual learning and double loop learning
(2) Mental Models — a mental model is one’s way of looking at the world. It involves
each individual reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving his or her internal NOTES
pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape personal actions and decisions. It is a
framework for the cognitive processes of our mind. In other words, it determines how we
think and act. A simple example of a mental model comes from an exercise described in
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Learning only comes from seeing the world the way it
really is.
(3) Shared Vision — what does it mean to have a shared vision? A shared vision begins
with the individual, and an individual vision is something that one person holds as a truth. It
means individuals building a sense of commitment within particular workgroups, developing
shared images of common and desirable futures, and the principles and guiding practices
to support the journey to such futures.
The shared vision of an organization must be built of the individual visions of its members.
What this means for the leader in the Learning Organization is that the organizational vision
must not be created by the leader, rather, the vision must be created through interaction
with the individuals in the organization. Only by compromising between the individual visions
and the development of these visions in a common direction can the shared vision be
created. The leader’s role in creating a shared vision is to share an own vision with the
employees. This should not be done to force that vision on others, but rather to encourage
others to share their vision too. Based on these visions, the organization’s vision should
evolve.
It would be naive to expect that the organization can change overnight from having a
vision that is communicated from the top to an organization where the vision evolves from
the visions of all the people in the organization. The organization will have to go through
major change for this to happen, and this is where OD can play a role. In the development
of a learning organization, the OD-consultant would use the same tools as before, just on
a much broader scale.
(4) Team Learning — this involves relevant thinking skills that enable groups of people
to develop intelligence and an ability that is greater than the sum of individual members’
talents. It is a discipline that starts with “dialogue,” the capacity of members of a team to
suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine “thinking together.” Team learning is vital
because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.
(5) Systems thinking — this involves a way of thinking about, and a language for describing
and understanding forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. It is a
paradigm premised upon the primacy of the whole —the antithesis of the traditional evolution
of the concept of learning in western cultures. This discipline helps managers and employees
alike to see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger
processes of the natural and economic world.
Once we embrace the idea that systems thinking can improve individual learning by
NOTES inducing people to focus on the whole system, and by providing individuals with skills and
tools to enable them to derive observable patterns of behavior from the systems they see
at work, the next step is to justify why systems thinking is even more important to
organizations of people. Here, the discipline of systems thinking is most clearly interrelated
with the other disciplines, especially with mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
Team-Based Structure - Teams are the best way of mixing energy with experience and
for any organisation teams are good sources of attaining targets effectively and efficiently.
Team based structures support continuous learning and pooling of experience and sharing
knowledge. Looking at these benefits, a team-based structure is necessary for any
organization aiming to become a learning organisation.
Empowered Employees - Employee empowerment will make sure that employee take
full responsibility for their actions and they work in an open environment this will also
facilitate growth of employees and encourage innovation as well as instills the ability to
think out of the box. Empowered employees will take more initiative & they will try to
solve the problem where and when it will arise; this makes organizational climate more
conducive to learning.
The Linkages Team based structure, empowered employees and open information all
coexist and they are linked with each other as essentials. The team structure will facilitate
sharing of common resources and objectives. Overall performance of the team or group
will depend upon total of performances of each individual as well as team will make a
coordinated effort to attain its targets or to perform effectively and efficiently. No organization
can empower its employees with out sharing information with them so to empower
employees the organization has to share information with employees and this connects
open information with empowered employees. Employees who have information and who
also posses the power to act and decide will definitely try their level best to improve the
performance of the organization also they will be open towards learning & information
sharing. Over and above these elements, the most important ingredient for a learning
organization is Knowledge Management- being able to capitalize on the knowledge NOTES
members of the organization. The knowledge or enriched experience that might not be
written down or codified in formal documents. As employees do their jobs, they gain
knowledge about the tasks they perform and learn the best ways to get certain things done
and solve specific problems. Through knowledge management, this information can be
shared and used by other employees working in the same organization. Certainly, the
people performing a certain job are likely to learn the most about it. Knowledge management
seeks to share this learning and knowledge throughout an organization.
Middle-Down-Up Management
Learning occurs at three levels: individual (personal mastery), group (team learning),
NOTES and organizational (building shared vision). Mental models underlie all learning. They can
either impede it by going unnoticed or accelerate it by being reflected, surfaced and
examined. On the other, learning may change mental models. The fifth discipline, Systems
Thinking, integrates the other four by enhancing each of them.
Adapting the middle-up-down management process of Nonaka and Takeuchi, let us
propose middle-down-up approach. In this framework, middle managers play an important
role by working as a “bridge” between the broad visions of the top management and the
concrete realities of business that front-line employees confront. They figure out the strategic
intentions of the top management and translate them into a conceptual framework
comprehensible to their subordinates. By signaling their own priorities, assumptions, and
ways of thinking and acting, leaders manifest espoused values. These conscious and explicitly
articulated values, however, are not necessarily internalized by the organization but remain
to be questioned, debated, and challenged in dialogue, until the team has a shared perception
of the success based on these values, and the value goes through a process of cognitive
transformation into a belief and, ultimately, and assumption. In this leadership process, the
images and maps of the conceptual framework are then incorporated into organizational
theory-in-use, and explicit knowledge is internalized into tacit knowledge.
When people share common mental models congruent with the shared vision, they
can be empowered: they will know how to operate in various business settings as long as
the overall business reality remains invariant. On the contrary, “to empower people in an
unaligned organization can be counterproductive”. Shared vision emerges from the personal
visions of individuals in the management process, in which the mental models are manifested
on the surface of the organizational culture, and the tacit knowledge is externalized into
explicit knowledge.
Revisiting this model, Figure 3.2 depicts how the levels of enterprise architecture
correspond to the model.
On the strategic level, business activity is monitored (BAM) through the management
process, exposing organizational theory-in-use, or actual behavior, in the form of real-time NOTES
management dashboards facilitating strategic decision-making. The shared vision of the
organization is built as a steering process of external adaptation and internal integration.
The output of this process is the new and revised models describing the business processes
on the highest level. Simulation capabilities are also employed as the means of optimizing
the processes.
The tactical level is about coordination and associated with team learning. The
strategic intent of the top management is translated to unique end-to-end core business
processes. These processes can be configured by composing underlying context-
independent services and coordinating the interplay of executable processes. Choreography
is the prevalent means to describe relatively static collaborative processes; new concepts
are emerging to address more dynamic collaborations. This is where the team learning
occurs: the coordination of the collaborative effort requires a significant amount of dialogue
between the process participants. Team learning also has an effect on tacit knowledge
within the organization through the leadership process.
The operational level embraces the operational and information model of the
organization in the form of services. The services are context-independent, idempotent
faculties optimized to perform their predefined function. Typically, orchestration describes
the sequence and conditions in which the service accesses underlying resources,
binding them to its execution context. Thus this level corresponds to personal mastery: the
purpose of orchestration is to optimize resource utilization and streamline service efficiency
against some performance measure defined by the management process.
The model reflects the reality as perceived by the organization. It is the vast repository
of “sources of truth” dispersed in enterprise information systems and databases, the
knowledge of the organization. Thereby, it can be equated to mental models in the Middle-
Down-Up model.
3.6 CAPTURING AND CODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge capture is a process by which the expert’s thoughts and experiences are
captured. In a broader view, knowledge capture may also include capturing knowledge
from other sources such as books, technical manuscripts, and drawings. Knowledge has
to be captured and codified in such a way that it can become a part of the existing knowledge
base of the organization. Knowledge capture is a demanding mental process in which a
knowledge developer collaborates with the expert to convert expertise into a coded
program. Three important steps are involved:
3. Using the interpretation to build the rules that represent the expert’s thought
NOTES processes or solutions.
We need to capture both types of knowledge – explicit and tacit. Tacit knowledge
management is the process of capturing the experience and expertise of the individual in an
organization and making it available to anyone who needs it. The capture of explicit
knowledge is the systematic approach of capturing, organizing, and refining information in
a way that makes information easy to find, and facilitates learning and problem solving.
The approach used to capture, describe, and subsequently code knowledge depends
on the type of knowledge: explicit knowledge is already well described, but we may need
to abstract and summarize this content. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, may require
much more significant up-front analysis and organization before it can be suitably described
and represented. A wide variety of techniques may be used to capture and codify knowledge
which is described here.
Tacit knowledge capture requires free access to a cooperative and articulate expert.
In most cases, the knowledge developer does not have the luxury of deciding on the
expert. However, the developer must be able to identify real expertise and how well a
particular expert’s know-how suits the project.
To ensure the reliability and quality of the KM system, a prime consideration is whether
to tap one expert or a panel of experts and this decision is based on several factor such as
the complexity of the problem, the criticality of the project to the organization, the types of
expert available, and the funds allocated for building the KM system. Each alternative has
advantages and limitations.
• Stimulates interaction.
NOTES • Listening to a multitude of views allows the developer to consider alternative ways
of representing knowledge.
• Formal meetings are sometimes better environment for generating thoughtful
contributions.
Creating the right impression: The knowledge developer must learn to use psychology,
common sense, and technical as well as marketing skills to attract the experts respect and
attention.
Experts are usually found to use one of the following styles of expression:
Procedure type: These types of experts are found to be logical, verbal and always
procedural.
Storyteller type: These types of experts are found to be focused on the content of
the domain at the expense of the solution.
Godfather type: These types of experts are found to be compulsive to take over.
Salesperson type: These types of experts are found to spend most of the time dancing
around the topic, explaining why his/her solution is the best.
• Individual approach: The knowledge developer holds sessions with one expert
at a time.
• Approach using primary and secondary experts:
o The knowledge developer hold sessions with the senior expert early in the
knowledge capture program for the clarification of the plan.
o For a detailed probing, he/she may ask for other experts’ knowledge.
Analogies/Uncertainties:
• In the course of explaining events, experts can use analogies (comparing a problem
with a similar problem which has been encountered in possibly different settings,
months or years ago).
• An expert’s knowledge or expertise represents the ability to gather uncertain
information as input and to use a plausible line of reasoning to clarify the fuzzy
details.
• Belief, an aspect of uncertainty, tends to describe the level of credibility.
Understanding experience:
• Knowledge developers can benefit from their understanding/knowledge of cognitive
psychology.
• When a question is asked, then an expert operates on certain stored information
through deductive, inductive, or other kinds of problem-solving methods.
• The resulting answer is often found to be the culmination of the processing of
stored information.
• The right question usually evokes the memory of experiences that produced good
and appropriate solutions in the past.
How well the expert can represent internal processes can vary with their command of
the language they are using and the knowledge developer’s interviewing skills.
• It is a flexible tool.
• It is excellent for evaluating the validity of information.
• It is very effective in case of eliciting information regarding complex matters.
• Often people enjoy being interviewed.
Interviews can range from the highly unstructured type to highly structured type.
• The unstructured types are difficult to conduct, and they are used in the case when
the knowledge developer really needs to explore an issue.
• The structured types are found to be goal-oriented, and they are used in the case
when the knowledge developer needs specific information.
Like any other professional, the knowledge developer must be well versed in the use
of specialized knowledge capture tools. Each tool has a unique purpose, depending on
whether the capture process revolves around a single expert or multiple experts. Let us
examine other tools used in knowledge capture.
if it seems incorrect; and most of all, does not argue with the expert while the
expert is performing the task. NOTES
• Compared to the process of interviewing, on-site observation brings the knowledge
developer closer to the actual steps, techniques, and procedures used by the expert.
• One disadvantage is that sometimes some experts to not like the idea of being
observed.
• The reaction of other people (in the observation setting) can also be a problem
causing distraction.
• Another disadvantage is the accuracy/completeness of the captured knowledge.
(b) Brainstorming
• It is an unstructured approach towards generating ideas about creative solution of
a problem which involves multiple experts in a session.
• In this case, questions can be raised for clarification, but no evaluations are done
at the spot.
• Similarities (that emerge through opinions) are usually grouped together logically
and evaluated by asking some questions like:
o What benefits are to be gained if a particular idea is followed?
o What specific problems that idea can possibly solve.
o What new problems can arise through this?
Electronic Brainstorming
• This approach protects the introvert experts and prevents tagging comments
NOTES to individuals.
• The benefit includes improved communication, effective discussion regarding
sensitive issues, and closes the meeting with concise recommendations for
necessary action.
• This eventually leads to convergence of ideas and helps to set final specifications.
• The result is usually the joint ownership of the solution.
• Each expert’s contributions are shared with the rest of the experts by using the
NOTES results from each questionnaire to construct the next questionnaire.
Concept Mapping
• It is a network of concepts consisting of nodes and links.
• A node represents a concept, and a link represents the relationship between
concepts.
• Concept mapping is designed to transform new concepts/propositions into the
existing cognitive structures related to knowledge capture.
• It is a structured conceptualization.
• It is an effective way for a group to function without losing their individuality.
• Concept mapping can be done for several reasons:
o To design complex structures.
o To generate ideas.
o To communicate ideas.
o To diagnose misunderstanding.
• Six-step procedure for using a concept map as a tool:
o Preparation.
o Idea generation.
o Statement structuring.
o Representation.
o Interpretation
o Utilization.
• Similar to concept mapping, a semantic net is a collection of nodes linked together
to form a net.
o A knowledge developer can graphically represent descriptive/declarative
knowledge through a net.
o Each idea of interest is usually represented by a node linked by lines (called
arcs) which shows relationships between nodes.
o Fundamentally it is a network of concepts and relationships.
(i) Blackboarding
• In this case, the experts work together to solve a specific problem using the
blackboard as their workspace.
• Each expert gets equal opportunity to contribute to the solution via the blackboard.
• It is assumed that all participants are experts, but they might have acquired their
individual expertise in situations different from those of the other experts in the
group.
• The process of blackboarding continues till the solution has been reached.
The knowledge developer should note the following points before initiating knowledge
codification:
12. Recorded knowledge is often difficult to access (because it is either fragmented or
poorly organized).
13. Diffusion of new knowledge is too slow.
14. Knowledge is nor shared, but hoarded (this can involve political implications).
15. Often knowledge is not found in the proper form.
16. Often knowledge is not available at the correct time when it is needed.
17. Often knowledge is not present in the proper location where it should be present.
NOTES 18. Often the knowledge is found to be incomplete.
3.7.1 Codifying Knowledge
• An organization must focus on the following before codification:
o What organizational goals will the codified knowledge serve?
o What knowledge exists in the organization that can address these goals?
o How useful is the existing knowledge for codification?
o How would someone codify knowledge?
• Codifying tacit knowledge (in its entirety) in a knowledge base or repository
is often difficult because it is usually developed and internalized in the minds of
the human
NOTES
(b Decision Table
A phonecard company sends out monthly invoices to permanent customers and gives
them discount if payments are made within two weeks. Their discounting policy is as
follows:
‘If the amount of the order of phonecards is greater than Rs.35, subtract 5% of
the order; if the amount is greater than or equal to Rs.20 and less than or equal to
Rs.35, subtract a 4% discount; if the amount is less than Rs.20, do not apply any
discount.”
We shall develop a decision table for their discounting decisions, where the condition
NOTES alternatives are ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.
1 2 3 4
A decision tree for the phonecard company discounting policy (as discussed above)
is shown next.
(d) Frames
NOTES
• A frame is a codification scheme used for organizing knowledge through previous
experience.
• It deals with a combination of declarative and operational knowledge.
• Key elements of frames:
o Slot: A specific object being described/an attribute of an entity.
o Facet: The value of an object/slot.
(f Case-Based Reasoning
• It is reasoning from relevant past cases in a way similar to human’s use of past
experiences to arrive at conclusions.
• Case-based reasoning is a technique that records and documents cases and then
searches the appropriate cases to determine their usefulness in solving new cases
presented to the expert.
• The aim is to bring up the most similar historical case that matches the present
case.
• Adding new cases and reclassifying the case library usually expands knowledge.
• A case library may require considerable database storage as well as an efficient
retrieval system.
NOTES
PEOPLE TECHNOLOGY
CONTENT
After determining the knowledge that people need, the next step is to find out where
the required knowledge resides, and the way to capture it successfully. Here, the term
knowledge center means areas in the organization where knowledge is available for
capturing. These centers supports to identify expert(s) or expert teams in each center who
can collaborate in the necessary knowledge capture process.
This step breaks down each knowledge center into some more manageable levels,
satellites, or areas.
Transport Layer
• This is the most technical layer.
• It ensures to make the organization a network of relationships where electronic
transfer of knowledge can be considered as routine.
• This layer associates with LAN (Local Area Network), WAN (Wide Area
Network), intranets, extranets, and internet.
• In this layer we consider multimedia, URL’s, connectivity speeds/bandwidths,
search tools, and consider managing of network traffic.
Middleware Layer
• This layer makes it possible to connect between old and new data formats.
• It contains a range of programs to do this job.
• Repositories Layer
• It is the bottom layer of the KM architecture which represents the physical layer in
which repositories are installed.
• These may include legacy applications, intelligent data warehouses, operational
databases etc.
o After establishing the repositories, they are linked to form an integrated repository.
o An integrated repository brings together all the knowledge available from the
repositories.
o The main advantage of an integrated knowledge repository is that the user does
not care in which repository the knowledge resides. A conceptual model for an
enterprise-wide integrated knowledge management system is shown in Figure
3.9.
NOTES
3.9 REPOSITORIES
The way core knowledge is shared with other members of the knowledge community
is an important issue for organizations. The knowledge repositories act as the link between
users and core knowledge, operating as a single point of entry to help people to find
relevant information from many different organizational sources. A repository’s broad
functions are to codify explicit knowledge in a logical manner and to direct the user to
enabling sources (including people, organizational units or groups, web sites, policies and
other avenues) which may guide and inform the knowledge seeker. The repository also
acts as the vehicle for contributing new knowledge, and for requesting personalized services
which keep the user updated on repository additions. In effect, a highly effective knowledge
repository should serve as a single point of contact for all knowledge needs.
A repository is unlikely to include all these features. Its design needs to reflect user
NOTES needs and the knowledge that is most important to core business. An effective repository
ensures users can draw from an appropriate array of options which support their most
important knowledge activities. It cannot be all things to all workers. The selectivity of the
content management system is its strength. Repositories need to be carefully developed to
provide this selective but detailed guidance on what is known in the organization, and by
whom.
The design of a knowledge repository reflects the two basic components of knowledge
as an object: structure and content. Knowledge structures provide the context for
interpreting accumulated content. If the repository is conceived as a “knowledge platform”,
then many different views of the content may be derived from a particular repository
structure. A high degree of viewing flexibility enables users to alter and combine views
dynamically and interactively and to more easily apply the knowledge to new contexts and
circumstances. At this point, knowledge-as-object becomes knowledge-as-process.
The basic structural element is the knowledge unit, a formally defined, atomic packet
of knowledge content that can be labeled, indexed, stored, retrieved and manipulated.
The format, size and content of knowledge units may vary depending on the type of explicit
knowledge being stored and the context of their use. The repository structure also includes
the schemes for linking and cross-referencing knowledge units. These links may represent
conceptual associations, ordered sequences, causality or other relationships depending on
the type of knowledge being stored.
To reflect the full range of explicit organizational knowledge, repositories should strive
to record significant and meaningful concepts, categories, and definitions, (declarative
knowledge), processes, actions and sequences of events (procedural knowledge), rationale
for actions or conclusions (causal knowledge), circumstances and intentions under which
the knowledge was developed and is to be applied (specific contextual knowledge), and
the linkages among them. The repository should be indexed according to those concepts
and categories, providing access paths that are meaningful to the organization. It should
accommodate changes or additions to that knowledge (e.g., by linking annotations) as
subsequent authors and creators adapt the knowledge for use in additional contexts.
A knowledge platform may actually consist of several repositories, each with a structure
appropriate to a particular type of knowledge or content. These repositories may be logically
linked to form a composite or “virtual” repository, the content of each providing context
for interpreting the content of the others. (Refer Figure 1.1) For example, product literature,
best sales practices, and competitor intelligence for a particular market might be stored
separately but viewed as though contained in one repository.
NOTES
The refinery represents the process for creating and distributing the knowledge
contained in the repository. This process includes five stages:
• Acquisition. Information and knowledge is either created within the organization
or can be acquired from many different internal and external sources.
• Refining. Captured knowledge, before being added to the repository, is subjected
to value-adding processes (refining) such as cleansing, labeling, indexing, sorting,
abstracting, standardizing, integrating, and re-categorizing.
• Storage and Retrieval. This stage bridges upstream repository creation to
downstream knowledge distribution.
• Distribution. This stage represents the mechanisms used to make repository
content accessible.
• Presentation. The value of knowledge is pervasively influenced by the context of
its use. Capabilities should be provided for flexibly arranging, selecting, and
integrating the knowledge content.
Knowledge repositories have a lifecycle that must be managed. Once created, they
tend to grow, reaching a point where they begin to collapse under their own weight, requiring
major reorganization. Their rejuvenation requires deleting obsolete content, archiving less
active but potentially useful content, and reorganizing what is left. Content or topic areas
may become fragmented or redundant. Reorganizing requires eliminating those redundancies,
For knowledge repositories to be meaningful, their structure must reflect the structure
of shared mental models or contextual knowledge tacitly held by the organization. In most
organizations, those structures are neither well-defined nor widely shared. Yet their
explication is essential for effectively managing explicitly encoded organizational knowledge.
This requires defining what is meant by a knowledge-unit and how that collection of
knowledge units should be meaningfully indexed and categorized for ease of access, retrieval,
exchange and integration. Creating “semantic consensus” even within common practice
communities is often a difficult task, let alone across an entire organization. Different lexicons
naturally emerge from different parts of an organization. Standards are in many ways counter
to the culture of many organizations. However, the ability to integrate and share knowledge
depends on some broadly meaningful scheme for its structure.
NOTES
Integrative Applications
Integrative applications exhibit a sequential flow of explicit knowledge into and out of
the repository. Producers and consumers interact with the repository rather than with each
other directly. The repository becomes the primary medium for knowledge exchange,
providing a place for members of a knowledge community to contribute their knowledge
and views. The primary focus tends to be on the repository and the explicit knowledge it
contains, rather than on the contributors, users, or the tacit knowledge they may hold.
At the other extreme, the producers and consumers are members of the same practice
NOTES community or organizational unit. While still exhibiting a sequential flow, the repository
provides a means to integrate and build on their collective knowledge. We can label these
as integrated knowledge-bases. A best-practices database is the most common
application. Practices are collected, integrated and shared among people confronting similar
problems.
Interactive Applications
the quality of the contributions, or to offer a place for readers to react to and discuss the
publication. Best practice databases typically require some degree of forum interaction, so NOTES
that those attempting to adopt a practice have an opportunity to discuss its reapplication
with its creators.
Composite Applications
Collaborative platform is a tool that supports team members or other tools that share
information and contribute to knowledge management system. The collaborative platform,
along with the communications network services and hardware, provides the pipeline to
enable the flow of explicated knowledge, its context, and the medium for conversations.
Besides this, the collaborative platform provides a surrogate channel for defining, storing,
moving, and linking digital objects, such as conversation threads that correspond to
knowledge units. The collaboration platform enables the content of the KM system with a
high degree of flexibility so that it is rendered meaningful, useful, and applicable across the
NOTES many possible contexts of use. More importantly, the collaborative platform empowers
the users. The user can either search for content - the pull approach to content delivery –
or subscribe to content, that is, have content pushed to him or her.
Meta knowledge implies knowing what you know and it is knowledge about
knowledge. Knowledge inventories, knowledge maps and expertise directories are examples
of meta-knowledge. When a request for information is sent to a computer-based repository
or database, the system has no way of determining whether the information is known or
present in its memory. For example, if a traditional database is confronted with a request
for information on two customers, only one of which exists in the database, the system will
have to search exhaustively through all records before it can determine whether a record NOTES
on the missing customer exist in the database. In the same vein, when a company is faced
with an incoming glut of information, confusion often surrounds the determination of the
presence or absence of that information. In other words, there is little that the company
can do to figure out whether that information represents something truly new or unknown.
Creation of meta knowledge is often extremely context dependent and requires the use of
pattern recognition or analogical reasoning. Being able to extract meta knowledge from
knowledge is a necessary characteristic of an effective KM system.
Knowledge sharing is an important component for any business to move ahead. The
benefits of knowledge management are tremendous if it is used as a catalyst for collaborative
efforts. Collaborative tools play an important role in knowledge sharing. They help to
foster relations between two business partners and provide access to all the relevant
information that is shared on an ongoing basis. Companies are developing these collaborative
tools to foster information sharing among employees. Let us analyse some of the commonly
available tools and technologies used as collaborative platform.
(a) Intranets
NOTES
It is certainly true that knowledge management is not a technology issue, effort must
still be spent in providing a suitable environment to facilitate knowledge capture and sharing.
For most organizations, this role is most easily taken on by the corporate intranet, the
existing information resource that is available to most staff. Many intranets are valuable
tools to support knowledge. Well-planned intranets make ideal platforms for knowledge
management initiatives as employees use the intranet as a learning, collaborative platform if
they have the confidence that it will consistently provide them with authoritative, validated
and qualified knowledge in return. The organizational intranet can be optimized to support
collaborative platform if changes are made to the existing content, publishing processes,
and the information architecture of the intranet.
(b) Portals
Collaborative tools (groupware) are computer-based tools that help people work
together and share information. They allow for virtual on-line meetings and data sharing.
Some examples of collaborative tools include:
NOTES
Collaborative tools are great for bringing geographically dispersed teams together for
NOTES virtual meetings. A benefit for process redesign teams is that they can now interact more
easily with process experts in other locations. This can bring more information to the core
team faster and can elicit important inputs that may have been missed just because it was
inconvenient or expensive to transport the person to the session physically. Additionally,
collaborative tools allow better change management by permitting the team to continuously
communicate with the organization at large.
3.11.3 Collaborative knowledge applications
(a) Collaborative technologies or tools such as instant messaging and video conferencing
are being integrated into KM systems to provide seamless access to all types of information
necessary for companies, and even departments within a company, to work together.
When companies start using knowledge management as a catalyst for collaborative efforts—
ranging from sharing the plans for a new product or an invoice that needs sorting out—the
potential benefits are huge.
For example, a buyer at a retail firm might be able to get an e-mail alert that a vendor
has a concern about a particular purchase order. Together, the retailer and the vendor can
view the document simultaneously—online, in real time—to work out the necessary changes.
Once the purchase order has been adjusted, both parties can notify the appropriate people
within their companies to view the updated purchase order and make the necessary
scheduling changes. That notification can happen via e-mail, pager, cell phone or instant
messaging, and in many cases the alerts can be triggered automatically. The KM system
acts as both a communication hub and data repository.
If a further discussion between the retailer and the supplier is necessary, a video
conference might be arranged. That video could be stored on a secure Web site to be
referred to later if necessary. Essentially, the parties involved in a project can set up a
“virtual office” on the Web that provides access to all relevant information that is shared on
an ongoing basis. Knowledge management needs to be built around transactions and
Collaboration features of a knowledge management system help companies work together.
(b) Sales forecasts can also be one of the most critical applications for collaborative-
based knowledge management systems.
(c) Companies are also integrating KM with their enterprise resource planning (ERP)
systems, which are corporate wide systems used for tracking things such as inventory,
financial data and even human resource information.
(d) Collaborative KM also has the potential for greater sharing of information during
the design of a new product. A cell phone maker, for example, can have dozens or
even hundreds of component suppliers and work very closely with the top 10
maybe and get them involved in the new phone design, share documents and
drawings and specifications to be sure they’ll be able to deliver. This can reduce
time to market, and you can hopefully deal with quality issues upfront.
(e) The benefit of a Web-based collaborative KM system is that it does not require
any specialized software to enable business partners to view documents and other NOTES
files online; one can access information from a laptop while on move. These systems
are now accessible through a standard Internet browser.
This is simply an instance of how the knowledge management (KM) system at TCS
has undergone a sea of change over the last 20 years. It now uses tools that are popular
among Generation ‘X’ such as IM, blogging, and jam sessions.
TCS, for instance, uses a single system for IM worldwide. That’s not all, it uses
multiple universal access technology, private IP telephony (where an employee can dial a
seven-digit number and speak to anyone anywhere in the world), and video conferencing.
“The latest technology was set up two years ago. We have been upgrading regularly. TCS’
knowledge management initiative has always kept pace with the latest technology available
at the time. The current KM portal using the latest technology encourages sharing, and
acts as a store-house of corporate knowledge,” says Anant Krishnan, Vice President and
Chief Technology Officer, TCS. Many of the collaboration tools are yet to be integrated
into the KM portal.
Currently at TCS, the KM portal - build using Microsoft’s Sharepoint - uses 8-9
channels of communication to get the 100,000 plus employees involved. Other than these
channels, the company also uses the ‘Just Ask’ system (embedded into the KM),
collaboration tools, Blog platform and Idea Storm.
The Idea Storm is a once-a-year event wherein 2-3 topics are posed by the corporate
team on which ideas are invited by everyone.
IM is clearly the most popular method with almost 1,000 online meets happening on
the system everyday across the globe. Followed by Just Ask System, which could be a
simple question and answer interaction to a detail discussion.
However, it is blogging that has caught on quite rapidly. Almost 40,000-50,000 TCS
NOTES staff blog on the official intranet, including Krishnan.
For instance, within this is a system called TIP. It is an anytime open portal for product
innovation and potential new ideas. “I get about 25,000 solutions a year on any given issue
right from how TCS should innovate its buses to product innovation. Of this 15-20 are
reasonable good product and services idea,” adds Krishnan.
TCS has also initiated a feature called My Site. The system, embedded into the KM
portal, allows each associate to have a personal page like facebook or orkut. Now, 8,000-
10,000 employees are using this.
Krishnan opines that the immediate advantage of the KM portal is to get solutions to
practical problems. “In the 80s KM were deployed with an ability to get tactical teams to
work on programmes, today most interaction we see are on short run immediate practical
solutions,” says Krishnan.
Going ahead the IT behemoth will continue to invest in adopting social networking
tools. It will add many more feature in its blogging systems, create Wiki’s among other
tools. Krishnan believes as the company becomes larger and as the usage in business will
multiply because of the sheer access this allows.
Question: Critically analyse the case in the light of collaborative concepts and list the
Tata’s collaborative initiatives.
SUMMARY
Knowledge has to be captured and codified in such a way that it can become a part
of the existing knowledge base of the organization. Knowledge capture is a demanding
mental process in which a knowledge developer collaborates with the expert to convert
expertise into a coded program. After knowledge is captured, it is organized and codified
in a manner amenable for transfer and effective use. Knowledge codification is organizing
and representing knowledge before it is accessed by authorized personnel.
Collaborative platform is a tool that supports team members or other tools that share
information and contribute to knowledge management system. The collaborative platform,
along with the communications network services and hardware, provides the pipeline to
enable the flow of explicated knowledge, its context, and the medium for conversations.
SHORT QUESTIONS
1. Define organizational learning.
2. Distinguish between organizational learning and learning organization.
3. What are the characteristics of learning organizations?
4. Compare learning organization with traditional organization.
5. Explain knowledge codification in your own words.
6. Distinguish between decision table and decision tree.
7. How knowledge codifications differ from knowledge creation?
8. What is a knowledge map?
9. How does knowledge map differ from decision tree?
10. How would you identify expertise?
11. What is the interviewer effect?
12. Define brainstorming and how it differs from e-brainstorming?
13. What is protocol analysis?
14. What are the distinctive features of on-site observation?
15. Distinguish between protocol analysis and Delphi method.
16. Give the differences between blackboarding and electronic brainstorming?
17. What is concept mapping?
18. What is a knowledge repository? What are its contents?
19. What is knowledge refining?
20. Distinguish between intranet and extranet.
21. What is a portal?
22. What is bulletin board?
LONG QUESTIONS
NOTES
1. Describe in detail the individual’s role and contributions in organizational learning?
2. What is the commonly employed orientation by organizations for effective
dissemination of knowledge?
3. Explain the five learning disciplines propounded by Peter Senge.
4. In your own words, define tacit knowledge capture. What makes it unique?
5. Working with multiple experts has definite benefits and limitations. Cite an example
in which the use of multiple experts is a must. Explain your choice.
6. Use an example of your own to illustrate the conditions under which you would be
willing to build a KM system based on single expert. Justify your decision?
7. Review briefly some of the problems encountered during an interview?
8. In what way is rapid prototyping related to interviewing? Be specific in your answer.
9. How is brainstorming conducted? Provide an example.
10. In what way does consensus decision making follow brainstorming?
11. Summarize the pros and cons of decision tables versus decision trees. Under what
conditions would you use one tool over the other?
12. In your own words, explain knowledge codification. How does it differ from
knowledge creation?
13. Present justification for knowledge codification.
14. Define the procedure to design a knowledge repository.
15. Write a detailed note on KM applications.
16. Define collaborative platform? What are its tools for information sharing?
NOTES
UNIT IV
The introduction of any new management system into an organization requires a change
in culture. For example, the introduction of a customer-relationship management (CRM)
system will demand culture change in terms of the way staffs interact with clients. But if any
change to a new management system is to deliver value in the long term, then there needs
to be a way of sustaining the culture – of making sure that behaviours stay changed, the
processes are carried out and that people do what they are supposed to do. Introduction
of KM in an organization is also not an exception to this and several researches suggests
after review of KM critical success factors identified for its implementation that many
factors have been important in implementation of a successful KM program. These factors
include culture, infrastructure, technology and measures. A common element in many KM
research frameworks and models is organizational culture. Refer the following figure
4.1.
Figure 4.1
Definition of culture
Without the benefit of a culture that recognizes, encourages, and rewards KM activities,
consistent performance of KM activities will not occur. Interaction and collaboration among
employees is important when attempting to transmit tacit knowledge between individuals
or convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, thereby transforming it from the
individual to the organizational level. Culture is important because it shapes assumptions
about what knowledge is worth exchanging; it defines relationships between individual and
organizational knowledge; it creates the context for social interaction that determines how
knowledge will be shared in particular situations; and it shapes the processes by which
new knowledge is created, legitimated, and distributed in organizations. Lack of technology
does not prevent KM activity – it just means that KM activity must be accomplished in
different ways. For example, employee suggestion programs are often developed using
traditional methods (i.e., methods not involving information technology). Most organizations
have sufficient technology to assist them in creating, sharing and documenting knowledge.
Sophisticated software applications and other technology may help but are certainly not a
requirement. Organized processes are more important. These processes require that the
organizational culture value, encourage, and reward KM behavior. Thus a knowledge
culture is required where each individual recognizes and accepts knowledge sharing as a
desirable behaviour. NOTES
4.2. LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this Unit, you should be able to understand the following:
• What is organizational culture?
• The relation between organizational culture and the business context and how
does culture contribute to organizational innovation and success
• Appreciate the contribution of organizational culture to the management of change
• Discuss the key organizational culture enablers and the chief obstacles to effective
knowledge sharing and KM
• How to implement knowledge culture enhancement program
• Describe the key components of a community of practice
• Define the major roles and responsibilities in a community of practice
• How CoP is developed and nurtured?
• How to develop organizational memory?
systems also need to be aligned so that the knowledge philosophy is reflected in the
structures, practices, performance outcomes and rewards. Thus the knowledge philosophy NOTES
needs to be embedded in the organizational culture and be evident in various ways to
ensure its acceptance and adoption by every employee.
Although this aspect may seem elementary, it is often overlooked. From the moment
an individual is brought into a knowledge management unit, he or she should know the
importance of sharing the right information with the right people. With sharing being a norm
for companies that depend on information to make sound business decisions, knowledge
workers must be prepared to disseminate relevant data on an ad hoc basis. To do so, they
must:
• Know how knowledge sharing has helped the company in the past through the use
of case studies and best practices report
• Be trained on the tool used to share information within the company
• Be provided with “a cause-and-effect analysis” of disseminating information when
it is needed
• Be rewarded when information is shared
Individuals who are unable to see the need to share within the company may not be
the most appropriate persons to work in the unit.
One of the most crucial elements behind a solid knowledge-sharing culture is trust. If
there is a lack of trust within the company among personnel, knowledge will be hoarded.
Information that is in the hands of a few individuals can be dangerous. When only a selected
few have access to knowledge, they become powerful individuals in the company and can
NOTES influence decisions that are made by top management.
If information overload is threatening the culture, the following tips can be used to
help improve the process of sharing information in a company.
• Begin to filter information on the basis of keywords
• Conduct more focus searches on the Web and databases
• Readjust the approach used to gather information internally
• Have a solid criteria to judge what is relevant to the department
To ensure that the individuals who will be sharing information throughout the company
utilize the right tools, managers should consider: NOTES
• Investigating which of the present tools in the company are being used to share
information
• Discovering how the present tools can be used more efficiently to make information
accessible
• Continuing to obtain the best possible tools to assist individuals in their work of
providing data to key decision makers
• Finding the tools that will be the right fit with its users for the long term
• Training personnel to use the applications to execute sharing tasks efficiently
• Once the tools are obtained and utilized by the intended users, managers must
constantly evaluate the performance of the applications and make the necessary
modifications to ensure that the department is not encountering any difficulties
distributing information.
If the situation should arise that individual(s) in the department are hindering the flow
of data in the company, managers have the power to replace the individual(s). With
substantiated claims, personnel can be repositioned within the department to ensure that
the skilled individuals who are motivated to share are in the right place. Changing the
sharers will breathe new life into the knowledge management unit and hopefully bring new
ideas to the table.
Making the necessary changes in personnel is a very delicate issue to tackle. Not wanting
to be unfair when removing individuals from their present job, managers have to consider
issues such as:
• Are the individuals unhappy with their current tasks within the department?
• Are the individuals skilled enough to remain a part of the team?
• What contributions have the individuals made over the past 6 to 12 months?
• Can the company afford to make the necessary changes?
KNOWLEDGE CULTURE
Core values.
Further, it needs to encourage employees to look beyond immediate needs when sharing
and exploring knowledge potentials. NOTES
Knowledge communities need to encourage flexible and adaptable behaviour.
Organization routines and processes need to be flexible, seeking sound outcomes through
a number of different mechanisms. Flexibility encourages people to seek opportunities to
experiment and work towards creative alternatives. Knowledge workers need to be
responsible for identifying the best ways of achieving the desired goals, with several workers
possibly operating differently to achieve the same outcomes.
Knowledge cultures must consistently affirm the value placed on knowledge workers.
For example, knowledge workers need opportunities to attend conferences, collaborate
with others, gestate ideas, communicate and work across organizational boundaries. The
ongoing recognition of the valued knowledge of employees is another way of recognizing
the human capital in the organization. A simple example is the public acknowledgement of
those who contribute to a project, or a celebratory function at the success of an innovation.
This also affirms the importance of individual knowledge workers and reinforces the message
that the organization is a learning culture.
Structural support
As noted earlier, people interpret messages from their work environment to identify
the behaviours and values which should be adopted. Structural support describes the
organizational structure, systems and processes which the organization sponsors through
NOTES resource allocation and public affirmation. Structural supports, which may include
technological systems, human resource process and other forms of work related infra-
structure, may operate as either barriers to or facilitators of knowledge cultures. For example,
a structural arrangement that reinforces knowledge chains will limit the capacity to
collaborate, as bottlenecks will occur. Enterprises that encourage knowledge hubs and
network through structural arrangements and/or technological support will foster a stronger
collaborative culture. Figure 4.2 lists a number of structural supports which help build
knowledge cultures.
A further structural influence relates to the ways individual employees are managed.
Human resources management systems are major cultural influences- they help with
employee socialization, performance management, and reward and recognition. The level
of control and coordination of staff activities also influences the culture. If staff is firmly
directed into particular areas of activity, they may have less desire or capacity to experiment
or socialize with areas beyond their stipulated roles. Thus, the human resources practices
and systems are most important in directing the employee’s focus and priorities.
Enacted values
The organization culture is strongly influenced by the values which are reflected in
actual practice, called enacted values. The real values demonstrated in everyday activities
are strong evidence of the real culture which operates, and will be heeded either consciously
or subconsciously by each member.
Cues and messages about the knowledge culture can be generated from many different
sources, particularly from those who provide models of behaviour or hold leadership NOTES
positions. Their public support of and demonstrated commitment to the values offer strong
messages to others. Thus, the more people see the core values in practice, the greater the
likelihood they will adopt and practice them
A further way of building the knowledge culture is through interaction with colleagues.
As noted earlier, individuals are strongly influenced by people with whom they regularly
interact. The quality and focus of that interaction play a major role in determining the
strength of the knowledge culture in the smaller community. There are many aspects to
interaction with colleagues. The communication processes which operate across the group
can be significant in facilitating a particular culture. Mentorship, team behaviours, co-workers
interaction and the presence of communities of practice all play a part in developing the
culture.
Employees also need access to communication channels where they may offer feedback
on the cultural and systematic changes. Many developmental processes are sabotaged by
innuendo and gossip before they are even in the public domain. Effective change processes
ensure that accurate information is available at all times. A program web site can be a
useful way of ensuring good dissemination of the purpose, strategy and desired outcomes
of the program. As the program evolves, the web site can also garner feedback on pilot
group experiences and other contributor insights, which may help to allay concerns.
Communication may also be in the form of open forums, public messages from the chief
NOTES sponsor of the project, and focus group meetings in which the shifting knowledge focus
and its implications may be discussed. These communication channels need to be maintained
over the course of the program, so that members of the organization’s community can seek
further affirmation and advice as the process continues.
Pilot testing
Cultural change programs rarely run smoothly as they seek to influence and persuade
organizational members to adopt different values, attitudes and patterns of behaviours.
Some changes may be enthusiastically embraced, but others may be bitterly opposed. The
promotion of new values and processes without careful testing of the strategy can be high
risk. Pilot tests of the planned changes can help identify possible problems. They also build
expertise within the community which may be accessed in the second stage of the
implementation. Further, they enable the development of case studies and real experts
who can share their insights with others who follow. They also allow close support and
analysis of the various processes by the program team. The time taken to undertake pilot
studies is well rewarded in terms of success and the removal of problems. If need to be, a
further pilot study might be done before large scale implementation. Participants in these
initial test sites need to be both recognized and valued for the contribution they make.
Adaptation can lead to some very different outcomes from those initially planned by
the program managers and sponsors. Contributors may seek to shift the focus of the
proposed cultural change, and to integrate their own existing preferences. When interventions
are planned, they need to be open to renegotiation and adaptation as further insights are
gained.
As the initiative takes root, users can be encouraged to share their ideas and insights
with others, through mentoring or by communal sharing through a range of dissemination
channels. Communal learning is an important element of the building of knowledge cultures-
it creates positive attitudes to the desired organizational approaches to knowledge
management. Various networking options might be encouraged; including bulletin boards,
list-servs, and support of frequently asked questions or frequently identified problems.
Coping with issues as they arise is very important, as it assures users that their needs and
experiences are of great concern. The prompt resolution of problems also ensures that
negativity does not become a prevailing attitude.
A range of strategies can help maintain the knowledge culture. The socialization of
new members, using both knowledge workers and official knowledge leaders is an important
strategy, as it affirms the culture of the workplace immediately, and clarifies the values
which should be evident in the new employee’s work practices. The development of reward
and performance management systems which integrate knowledge values expectations
are key aspects of ongoing support for the knowledge culture. The development and
mentoring of new leaders and ongoing professional development of knowledge related
competencies also send strong messages regarding the importance of these contributors.
Similarly, the integration and constant improvement of existing knowledge systems and
services (such as the knowledge help desk) can be of significant value in encouraging
positive responses to the knowledge culture. Recognition of key knowledge workers,
celebration of major knowledge advancements and strategies, and ongoing sharing of
experiences in enhancing knowledge management all serve to reinforce the strong knowledge
culture. An organizational developer who strives to maintain the knowledge culture throughout
the community can be of great value. Larger organizations regard this role as an important
NOTES full time commitment. The appointment of a coordinator of this culture can be one of the
strongest affirmations of the importance of the knowledge culture.
• Provide opportunities to interact across CoPs. This wider interaction can greatly
help the various groups identify common interests, potential members and likely NOTES
areas of collaboration.
• Consider appointing a broker to act as a facilitator and group support agent. Brokers
can help with the complex processes of translating, coordinating and suitably
integrating the different perspectives of the various members. This can be particularly
helpful when the participants find it hard to contribute the extra effort to maintain
the CoP connection and focus. It can also reduce conflicts of interest.
We frequently say that people are an organization’s most important resource. Yet we
seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through which individuals develop
and share the capacity to create and use knowledge. Even when people work for large
organizations, they learn through their participation in more specific communities made up
of people with whom they interact on a regular basis. These “communities of practice”
are mostly informal and distinct from organizational units. However, they are a company’s
most versatile and dynamic knowledge resource and form the basis of an organization’s
ability to know and learn.
Although the term “Community of Practice” is new, CoPs are not. Such groups have
been around ever since people in organizations realized they could benefit from sharing
their knowledge, insights, and experiences with others who have similar interests or goals.
One of the best-known examples of a CoP was formed by the copy machine repair
NOTES technicians at Xerox Corporation. Through networking and sharing their experiences,
particularly the problems they encountered and the solutions they devised, a core group of
these technicians proved extremely effective in improving the efficiency and effectiveness
of efforts to diagnose and repair Xerox customers’ copy machines. The impact on customer
satisfaction and the business value to Xerox was invaluable. Yet, for the most part, this was
a voluntary, informal gathering and sharing of expertise, not a “corporate program” (however,
once the company realized the value of the knowledge being created by this CoP, steps
were taken to support and enhance the efforts of the group).
To develop the capacity to create and retain knowledge, organizations must understand
the processes by which these learning communities evolve and interact. We need to build
organizational and technological infrastructures that do not dismiss or impede these processes,
but rather recognize, support, and leverage them.
Just because communities of practice arise naturally does not mean that organizations
can’t do anything to influence their development. Most communities of practice exist whether
or not the organization recognizes them. Many are best left alone–some might actually
wither under the institutional spotlight. And some may actually need to be carefully seeded
and nurtured. But a good number will benefit from some attention, as long as this attention
does not smother their self-organizing drive.
These roles may be formal or informal, and may be concentrated in a core group or
more widely distributed. But in all cases, leadership must have intrinsic legitimacy in the NOTES
community. To be effective, therefore, managers and others must work with communities
of practice from the inside rather than merely attempt to design them or manipulate them
from the outside. Nurturing communities of practice in organizations includes:
1) Legitimizing participation. Organizations can support communities of practice
by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate
in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring
is acknowledged. To this end, it is important to have an institutional discourse that
includes this less-recognized dimension of organizational life. Merely introducing
the term “communities of practice” into an organization’s vocabulary can have a
positive effect by giving people an opportunity to talk about how their participation
in these groups contributes to the organization as a whole.
2) Negotiating their strategic context. In what Richard McDermott calls “double-
knit organizations,” people work in teams for projects but belong to longer-lived
communities of practice for maintaining their expertise. The value of team-based
projects that deliver tangible products is easily recognized, but it is also easy to
overlook the potential cost of their short-term focus. The learning that communities
of practice share is just as critical, but its longer-term value is more subtle to
appreciate. Organizations must therefore develop a clear sense of how knowledge
is linked to business strategies and use this understanding to help communities of
practice articulate their strategic value. This involves a process of negotiation that
goes both ways. It includes understanding what knowledge–and therefore what
practices–a given strategy requires. Conversely, it also includes paying attention to
what emergent communities of practice indicate with regard to potential strategic
directions.
3) Being attuned to real practices. To be successful, organizations must leverage
existing practices. For instance, when the customer service function of a large
corporation decided to combine service, sales, and repairs under the same 800
number, researchers from the Institute for Research on Learning discovered that
people were already learning from each other on the job while answering phone
calls. They then instituted a learning strategy for combining the three functions that
took advantage of this existing practice. By leveraging what they were already
doing, workers achieved competency in the three areas much faster than they
would have through traditional training. More generally, the knowledge that
companies need is usually already present in some form, and the best place to start
is to foster the formation of communities of practice that leverage the potential that
already exists.
4) Fine-tuning the organization. Many elements in an organizational environment
can foster or inhibit communities of practice, including management interest, reward
systems, work processes, corporate culture, and company policies. These factors
rarely determine whether people form communities of practice, but they can facilitate
or hinder participation. For example, issues of compensation and recognition often
come up. Because communities of practice must be self-organizing to learn effectively
Such a team can also help identify and eliminate barriers to participation in the structure
or culture of the overall organization; for instance, conflicts between short-term demands
on people’s time and the need to participate in learning communities. In addition, just the
existence of such a team sends the message that the organization values the work and
initiative of communities of practice.
KM Viewpoint 4.1
Different members of an organization can take actions in their own domains to
support communities of practice and maximize the benefits they can provide:
• Line managers must make sure that people are able to participate in the
right communities of practice so they sustain the expertise they need to
contribute to projects.
• Knowledge managers must go beyond creating informational
repositories that take knowledge to be a "thing," toward supporting the
whole social and technical ecology in which knowledge is retained and
created.
• Training departments must move the focus from training initiatives that
extract knowledge out of practice to learning initiatives that leverage the
learning potential inherent in practice.
• Strategists must find ways to create two-way connections between
communities of practice and organizational strategies.
• Change managers must help build new practices and communities to
bring about changes that will make a constructive difference.
• Accountants must learn to recognize the capital generated when
communities of practice increase an organization's learning potential.
• Facilities managers must understand the ways in which their designs
support or hinder the development of communities of practice.
• Work process designers must devise process improvement systems that
thrive on, rather than substitute for, engaged communities of practice.
The software engineering requirements for supporting this type of corporate memories,
NOTES needed for the strong integration of corporate memories with existing IT infrastructures,
with particular regard to existing capabilities for database management, document
management and business process support. A corporate memory architecture that meets
these requirements is necessary and the paradigm shift of corporate memories from artificial
intelligence to a more general framework for IT integration is the need of the hour.
SUMMARY
Organizational or corporate memories record the accumulated knowledge about the services
and the products of an organization, with the purpose of supporting the continuous
enhancement of knowledge-intensive work practices.
SHORT QUESTIONS
LONG QUESTIONS
NOTES
1. What is the culture of an organization? Why is it important to understand?
2. What are some of the key enablers and major obstacles to effective knowledge
sharing that can be attributed to the overall organizational culture?
3. What are the various knowledge culture enablers? Explain.
4. How to cultivate knowledge culture in organizations?
5. Choose three organizational culture elements and consider how these might be
different in a manufacturing community and knowledge community?
6. The chapter describes a number of knowledge culture features. Choose any four
of these and outline how their absence might affect the knowledge community?
7. ‘Knowledge culture interventions should be centrally driven’. Discuss this statement.
8. Why do knowledge cultures need to be maintained? Whose responsibility is it?
9. How do you develop and nurture a CoP in an organization?
NOTES
NOTES
UNIT V
1. Communication
2. Collaboration
3. Content creation
4. Content management
5. Adaptation
6. E-learning
7. Personal tools
8. Artificial intelligence
9. Networking
The knowledge capture and creation does not make extensive use of technologies
but a wide range of KM technologies may be used to support knowledge sharing and
dissemination as well as knowledge acquisition and application. Many tools and techniques
are borrowed from other disciplines, and others are specific to KM. All of them need to be
mixed and matched in the appropriate manner in order to address all the needs of the KM
discipline, and the choice of tools to be included in the KM toolkit must be consistent with
the organization’s overall business strategy.
Knowledge management tools are the ‘face and place’ as well as the ‘nuts and bolts’
of knowledge in the 21st century workspace which make data into knowledge. Knowledge
management implementation requires a wide range of diverse tools that are responsible in
the KM cycle. Technology is used to facilitate primarily communication, collaboration, and
content management for better knowledge capture, sharing, dissemination and application.
KM-enabling tools and techniques are also play a useful facilitating role in learning
organizations, especially in dealing with the information overload that is plaguing most
organizations that have launched an intranet, enterprise resource planning (ERP) or business
intelligence system. Major categories of KM tools are presented here.
only approaches will continue to generate unsuccessful projects. CMS should be handled
in a strategic way. These failures provide a valuable source of learning. The move towards NOTES
open standards would greatly assist the evolution of CMS, which is likely to proceed with
the use of XML-based protocols for communicating with and between content management
systems. Additional standards are needed for storing, structuring, and managing content.
Eventually, content, documents, records, and knowledge management will converge, which
will be of greatest benefit to organizations. As yet, there is no merged platform to
accommodate such a convergence.
Authoring tools, the most commonly used content creation tools, and range from the
general (e.g. word processing) to the more specialized (e.g. web page design software).
Annotation technologies enable short comments to be attached to specific sections of text
document, often by a number of different authors (e.g. by making use of the track changes
feature in Word). This allows a “running commentary” to be built up and preserved.
Annotations may be public (visible to all who access and read the document) or private
(visible to the author only).
The data mining and knowledge discovery processes automatically extract predictive
information from large databases based on statistical analysis (typically, cluster analysis).
Using a combination of machine learning, statistical analysis, modeling techniques, and
database technology, data mining detects hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data
and infers rules that allow the prediction of future results. Raw data is analyzed in order to
offer a model that attempts to explain the observed patterns. This model can then be used
to predict future occurrences and to forecast expected outcomes.
A large number of inputs are required, usually over a significant period of time, and the
types of model produced range from “easy” to “almost impossible” to understand. Examples
of easy-to-understand models are decision trees. Regression analyses are moderately easy
to understand, and neural networks remain black boxes. The major drawback of the
black box models is that it becomes very difficult to hypothesize about casual relationships.
Variables may be correlated, but this relationship may not have any meaning or
usefulness. For example, a major bank found a correlation between the state an applicant
lived in and a higher percentage of defaults on loans given out. This finding should not be
the basis for a policy that would automatically reject any applicants from their state. Reality
checks are always needed with statistics before any conclusions can be drawn.
Typical applications of data mining and knowledge discovery systems include market
segmentation, customer profiling, fraud detection, evaluation of retail promotions, credit
risk analysis, and market basket analysis. However, there are usually a few gems to be
mined with data mining applications. These are often unexpected correlations that upon
NOTES further study yield some useful (and often actionable) insights into what is occurring.
It is also possible to apply this technique and use these tools to mine content other
than data-namely, text mining and thematic analysis and web mining-to look at what content,
how often, for how long (e.g. number of hits), which is very helpful in content management.
Similarly, skill mining or expertise profiling can be used to detect patterns in online curriculum
vitae of organizational members. Expertise location systems can be automatically created
based on the content that has been mined. Commercial software systems can also be used
to mine e-mail data in order to determine who is answering what types of queries or
themes. Organizational experts and expertise can be detected by looking at the patterns of
questions and answers contained within the e-mails. The same caveat applies to all of
these data mining applications: a human being is always needed in the loop in order to
carry out “reality checks” (i.e. to verify and validate that the patterns do indeed exist and
that they have been interpreted in a useful and valuable manner.)
(c) Blogs
A blog is a slang name for a web log. For the uninitiated, a web log is a popular and
fairly personal content form on the Internet. A person’s web log is much like an open diary.
It chronicles what a person wants to share with the world on an almost daily basis. A blog
is a frequently updated, publicly accessible journal. Although the “blogosphere” started off
as a medium for mostly personal musings, it has evolved into a tool that offers some of the
most insightful information on the web. Furthermore, blogs are becoming much more
common, as businesses, politicians, policy makers, and even libraries and library associations
have begun to blog as a way of communicating with their patrons and constituents.
everal librarians publish blogs that offer a wealth of information about social software
and its uses. SNTReport.com focuses on the social software industry and how social
software tools are being used to help people collaborate. Blogs not only offers a new way
to communicate with customers, but they have internal uses as well. For example, large
organizations can use a well formed blog to exchange ideas and information about web
development projects, training initiatives, or research issues. These questions and answers
can be cross-indexed and archived, which helps build a knowledge network among the NOTES
participating members. Most importantly, the price of setting up a well formed, secure blog
and leverage it into a knowledge and content management tool is a pittance when compared
to the cost of other, proprietary solutions.
At present, the majority of blogs are published exclusively in text. The next generation
of blogs, however, will implement audio and video elements, bringing a sophisticated
multimedia blend to the medium.
Blogs are collections of articles or stories arranged in reverse chronology and are
generally updated more frequently than regular web pages. Just like any other information
on the net, there is no guarantee of authority, accuracy, or lack of bias. In fact, personal
blogs are frequently biased and can be good sources of opinion and information from the
“man on the street”. Because blogs can be updated on the fly, they frequently have access
to unfiltered information faster from war zones and sites of natural disasters than the
mainstream media outlets. Blogs are also good sources of unfiltered information on either
faulty or very useful products.
In the beginning, blogs appeared in search results alongside regular web pages. Since
blogs are technologically any different from other web pages (that is, they are HTML,
XML, java script, etc. - it is their format, not their coding that is different). Spiders and
bots (or web crawlers, knowledge robots) automatically search for information online and
collect posts (i.e. messages that are submitted to a computerized messaging system) the
same way as they collect other online information. Search engines that place greater value
on sites that are recently and frequently updated and are highly linked tend to rank blog
posts very highly. Because the barrier to publication is so low in blogs, arguably much
lower than that for standard web pages, these high rankings were introducing a lot of noise
into online searches. The odds are that if you have searched on a controversial topic in the
past year you have run across several archived blog posts. Recently, most major search
engines have altered their algorithms to push blogs down in the search results. Engines that
only return two results from any one site use this feature to limit the impact of blogs on the
search results.
Blog searching breaks down into atleast two categories: (1) information from within
blogs/across blogs or (2) addresses of feeds from blogs so that you may subscribe in your
aggregator (i.e. a piece of software or a remotely hosted service that periodically reads a
set of news sources, such as blogs, identifies what is new, and displays them on single
page). Feeds and blogs are two different concepts, but they are closely linked because
most blogs have feeds and many feeds are generated by blogs. Just as in other web search
tools, there are search engines and directories. At this time, blog search engines are where
general search engines were before the Google Age: there are many competing smaller
products, but no product dominates the scene.
Personal portals- which were once known as “enterprise” portals- are now focused
n needs of the individual- all a person’s information and application needs harmoniously
brought together into a preferred arrangement on the desktop. This is mass customization
in front of your eyes. Again, the aims are laudable, but reality and theory are often miles
apart. PKM brings many of the key principles of KM to bear on the personal productivity
and specific work requirements of a given knowledge worker. Definitions of PKM revolve
around a set of core issues: managing and supporting personal knowledge and information
so that it is accessible, meaningful, and valuable to the individual; maintaining networks,
contacts, and communities; making life easier and more enjoyable; and exploiting personal
capital (Higgison, 2004). On an information management level, PKM involves filtering and
making sense of information and organization paper and digital archives-mails, and
bookmark collections.
The most commonly used communication technologies include the telephone, fax,
NOTES videoconferencing, teleconferencing, chat rooms, instant messaging, phone text messaging
(SMS), internet telephone (voice over IP or VOIP), e-mail, and discussion forums.
Communication is said to be dyadic when it occurs between two individuals (e.g. a telephone
call). Teleconferencing, on the other hand, may have more than two participants interacting
with one another real time. Videoconferencing introduces a multimedia component to the
communication channel as participants can not only hear (audio) but also see the other
participants (audiovisual). Desktop videoconferencing is similar but does not require a
dedicated videoconferencing facility. Simple and inexpensive digital video cameras can be
used to transmit images. The visual component is especially useful when demonstrations
are presented to all participants.
Chat rooms are text-based but synchronous. Participants communicative with one
another in real time via a web server that provides the interaction facility. Instant messaging
is also real-time communication, but in this case participants sign on to the instant messaging
system and they can immediately see who else is online or “live” at that same time. Messages
are exchanged through text boxes. The SMS (Short Messaging System) allows text messages
to be sent via a cellular phone rather than through the internet.
E-mail is by far the most common groupware application (besides, of course, the
traditional telephone). Although the basic technology is designed to pass simple messages
between two people, even relatively basic e-mail systems today typically include interesting
features for forwarding messages, filing messages, creating mailing groups, and attaching
files with a message. Other features that have been explored include automatic sorting and
processing of messages, automatic routing, and structures communication (messages
requiring certain information).
Newsgroup and mailing lists are similar in spirit to e-mail systems except that they
are intended for messages among large groups of people instead of one-to-one
communication. In practice, the main difference between newsgroups and mailing lists is
that newsgroup shows messages to users only when they are explicitly requested (an “on-
demand” service), while mailing lists deliver messages as they become available (an
“interrupt-driven” interface).
Hypertext is a system for linking text documents to each other, with the web being an
obvious example. Whenever multiple people author and link documents, the system
becomes group work, constantly evolving and responding to other’s work. Some hypertext
systems include capabilities for seeing who else has visited a certain page or link, or at least
seeing how often a link has been followed, thus giving users a basic awareness of what
other people are doing in the system. Page counters on the web are a crude approximation
of this function. Another common multi-user feature in hypertext (that is not found on the
web) is allowing any user to create links from any page, so that others can be informed
NOTES when there are relevant links not known to the original author.
Video communications systems allow two-way or multiway calling with live video,
providing essentially a telephone system with an additional visual component. Cost and
compatibility issues limited the early use of video systems to scheduled videoconferencing
meeting rooms. Video is advantageous when visual information is being discussed, but
may not provide substantial benefit in most cases where conventional audio telephones are
adequate. In addition to supporting conversations, video may also be used in less direct
collaborative situations, such as by providing a view of activities at a remote location.
Chat systems permit many people to write messages in real time in a public space.
As each person submits a message, it appears at the bottom of a scrolling screen. Chat
groups are usually formed by listing chat rooms by name, location, number of people,
topic of discussion, and so on.
Many systems allow for rooms with controlled access or with moderators to lead the
discussion, but most of the topics of interest to researchers involve issues related to NOTES
unmoderated real-time communication, including anonymity, following the stream of
conversation, scalability with number of users, and abusive users.
Although chat-like systems are possible using nontext media, the text version of chat has
the rather interesting aspect of having a direct transcript of the conversation, which not
only has long term value, but also allows for backward reference during conversation,
making it easier for people to drop into a conversation and still pick up on the ongoing
discussion.
(b) Wikis
Wikis are web-based software that supports concepts such as open editing, which
allows multiple users to create and edit content on a website. A wiki site grows and changes
at the will of the participants. People can add and edit pages at will, using a Word-like
screen, without knowing any programming or HTML commands. More specifically, a wiki
is composed of web pages where people input information and then create hyperlinks to
another page or new pages for more details about a particular topic. Anyone can edit any
page and add, delete, or correct information. A search field at the bottom of the page lets
you enter a key word for the information you want to find. Today, two types of wikis exist:
public wikis and corporate wikis. Public wikis are developed first and are freewheeling
forums with few controls. In the last year or two, corporations have been harnessing the
power of wikis to provide interactive forums for tracking projects and communicating with
employees over their in-house intranets.
A public wiki survives thanks to the initiative, honesty, and integrity of its users. Sites
can be vandalized, derogatory remarks- called “flames”- can be posted, and misinformation
can be published. However, a vandalized site can be restored, a flame can be erased, and
information can be corrected by anyone who knows better. The community polices itself.
Corporate wikis differ from public wikis in that they are more secure and have many more
navigation, usage, and help features. Corporate wikis are used for project management
and company communications as well as discussion sites and knowledge databases. For
example, a wiki can be established for a particular project, with the project team given
access to update the status of tasks and add related documents and spreadsheets. Its
central location makes it easy to keep everyone informed and up to date regardless of their
home office, location or time zone. A wiki is more reliable than continually e-mailing updates
back and forth to the team members, it is faster than e-mail since updates are available
instantly, and it is more efficient than e-mail since each team member does not have to
NOTES maintain his or her own copies. Managers like wikis because they allow them to see what
progress the team is making or what issues it is facing without getting involved or raising
concern (e.g. a new way of project management reporting).
For security reasons, corporations usually buy wiki software rather than lease space
on the internet, and they set up the wiki behind the company’s firewall as a part of the
intranet or as an extranet if customers or vendors are allowed access. Also, corporations
look for wiki software that has authorization and password safeguards, “rollback” versions
so that information can be restored to its former state, and easy uploads capabilities for
documents and images. Some wikis notify users when new information is added; this is an
especially nice feature for corporate projects where fast responses are required.
The knowledge repository is the one-stop-shop for all organizational users providing
access to all historical, current, and projected valuable knowledge content. All users should
be able to connect to and annotate content, connect to others who have come into contact
with the content, as well as contribute content of their own. The interface to the repositories
should be user-friendly, seamless, and transparent.
The knowledge repository typically involves content management software tools such
as a Lotus Notes platform and will be run as an intranet within the organization, with
appropriate privacy and security measures in place.
The purpose of a portal is to aggregate content from a variety of sources into a one-
stop-shop for relevant content. Portals enable the organizations to access internal and
external knowledge that can be consolidated, analyzed, and used as inputs to decision
making. Ideally, portals will take into account the different needs of the users and the
NOTES different sorts of knowledge work they carry out in order to provide the best fit with both
content and the format in which the content is presented (the portal interface). Knowledge
portals link people, processes, and valuable knowledge content and provide the
organizational glue or common thread that serves to support knowledge workers. First
generation portals were essentially a means of broadcasting information to all organizational
members. Today, they have evolved into sophisticated shared workplaces where knowledge
workers cannot only contribute content and share content but also acquire and apply
valuable organizational knowledge. Knowledge portals support knowledge creation, sharing,
and use by allowing a high level of bidirectional interaction with users.
E-learning applications started out as a computer based learning (CBT) and web
based training (WBT) applications. The common feature is the online learning environment
provided for learners. Courses can now be delivered via the web or the company intranet.
The particular knowledge and know-how to be acquired can be scoped and delivered in
Decision support systems are designed to facilitate groups in decision making. They
provide tools for brainstorming, critiquing ideas, putting weights and probabilities on events
and alternatives, and voting. Such systems enable presumably more rational and even-
handed decisions. Primarily designed to facilitate meetings, they encourage equal
participation by, for instance, providing anonymity or enforcing turn-taking.
Intelligent Agents can generally be defined as software programs that assist their
user and act on his or her behalf: a computer program that helps you in newsgathering, acts
autonomously and on its own initiative, have intelligence and can learn, improving its
performance in executing its tasks. These agents are autonomous computer programs,
where their environment dynamically affects their behavior and strategy for problem solving.
They help users deal with information. Most agents are internet based- that is, software
programs inhabiting the Net and performing their functions there.
Many knowledge management applications make use of intelligent agents. This range
includes personalized information management (such as filtering e-mail), electronic commerce
(such as locating information for purchasing and buying), and management of complex
commercial and industrial processes (such as scheduling appointments and air traffic control).
These tasks/applications can generally be grouped into five categories:
1. Watcher agents: look for specific information.
2. Learning agents: tailor to an individual’s preferences by learning from the user’s
past behavior.
3. Shopping agents: compare “the best price for an item”.
4. Information retrieval agents: help the user to “search for information in an intelligent
fashion”.
5. Helper agents: perform tasks autonomously without human interaction.
In the age of computers, information, whether useful or useless, is readily available on
the internet. So much data is available that we often claim to be “overloaded with
information”. Having too much data can cause as much trouble as having no data, as we
must sift through so much information to get what we need. Let us categorize this information
overload problem into two divisions:
Some companies receive so much e-mail that they have to employ clerical workers to
sift through the flood of e-mail, answering basic queries and forwarding others to specialized
workers. Others use intelligent filtering software such as GrapeVine for Lotus, which reads
a preestablished “knowledge chart” to determine who should receive what mail. Intelligent
agent services can supplement but not replace the value of edited information. As information
becomes more available, it becomes more and more crucial to have strong editors filter
that information. There is so much content out there that the tools that filter content are
going to be as important as the content itself.
News agents are designed to create custom newspapers from a huge number of web
newspapers throughout the world. The trend in this field is toward autonomous, personalized,
adaptive, and very smart agents that surf the Net, newsgroups, databases, and so on and
deliver selected information to their users. “Push” technology is strictly connected to news
bots developments, consisting basically in the delivery of information on the web that appears
to be initiated by the information server rather than by the client.
Information overload is a world wide problem today, but Intelligent Agents help reduce
this problem. Using them to filter the oncoming “traffic” of the “information highway” can
help reduce cost, effort and time. Yet the development of Intelligent Agents is still in its
infancy. As it gains in popularity and use, we can expect to see more sophisticated and
better developed Intelligent Agents.
Information studies research has examined information seeking behavior for over five
NOTES decades now and can serve as an excellent theoretical basis for the study of the Internet as
an information source and Intelligent Agents as mediators in this digital environment using a
case study to explore how knowledge workers made use of internet based information
systems, found that information studies theory provides an appropriate framework for
examining internet based information seeking behaviours. The knowledge workers use the
web to find information external to their organizations as part of their daily work life. A
typology of different complementary modes of using the web as an information source was
identified and described.
Adaptive technologies are used to better target content to a specific knowledge worker
or to a specific group of knowledge workers who share common work needs.
Personalization, on the other hand, refers to the automatic changing of content and
interfaces based on the observed and analyzed behaviors of the intended end user. For
example, many MS office applications offer the option of dynamically reordering pop-
down menu based on frequency of usage (the ones used most often will be displayed on
top). One way of automatically personalizing knowledge acquisition makes use of
recommender systems. Recommendations regarding content that is likely to be considered
useful and relevant by a given knowledge worker may be based on a user profile of that
knowledge worker (e.g. with themes checked off), or the recommendation may be based
on affinity groups. Affinity groups make use of similarity analysis of users in order to develop
groups of individuals who appear to share the same interests. Amazon, for example, uses
affinity groups when, after ordering a book online, visitors to the site are provided with
information on related books that others who have bought the same book have also
purchased.
Tools and techniques are a means and not an end in themselves. First, the business
objectives must be clearly identified, and then a consensus must be reached on priority
The need for measurement of KM follows a bell curve pattern through the life cycle
of a business life cycle. In the earliest stages of knowledge management implementation,
formal measurement rarely takes place, nor is it required. As KM becomes more structured
and widespread and companies move into stages two, three, and four, the need for
measurement steadily increases. As KM becomes institutionalized—a way of doing
business—the importance of KM-specific measures diminishes, and the need to measure
the effectiveness of knowledge-intensive business processes replaces them.
NOTES
The fire to manage knowledge starts with the spark of inspiration. There has to be a
new source of energy or interest to cause KM to appear in the option set for the organization.
Someone must become inspired with the vision of what it would be like if the organization
could effectively support human knowledge capture, transfer, and use. Energized by his or
her vision, this champion begins to search for opportunities to share the vision with others
and to find opportunities to demonstrate the value of KM to the organization. The central
task for the champion at this stage is to create a vision that inspires others to join in the
exploration of how managing knowledge might contribute value to the enterprise and its
people.
Interviewing key stakeholders helps uncover KM needs and exposes areas of lost
time, effort, and therefore money. Making comparisons with similar industries that have
successfully implemented KM also can convince skeptics. If the competitor has gained
recognition for its KM efforts and has seen its productivity jump and operating costs
plummet, then the organization implementing KM likely found a good candidate to use as
proof of KM’s power.
Stage 1 is the time for advocating the potential of KM to the stakeholders and after that
more concrete measures will be necessary. NOTES
Stage 2 – Explore and Experiment Stage
At this point in the process, negotiations for some corporate funding can add additional
resources to the scarce and limited funds from the local teams. Toward the end of this
stage, the pilots’ focus begins to center on specific knowledge management ideas and
principles in order to demonstrate concepts and capabilities.
Knowledge management will generate these financial measurements and others, but
not in the early stages. Measurement of financial returns or results should not be undertaken
at this point except as byproducts of other concurrent efforts. Simply stated, if the
organization is measuring for financial returns when your organization is at this particular
juncture, then it is measuring the wrong thing.
Simple measures are critical at this stage. Examples of potential measurements include:
Measure for Progress: Measure the progress you make in developing and growing
NOTES sponsorship and support from top management.
As part of your early work in Stages 1 and 2, you should have completed an assessment
or knowledge map of your organization to determine what practices you currently have in
place and what you are missing. As part of this assessment, you should attempt to identify
what, if any, measurements are currently being used. You will at some point need to determine
the value of that measurement and whether it can be used going forward. The existing
measurement can, at a minimum, provide you with a benchmark for future measurements.
Benchmarking with other organizations can be a persuasive tool and can lead to
executive sponsorship. Since most successful KM initiatives are grassroots or organizational
(department/division) and not corporate (top-down) in origin, measurement within the
various division/department is crucial.
mechanism to capture the hard and soft lessons learned in the knowledge management
pilots, as these will be the building blocks for the later KM stages. NOTES
Having a predefined taxonomy on the classification of lessons learned can be helpful
in developing conclusions and identifying areas desirable for replication throughout an
organization. In addition, during the acceleration of knowledge management scale-up,
establishing measures for the various components of a knowledge management initiative is
beneficial. These measures include process dimensions, culture dimensions, content
dimensions, information technology dimensions, and people dimensions.
• What is the threshold for indicating a repeat user is a steady customer? Someone
may sample a site several times but will stop visiting if they fail to get the results
they seek.
c Measure the Cultural Impact: In Stage 3, the issues surrounding the potential for
NOTES measuring the cultural side of knowledge management need to be addressed.
Considerable effort needs to be placed on determining:
In selecting measures, consideration should be given to if and how the cultural side of
KM can be measured in Stage 3.
(i) Anecdotal stories. As stated earlier, stories can form the basis for extrapolation
of quantitative data. This is not necessarily the only or best means of using anecdotal
measurements, but considering the intrinsic value of the anecdote can be important.
(ii) Performance review. Another means of measuring cultural impact is through the
performance review process. Individuals can be rated by their peers (360-degree
feedback) on three major knowledge-sharing points listed below. This can be
implemented in Stage 3 because there are formal (if only pilot) applications in
place. As part of these applications feedback on the usefulness of the knowledge
provided is essential.
1. Do they share their knowledge in an open and constructive way?
2. Do others find their knowledge of value and use it? What results are gained from
it?
3. Do they use others’ knowledge and apply it to improve operations? This can be
measured somewhat by traditional business measurement tools.
(iii) Public and private recognition and rewards for individuals and teams: Though
an organisation advocates team building and sharing of knowledge, incentives for
individual contributions are still required. A reward or recognition system properly
implemented can provide quantitative measurements.
(iv)Measure the Effectiveness of Sharing Communities: Document the effectiveness
of communities of practices (CoPs). Based on the findings, determine essential
elements that contribute to coherent and effective CoP. Draw correlations against
CoPs that have not been as successful. Extract lessons learned and best practices
from these correlations and use them to build new CoPs and improve existing
ones.
(v) Measure the Ownership of Capture and Compilation: What are the costs
involved in capturing information in a usable manor? This includes not only the
capturing but also the indexing. If the information is not retrievable it is of little
value. Quantifiable measurement of the time required to capture the information in
a usable manner is applicable. This can be critical in evaluating the impact of a pilot
project. Is the cost of the capture process too high in comparison to the value of
the captured information or knowledge?
many areas of fitness that, in aggregate, help the organization determine whether the projects
NOTES in its KM portfolio are of high impact and beneficial to the success of the company. Project
criteria may include:
• Proficiency. Has a process become world-class because of KM, or has it made
only mediocre improvement?
• Diffusion. Has KM been properly executed? Is the project and knowledge
managed well? Is it well understood?
• Codification. Because codifying knowledge is expensive, should the organization
limit that? Is that limitation visible and understood?
• Openness for combination/innovation. Is the knowledge described in jargon
that no one understands? Is the knowledge base open to other disciplines? Does
the project generate questions to the organization to help it grow?
Justification measures can be difficult when the organization is trying to decide whether
to adopt KM as part of the ongoing corporate strategy. The question of measurement
must often be restated at this stage. The organization has to not only measure how knowledge
area projects perform but also evaluate how it feels the business key indicators are linked
to the knowledge areas. This can be easier if the business owner decides what needs to be
improved through a project before embarking on it. When the improvements occur, he or
she can communicate the causal linkages between where the business started and where it
ended up because of the concentration on creating a viable knowledge project.
At this stage, it is important to tap into the values of the organization and determine
whether a culture shift is occurring. Personal performance reviews can be a useful avenue
to determine whether managers support knowledge sharing and give employees a chance
to show their ability to share. Then questions can be asked of employees to determine
whether management really does support knowledge sharing. Targeted questions such as
“How do you support creation and innovation?” can also help determine employee mind-
set.
Sharing and using knowledge become part of the organization’s “way of doing
business” as well as an expected management competency. In the relatively young arena of
KM, only a few organizations have reached this stage. As in Stage 4, Stage 5 measures
are not used to prove value. They are used to check progress and monitor the continued
evolution of the culture. KM can no longer be called an initiative or project at this stage,
but becomes the backbone on which the organizational business processes are built on.
It is widely accepted that intangible (knowledge or intellectual) assets are the major
drivers of corporate value and growth in most economic sectors, but the measurement of
these assets has eluded so far managers, accountants, and financial analysts valuing
investment projects.
The value of knowledge or the intellectual capital of any organization and the efficiency
and performance of the associated KM systems cannot be measured by the conventional
tools and techniques in existence. There is no difference between monetary measures and
other measures though monetary measurement is objective and guided by definitions and
standards. As of today, there exists no system that uses money as a measurement tool.
Most organizations measure some of their intangible assets and they use non-monetary
measures for particularly measuring operational efficiency. Manufacturing companies
measure “output per hour” as a basis. Hospital and hotel measure bed utilization, school
measure student’s performance in terms of marks, employee satisfaction and retention as
a measure of competence by most business organizations.
Some have attempted to gauge the value of intangible assets from the difference between
the company’s capital market value and its book value (the balance sheet value of net
physical and financial assets). This approach is unsatisfactory because it is based on two
flawed assumptions: (a) that there is no mispricing in capital markets, and (b) that balance
sheet historical values of assets reflect their current values.
Intangibles. Dividing the above-average earnings by the company’s average cost of capital
or an interest rate, one can derive an estimate of the value of its intangible assets or intellectual NOTES
capital.
Scorecard Methods (SC). The various components of intangible assets or intellectual
capital are identified and indicators and indices are generated and reported in scorecards
or as graphs. SC methods are similar to DIS methods, expect that no estimate is made of
the rupee-value of the Intangible assets. A composite index may or may not be produced.
5.5.2. Intangible assets monitor
Intangible asset monitor is a method for measuring intangible assets and a presentation
format that displays a number of relevant indicators for measuring intangible assets in a
simple manner. The choice of indicators depends on the company strategy. The format is
particularly relevant for knowledge organizations. The intangible assets monitor appears
similar to balanced score card, however, there are significant differences between the two.
The intangible assets monitor can be integrated in the MIS. The most important areas to
cover are growth/renewal, efficiency, and stability. The purpose is to get a broad picture:
so one or two indicators in each category could be designed. Normally, organizations are
interested in indicators that indicate change, i.e. growth, and renewal as well as efficiency
and stability measures.
Efficiency and effectiveness
Although often used as synonyms, efficiency and effectiveness measure different things.
Efficiency measures utilisation, i.e. how well an organization is using its capacity, regardless
of what it produces. A criterion of efficiency, often used by consultancy firms is billable
time; time billed to clients, as a proportion of time available. This measures how much time
consultants are paid for. It is a simple and good indicator of short term profitability because
it measures capacity usage, but it says nothing about what the consultants accomplish in
that time.
The needs of the various parties concerned may, of course, differ; shareholders are
interested in dividends; customers are interested in service levels, and quality. Firms should,
therefore, employ different efficiency measures, for different audiences. ROI (return on
invested capital) is a criterion of efficiency popular in financial circles. It measures profit
generated by the capital invested in a company, or a project and is thus a very important
indicator of efficiency, to both creditors and the owners of the invested capital. For
shareholders, the most important figure is what they earn after tax, in the form dividends on
the capital they have put into the company; the return after tax on their own equity, often
shortened ROE.
The management must also track the return on the firm’s total capital, and on particular
investment projects, so that they can control their allocation of capital. Unfortunately, this
technique cannot be applied to intangible assets, so various income statements, and non-
monetary measurements, must be used instead to calculate efficiency.
Intangible Assets
External Structure
Indicators Internal Structure Competence
Indicators Indicators
Indicators of Growth
Indicators of Growth Competence Index
Indicators of Growth Investment in IT Number of Years in the
Organic Growth. Investments in Internal Profession.
Structure Level of Education.
Competence Turnover.
Indicators of
Indicators of
Renewal/Innovation
Renewal/Innovation
Indicators of Competence-Enhancing
Organization Enhancing
Renewal/Innovation Customers.
Customers.
Image Enhancing Customers Training and Education
Proportion of new
Sales to new customers Costs.
products/services
Diversity
New processes implemented
Indicators of
Efficiency/Utilization
Indicators of Proportion of Professionals.
Indicators of
Efficiency/Utilization Leverage Effect.
Efficiency/Utilization
Profitability per Customer. Value Added per Employee.
Proportion of Support Staff
Sales per Customer. Value Added per
Win/Loss Index. Professional.
Profit per Employee.
Profit per Professional.
Indicators of Risk/Stability
Indicators of Risk/Stability
Satisfied Customers Index.
Values/Attitudes Index Indicators of Risk/Stability
Proportion of Big
Age of the organization. Professionals Turnover.
Customers.
Support Staff Turnover. Relative Pay.
Age Structure.
Rookie Ratio. Seniority
Devoted Customers Ratio.
Seniority.
Frequency of Repeat Orders.
5.5.3. IC Rating
NOTES
IC rating can be said to constitute value creating factors not shown in traditional
balance sheets, but which are of critical importance to a company’s long-term profitability.
IC Rating is a way of measuring intellectual capital from a new perspective and with a new
approach focus on the assets that in fact decide the ability of knowledge based companies
to create value for its interest groups.
The BSC is a proven approach to strategic management that imbeds the long-term
strategy into the management system through the mechanism of measurement. The BSC
translates vision and strategy into a tool that effectively communicates strategic intent and
motivates and tracks performance against the established goals. A vision describes the
ultimate goal and a strategy is a shared understanding about how that goal is to be reached.
The BSC provides a medium to translate the vision into a clear set of objectives. These
objectives are then further translated into a system of performance measurement that
effectively communicates a powerful, forward-looking, strategic focus to the entire
organization.
all future success – the organization’s people and infrastructure. Adequate investments in
NOTES these areas are critical to long term success. The development of a true learning organization
supports success in the next BSC perspective, the internal process perspective. The internal
process perspective focuses attention on the performance of the key internal processes
which drive the business. Improvement in internal processes now is a key lead indicator of
financial success in the future. However, in order to translate superior processes into financial
success, companies first please their customers. The customer perspective considers the
business through the eyes of a customer, so that the organization retains a careful focus on
customer needs and satisfaction. Finally, the financial perspective measures the ultimate
results that the business provides to its shareholders. Together, these four perspectives
provide a balanced view of the present and future performance of the business.
Business intelligence and Internet technology are the foundations of BSC systems. BI
systems take ground-level data – such as delivery time, sales figures, length of customer
service calls, etc. – and translate into a company-wide BSC summery which keep track of
the successful and unsuccessful goals of the organization. Internet technology makes the
system accessible to anyone in the business from anywhere.
Organizational implementation
A company initiates a BSC system by setting strategic goals in each of the four
quadrants described below:
• Customer satisfaction
• Internal business processes
• Learning
• Financials
It then assigns metrics that can be measured to determine whether the business is
meeting its goals. The grades are based on metrics that put measurable value on factors
usually considered too vague to quantify. The loaded BI system can extract that data from
existing systems, process it, determine whether the company is meeting customer satisfaction
goals, and issue a grade on the corporate scorecard. In the ultimate BSC environment,
there are different scorecards for everyone in the business, and for the business itself,
universally accessible via the organizational intranet on the Internet. This makes the BSC a
potent system for communicating strategic goals. Executives can view a scorecard on their
desktops that displays business’s strategic goals. If they require information about a goal,
they can drill down and obtain more minute details. Much of the detail comes from individual
employees, who enter data and notes about what is happing on the front lines into
personalized scorecards. These scorecards also tell them hoe their performance matches
their goals.
Measurement
NOTES
Measurement is a critical component of any management system. Most managers
recognize its vital role in communication, incepting and tracking the achievement of an
organization’s strategy. Despite this recognition, most organizations do not operate with a
measurement system that adequately fills all these roles, because they consist of many
financial indicators. Today’s measurement systems focus organizations on past performance
and encourage a short-term view of strategy, failing to provide the long-term strategic
management capabilities that today’s organizations need. The BSC has been quickly accepted
by the business world; it is easy to see the value of a focused set of performance
measurements. A good BSC should convey the details of the organization’s strategy. The
following three criteria help to determine if the performance measures are in tune with the
organizations strategy.
1. Cause and Effect Relationships: Every measure selected for a BSC should be
part of a chain of cause and effect relationships that represent the strategy.
2. Performance Drivers: Measures common to most companies within an industry
are known as “lag indicators”. Examples include market share or customer
retention. The drivers of performance (known as “lead indicators”) tend to be
unique because they reflect what is different about the strategy. A good BSC
should have a mix of lead and lag indicators.
3. Financial Linkage: Most organizations are preoccupied with goals such as quality,
customer satisfaction and innovation. While these goals are frequently strategic,
they also must translate into measures that are ultimately linked to financial indicators.
There are two essential ingredients to the successful design of a balance scorecard.
1. An architect who has a framework, philosophy, and a methodology for designing
and developing the new management system.
2. A client who will be totally engaged and assume ultimate ownership of the project,
understanding that the person must live with the results long after the architect
withdraws.
The client is the executive team of the business organization. The BSC and the
management system which will be built around it are, ultimately, the responsibility of the
executive team. Without their active sponsorship and participation, a BSC project should
not be attempted, because it is bound to fail.
Methodology: The approach should include the capture and translation to measurement
of an organizational strategy across a wide variety of strategic and operational situations.
The following approach can be employed in designing a BSC measurement system.
Design measures: With the prioritized strategic objectives agreed upon by the
executive team, the next step is the selection of measures to track the achievement of these
objectives. Sub-team working sessions focus on the development of measures for a subset
of the objectives, finalizing the working of objectives and searching for measures appropriate
for tracking each objective. At the end of this step, the sub-teams synthesize their
recommendations into a united “strategic story” in consonance with the strategic objectives
and measures; thereby concluding the design of the BSC measurement system.
This step typically reviews the client’s approach to data reporting and review,
management meetings and decision-making, strategic learning, strategic communication,
personal objective setting, planning and budgeting.
1. Customer connectivity
2. Internal process efficiency and effectiveness
3. Individual and group innovation and learning
4. Financials.
The BSC provides a holistic view of the short and long-term health of the organization,
by having metrics established in each of the basic elements with financial performance
being the ultimate lagging indicator.
Even with the best known tools and techniques for installing a measurement system,
many attempts fail. Here are the some of the barriers to implementation of measurement
systems.
and prognostic report on the current corporate ‘knowledge health’. The report provides
NOTES evidence as to whether corporate knowledge value potential is being maximized. In this
respect the K-Audit measures the risk and opportunities faced by the organization with
respect to corporate knowledge.
This section will cover four main areas of the knowledge audit:
The aims and objectives of the audit.
Process mapping is one of the most powerful ways for multi-disciplinary teams to
understand the real problems from the individual’s perspective, and to identify opportunities
for improvement.
3. An overview of the complete process – helping staff to understand, often for the
first time, how complicated the systems can be. NOTES
4. An aid to help plan effectively where to test ideas for improvements that are likely
to have the most impact on the project aims
5. Brilliant ideas – especially from staff who don’t normally have the opportunity to
contribute to service organization, but who really know how things work
6. An event that is interactive, that gets people involved and talking
7. An end product – the map – which is easy to understand and highly visual rocess
mapping is also easy, creative and fun.
A Knowledge audit can have the following components (not necessarily need to be in
order):
The major goal of this task is to identify precisely what knowledge the organization,
its people and team possess currently and what knowledge they would require in the future
in order to meet their objectives and goals. Knowledge need analysis can help any
organization to develop its future strategy. Amrit Tiwana suggested the following figure to
explain the Knowledge-Strategy Link.
NOTES
The K-need analysis can also measure the staff skills and competency enhancement-
needs and opportunities for training and development, corporate knowledge culture-practices
such as knowledge sharing attitude, collaboration, team spirit, rewards and recognitions &
staff relationship with their superiors, peers and subordinates.
• Usage of the knowledge (are they actually being used by whom, when, what for
and how often) NOTES
• (b) Corporate Experts (sources of tacit knowledge) inventory:
• Staff directory and their academic and professional qualifications, skill & core
competency levels and experience
• Training and learning opportunities
• Future potentials-leadership potential
The K-inventory analysis may involve a series of surveys and interviews in order to
get relevant answers to the above questions on both tacit and explicit knowledge that an
organization may hold and have.
Knowledge flow analysis look at knowledge resources move around the organization,
from where it is to where it is needed. In other words, it is to determine how people in an
organization find the knowledge they need, and how do they share the knowledge they
have. The knowledge flow analysis looks at people, processes and systems:
• Analysis of people: examine their attitude towards, habits and behaviors concerning,
and skills in knowledge sharing, use and dissemination.
• Analysis of process: examine how people go about their daily work activities and
how knowledge seeking, sharing, use and dissemination form parts of those activities,
existence of policies and practices concerning flow, sharing and usage of information
and knowledge, for example, are there any existing policies such as on information
handling, management of records, web publishing etc? Or are there other policies
that exist that may directly or indirectly affect or relate to knowledge management,
which may act as enablers or barriers to a good knowledge practice?
• Analysis of system: examine technical infrastructure: for example, information
technology systems, portals, content management, accessibility and ease of use,
and current level of usage. To what extend those existing systems facilitate
knowledge sharing and flow, and help to connect people within the organization.
Common approaches and tools that can be applied to conduct a knowledge audit
are: Site observation, questionnaire-based surveys, face to face Interviews, focus group
discussion, forums. A knowledge audit could be divided into four parts: background study,
data collection, data analysis and data evaluation. So the deliverables of a knowledge
audit could be: A list of knowledge items (K-needs & current K-assets) in the form of
spreadsheets
These deliverables will help an organization in identifying the gap between “what is” at
present and “what should be” in the future from a KM perspective.
Let us present first a classification system that divides knowledge professionals into
eight categories based on skills required. This classification help potential candidates to
determine what positions are appropriate for their skills and also aware of the tremendous
amount of potential and opportunities available in the field of KM.
These are contributors whose skills are web site, internet and intranet developers,
librarians, catalogue specialists, content developers, communicators, software designers
and developers, middle managers and others who create the knowledge networks and
links.
Composed of top strategists, thinkers, planners, marketers, and individuals with senior
management experience. These folks make planning and strategy the engine for business
improvement and growth.
This group focuses primarily on discussion within an academic setting and developing
and testing models and applications. Visionaries are thought leaders who are frequently
well in front of the practice. These individuals make outstanding speakers and can stimulate
your organizations thinking.
These individuals focus on learning and education in a corporate setting. Many have
created outstanding models and programs for linking external and internal audiences,
designing and developing curriculums, implementing distance learning and creating custom-
tailored courses for executives and senior managers.
One facet of knowledge and knowledge management is expert systems and how to
institutionalize corporate knowledge. Individuals in this area include Systems specialists,
Technologists, Chief Information Officers, Technology Transfer Specialists, Expert Systems
Engineers, Project managers and others who primarily focus on information technology.
The following section presents the classification of career opportunities in the field of
knowledge management as well as the various requirements of specific positions in KM
enabled organizations. The specific responsibilities are highlighted. Some of the career
opportunities are as follows:
Managerial positions
(a) Chief Learning Officers (CLO)
(b) Chief Knowledge Officers (CKO)
(c) Knowledge Managers
(d) Knowledge Initiative Managers
Technical positions
Non-Management Positions
(a) Librarians
(b) Cybrarians
(c) Information Brokers
The Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) needs to broadly possess two major attributes
- leading and managing qualities. He needs to be an entrepreneur and a strategist who can
understand the implications of using KM to transform organizations. At the same time he
needs to be a consultant to listen to other people’s ideas, incorporate them and nurture
them if they fit the knowledge vision.
The desired qualifications for a CKO are a post graduation in Human Resource
Management though it is not mandatory. A graduate study in Humanities-sociology,
psychology, economics, history or political science is very helpful and essential.
The qualities required by the CKO are multidisciplinary in nature. In this respect the
CKO’s role is perhaps deeper than the CEO’s and is often broader than the CIO’s (Chief
Information Officer) can or has the time to be. The CKO’s primary focus is on the intangible
assets as against the CFO’s (Chief Financial Officer) focus on tangible assets. To rise to
the level of CKO one needs to have considerable ability in all fields of functionaries (as
mentioned below) and have the additional qualifications of people management and group
dynamics.
A knowledge management analyst must be able to understand what is the best possible
market for the information or research, as well as make recommendations to the governing
bodies of the research facility as to what is the most opportune way to present the data. In
addition the knowledge management analyst works closely with the research grant writers
and other individuals involve in preparing data collections and assessments for publication
and dissemination.
The knowledge management analyst may also work to develop relationships with
other research facilities and enhance the ability to share information through networking or
other group processes. A high level of communication, ability to work with others as well
as understanding the various data collection processes is essential.
The knowledge management analyst may work onsite at the research facility or may
work off-site with link up through the internet. Usually the knowledge management analyst
will have regular contact with the facility even if they work primarily from another location.
A knowledge management analyst must have several years in the research field with
most having an average of 10 years experience. Strong ethical understanding as well as a
comprehensive knowledge of regulations, laws and protocols regarding information
dissemination is critical for a knowledge management analyst.
Position description
Primary duties
NOTES
• Ensure the proper coverage of a domain area by, for example, locating and including
FAQs and common problems.
• Maintain an even flow of symptoms to be further analyzed through research, including
analyzing and processing licensed content.
• Ensure a logical and user-friendly structure for knowledge-base to allow easy-to-
find solutions.
• Ensure the quality of the structure by performing structural level quality assurance
tasks.
• Maintain broad knowledge of all the related domain areas.
• Assist in product planning by working with product and development managers,
as well as customers and in-house SMEs.
Secondary duties
• Maintain an in-depth understanding of the various knowledge-base platforms.
• Assist in packaging and releasing each edition of the content product, including
requesting and attaching module icons, helping with release notes, etc.
Required skills
• Broad knowledge of all domains areas for the designated product, if applicable,
and in-depth knowledge of designated domain areas.
• Ability to plan multiple projects.
• Ability to analyze and translate user requirements.
• In-depth knowledge of the platforms with which the content product is integrated.
Job levels
• Level 1: 1-3 years of experience using the above skills; Expert in a minimum of 2
domain areas
• Level 2: 3-5 years of experience; 3-5 domain areas
• Level 3: more than 5 years of experience; More than 5 domain areas
Position description
Primary duties
NOTES
Responsibilities include conducting on-line assessments of client’s requirements needs,
synthesizing, summarizing and generating recommendations, developing presentation
material, generating client proposals, as well as assisting in selling organizational services.
This position also includes, assisting clients in implementing KM systems, creating a business
environment that is conducive to knowledge sharing, and increasing the speed and
productivity of key business processes within the organization.
Required skills
• A minimum of 3-5 years of experience delivering on-site business consulting services
to Major Corporation and implementing successful business solutions.
• Ability to work well in all levels in an organization.
• Exceptional relationship building track record.
• Demonstrated ability to manage projects.
• Understand/capacities to sell consulting services and have a successful track record
of selling ideas to clients and co-workers.
• Broad understanding of IT systems and leading edge software, including web-
based technologies.
• Formal management qualifications desired.
As the primary leader of the Knowledge Management team, the Knowledge Manager
(aka KM) is primarily responsible for managing the organization’s knowledge assets.
Depending on the depth and breadth of a particular organization, this team member may
be part of a small, focused group, within the IT department of a relatively small company,
or, in a large corporation, the KM may wear one of many hats common to more lateral
organizations.
Among the responsibilities of the Knowledge Manager is to manage the creation and
delivery of IT (and/or business) knowledge, and, to support the utilization of this accumulated
information by both the internal and external end-user communities. This may include any
or all of the following duties and capabilities:
a. Understanding the end-user’s information needs,
b. Coordinating who is responsible for each knowledge asset,
c. Where appropriate, communicating knowledge requirements to service providers,
d. Planning and managing the delivery of knowledge projects, communicating the
availability of knowledge to the end-user community,
e. Monitoring the use of the knowledge assets and measuring the business value of
the knowledge to the end-user community.
Position description
NOTES
The primary broad objective of this role is to define and manage the organizational
KMS.
Primary duties
• To define the requirements for KM at divisional/departmental level within
organizations.
• Define and implement the KM tools required to support these needs.
• Define operational requirements for managing KM tools.
• To ensure proper operation of the KM tools.
Required skills
• Extensive experience (5 years +) in software systems development, and operations,
preferably within the telecommunications or IT industry.
• Previous experience in KM tools deployment and operations.
• Proven capability to work in an international multi-cultural multilingual environment.
• Capability to manage relationship with users, integrators, and suppliers in a
distributed environment.
Position description
Under the direction of the category manager, the research analyst is responsible for
researching and cataloging specific industry, functional, or topic areas on the internet with
a business focus.
Primary duties
The research analyst is responsible for developing the controlled vocabulary for their
area, as well as contributing to other standards of organization and control. Cataloging will
include assigning subject headings as well as writing abstracts and reviews. The research
analyst can progress to the level of a category expert by understanding all of the business
resources available on the internet within their area of responsibility.
Required skills
• MLIS, MLS, or equivalent with minimum of two years professional experience
within a specific industry or industries, or other college graduate with research
experience and minimum three years experience within a specific industry or
industries.
• Sound knowledge of information resources within a specific industry (more than
one industry preferable) and most possess knowledge of business information
needs.
Position description
Partner with clients to help create the environment, the KM process and organization,
the technology infrastructure, and the KM applications.
Primary duties
The incumbent would be primarily responsible for the architecture, design, and creation
of new infrastructure or the improvement and enhancement of existing infrastructure. In
addition the individual would also be responsible for the development of systems to
implement specific business processes using tools and technologies of KM. The role also
involves assisting in managing the knowledge sharing strategies and organizational processes
both internal and external.
Required skills
• Minimum 2 years of KM or electronic performance support experience in planning,
implementing, and supporting KM initiatives and strategies.
• Qualifications should include strong planning, design, relationship, communication,
project management, and management of technical teams.
• Must have a strong user-focus and a passion for solving business problems using
technological solutions.
• Experience in KM tools and software selections.
• Bachelors Degree (preferably in Information Systems, Computer Science, or
Engineering)
• Strong desire to work in the management consulting industry.
Position description
General, business, and specialty publications indicate that the demand for special
librarians or knowledge catalogers is increasing qualitatively and quantitatively. Companies
are hiring these skilled professionals to perform conventional information functions as well
as branch into other areas like information architecture for web sites.
This position would be responsible for providing human and database infrastructure
support to employees and members to facilitate effective access to marketplace information
for development of business intelligence and product innovation. This will include
management of proprietary and syndicated research and innovation results.
Primary duties
The primary responsibilities include strategic marketing and market research library
management which includes report cataloging, database administration, and on-line research.
This is an addition to the responsibilities for the administration of organizational repositories
including managing the idea submissions, database administration, employee web-site
administration, and participant communication.
Required skills
Position description
This position calls for a proven track record developing timely and usable solutions to
complex problems with experience in building ontologies and knowledge representation
systems besides the following:
Primary duties
• Assist in the development and implementation of schema for classification across
multiple domains.
• Assist in development of automatic classification methods.
• Work with SME’s in multiple industries.
• Work with domain experts internal to the company.
• Undertake ontology maintenance procedures.
Required skills
NOTES
• Two +years experience as an ontologist.
• Knowledge of computational classification methodologies.
• Ability to lead and work with a team.
• Work under tight deadlines.
• Possess knowledge base of industry-specific tools available.
• Applicable area of expertise.
• Able to interface and deal with a wide variety of people.
• Goal driven.
• Graduate degree or equivalent experience: linguistics, computer science, AI,
knowledge representation, lexical semantics.
Required skills
• Two to five years of experience in internet site content management.
• One to two years experience in defining and implementing business operation
procedures.
Position description
Primary duties
Required skills
• Demonstrate understanding of current and emerging technologies from an
architectural standpoint with the ability to rapidly learn new technologies and
experience with server-based products.
• Strong understanding of all facets of the intranet/internet infrastructures, information
management concepts, network services, multimedia over the internet, and security
is necessary.
• Experience in designing and implementing intranet applications and websites
preferably on enterprise-scale internet/intranet sites is highly desirable
• Experience using software development methodologies, processes, and metrics.
• Strong knowledge of web authoring, HTML, W3C standards and definitions, and
internet development.
• Opportunities for specialists in knowledge representation and categorization schema
continue to expand as e-commerce applications grow. Short position descriptions
are listed below.
Responsibilities/qualities
• Develop and implement schema for classifying and describing items across multiple
domains.
• Develop automatic classification methods.
• Work with SME’s in multiple industries.
• Work with domain experts inside the company.
Desired
• A proven track record developing timely and usable solutions to complex problems.
• Two years experience building ontologies for commercial use.
• Ability to lead a team and a company to implement and improve schema.
• Experience in building ontologies and knowledge representation systems.
Required
Responsibilities
Required competencies
• Experience in building ontologies, or in electronic publishing mark-up languages,
or related categorizing specialties.
• Experience in a similar role in a business enterprise.
Desired competencies
Position description
Primary duties
• Implementing processes to locate existing knowledge/content from selected areas
within the organization and extending it into educational opportunities for customers.
This content may be in the form of survey data, white papers, research publications,
conference proceedings, etc.The resulting educational programming would be
created in partnership with the original content developers and maybe delivered
via seminars, publications, CD ROMS, web-based, satellite networks, streaming
media or two-way interactive video.
• In addition, this position will be responsible for the process related to the
organizational identification and communication, the topics of current interest to
customers as well as stimulating the creation of new knowledge directed towards
these topics
Personal competencies
• Excellent networking skills in order to develop and maintain highly effective internal
and external relationship.
• Ability to quickly grasp new concepts.
• High level of initiative and creativity.
• Crisp, precise written communication and well-developed presentation skills.
• Adept with all types of educational technologies
• Strong project management skills.
Managerial
• Develop methods, techniques, policy and evaluation criteria for obtaining results.
• Drive change and gain acceptance of others in sensitive situations.
• Work on complex, undefined problems.
207 ANNA UNIVERSITY CHENNAI
DBA 1735
Tata Steel has been recognized as the overall (1st place) 2006 Indian Most Admired
Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winner compared to its 6th position far the last year
(2005). Tata Steel’s 2006 Indian MAKE rankings in the 8 knowledge performance
dimensions which are the basis of the MAKE framework are:
This is the first time that the Tata Group has been named a Global MAKE Winner. As
per the summary report available Tata Group was rated high in two of the following
knowledge dimensions
• Developing knowledge workers through senior management leadership (8th place)
• Creating an environment for collaborative knowledge sharing (13th place)
• According to Mr. Rory Chase, MD, Teleos, Tata Steel and Tata Consultancy
Services received a similar number of nominations from the 2006 Global MAKE
expert panel. Most of Tata Steel’s nominations (approx. 90%) were from 2006
Global MAKE expert panel members located in Asia.
• Tata Steel received particularly high scores in the following knowledge performance
dimensions:
• Creating a learning organization
• Delivering value based on customer knowledge
• Areas where Tata Steel can improve are:
All selected Best Practice Partners share their practices with sponsors and with each
other through a virtual site visit and the cycle finishes with one and a half day Knowledge
Transfer Session (KTS) in which Best Practice Partners present their case study to all the
participating organizations and APQC recognizes them at the end of KTS.
“Yes, our KM department has a revenue target too,” says Ramkumar. Having acquired
substantial knowledge about KM in practice in the last four years since we embarked on
the KM initiatives, developing KM systems itself has now become a new line of business.”
ChannelOne
The company has around 60 knowledge harvesters, including eight knowledge auditors,
whose role is to encourage everyone in the organisation to participate in digitizing corporate NOTES
memory and knowledge management initiatives.
“Earlier, people used to send bulk mail to all employees, whenever they wanted to
know some crucial information but had no clue with whom it resided. But now, they can
find everything at ChannelOne, which also has a feature called: ‘What I didn’t find,’ that
enables users to inform the KM team about their knowledge requirements which are not
available in the portal,” Ramkumar explains.
He points out that CoPs have been instrumental in driving the World Bank’s KM
strategy; At Chrysler, senior managers and engineers formed ‘tech-clubs’ comprising experts
from different car platforms, which helped the company cut R&D costs by almost 50
percent. They now maintain an Engineering Book of Knowledge that captures variations in
best practices.
“The effects of community activities are often delayed. But CoPs do pay off. For
instance communities at Shell saved $2- 5 million for the company and contributed to
revenues by more than $13 million in a single year,” Ramkumar says. At Cognizant too,
CoPs are making a difference to the company.
The returns
“KM is not about building a smarter intranet. Intranets are only part of the KM
initiative in an organization. It is also not about a one-time investment. KM is, in fact
expensive and has a long gestation period. For these reasons, it is crucial to build metrics
of the results of KM systems and continually monitor the return on the investment (RoI)
made with the infrastructure.” However, Ramkumar acknowledges that there is a lack of
comprehensive standards for measuring the impact of KM. “In a sense the metric is the
limitation,” he feels and adds, “It is akin to one trying to compute the RoI of a telephone.”
“Metrics data should be collectable without undue burden since it’s not the measures
NOTES themselves that matter but the decisions that will be based on them. Measures that are
expensive and cumbersome to collect will detract from the measurement program’s
perceived value. The best measures would therefore be the ones that would be the natural
outcome of people’s work,” he explains.
Ramkumar further adds that it would be wrong to focus on the metrics that just
emphasise hard (financial) results while totally ignoring the soft ones. Hard results are often
dependent on soft employee attitudes and behaviour, and it would be wrong to ignore
these. The other limitation is that outcomes can often be based on other reasons. Hence, it
may not be possible to attribute a higher project win-rate, for instance, to KM, because it
might also be the by-product of other factors such as competition, a skilled sales person,
etc.
The thinking at Cognizant is that it may be better to carefully select a set of 15-20
metrics to act as a barometer in order to focus on and measure the past, present and future
value of investments in KM simultaneously.
Question: What are the knowledge sharing practices at Cognizant? Explain briefly the
KM measurement system in Cognizant?
Considerable care had gone even into the architecture of TCS’ own development
centers located across the country to encourage employee “conversations”—the lifeline of
lively communities (of practices). “Welcome to our Sholinganallur development centre,”
invites the chief financial officer S Mahalingam, to show how the building allows employees
to talk to each other. “This centre consists of modules, each dedicated to one particular
technology or a client or an industry practice. These structures lead to garden terraces,
where employees gather during their break for animated, informal conversations. Those
conversations could be personal, about their colleges or native places, but they provide
the necessary bonding for the communities that are technology centric,” he says, adding,
that when they converse with their colleagues, they often get solutions for problems they
were vexed with.
Organizational memory
NOTES
To continue to facilitate the conversations across a growing and diversified team spread
across different time zones and locations has been something Mahalingam and his colleagues
are trying to do—with the help of IT. His understanding is that vibrant communities—the
repositories of organizational memory—enhance organizational capabilities. When capturing
organizational memory becomes a necessity, the communities become inevitable.
Mahalingam explains, “In traditional set-ups, organizational memory resided in human
memory. It could even be about customers of one particular geographic location. The
knowledge was passed from one person to another within the organization through some
type of mentoring processes.” Now the mentoring process takes place online through
mailing lists, Web postings, etc. TCS has built a Web-based electronic knowledge
management (EKM) portal—Ultimatix. Supported by this Web portal and several Intranet
sub- portals are 26-odd divisions of CoPs—one each for 10 major industry practices, 10
service practices and six corporate functions.
Mahalingam explains the two important knowledge types in an organization that CoPs
and IT tools can help capture and disseminate. “There is knowledge pertaining to
operational—that is on how to deal with a particular type of project or how to do business
with a particular customer. Or knowledge about a business domain, like healthcare, telecom,
etc. Or it could even be about how to do business itself. And the knowledge that has to do
with the people and their project expertise. For instance, our US team could have delivered
a project to a client based in the same country. In the event of the same client moving to
Singapore, there needs to be a way to transfer the knowledge of our development team in
the US, which had already learned a good deal about this customer, to the Singapore
team.”
The beginnings
“The phrase communities of practices might have been coined some five years back,
but there have been CoPs in the past as well. We simply did not have the software tools
then and that is the only difference,” says Mahalingam. The earliest “group” in TCS was
based on the migration of technologies headed by Professor Kesav Nori. Then teams
were formed for mainframe, UNIX and databases.
K Ananth Krishnan, certified quality auditor (CQA), architecture and technology
consultant, who was heading the mainframe group, recollects the group practices in the
initial days: “Typically such groups were built around one or two experts in that particular
field. Then there were only about a thousand employees in TCS and the physical separation
also was manageable. We almost instantly came to know what were the opportunities and
solutions for the problems in the small setup.”
The groups kicked off formal documentation practices with the members writing down
NOTES the best practices. Says Krishnan, “In the mid-eighties, we started documenting the problems
and solutions. For mainframe, we had over 1,500-odd case studies. We had this knowledge
base to fall back on. Similarly for quality area, we had around 40 reviewed case study
documents way back in 1993. In the late nineties, the community practices had been
formalised.”
About EKM
EKM was the next big thing to happen to the community infrastructure, where the
activities can take place with a wider user base. The precursor to Ulitimatix was the intranet
system built after 1997. The intranet is still accessible only to the employees in India.
“We concentrated on process change management and technology change
management areas. Also we started creating Process Asset Libraries (PALs), which have
technology, and process-related information, case studies, etc, for project leaders,” informs
Krishnan, adding, “We have over 5,000 project leaders in TCS who have experience in
the range of five to ten years. Not all of them have equal expertise in all project aspects.
So, we formed the Software Engineering Group and made available the PAL copies to all
development centres through the intranet.”
Then came Ultimax, which made the knowledge globally available. The PAL library
and knowledge bases, which were hosted on the intranet, became a part of Ultimatix. It
presently has sub-portals for quality management system, software productivity
improvement, training materials, tools information, among others. The company has EKM
administrators for each practice and subject group with defined responsibilities. They edit
the documents and approve it for publishing.
Krishnan explains how the “relationship-based” exchanges, so typical of small groups,
could still be maintained in the networked era. “The groups are still there. With technology
we made them communicate with rocket power. Still in each community—at sub-levels—
we have members in the range of 10 or 20 and not more than that. They typically work on
a single site. For instance, our telecom group is based at Hyderabad and most members of
this community are located there.”
Case IV - Unilever
Unilever is one of the largest consumer goods companies, with corporate centres in
London and Rotterdam, and annual sales of around $48bn. It produces and markets a
wide range of foods, home and personal-care products, under well known brands like
Lipton, Ragu, Flora, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Breyers, Omo, All, Calvin Klein
Cosmetics, Elisabeth Arden and Dove. A truly global company, Unilever employs almost
NOTES 250,000 people in 100 countries, with sales in over 50 more. About 2.5 per cent of annual
turnover is invested in basic research and product innovation, leading to the filing of more
than 400 patent applications each year. At the heart of Unilever’s corporate purpose are
the ambition to be a truly ‘multi-local’, multinational company – understanding and anticipating
the everyday needs of people everywhere and meeting these needs with branded products
and services.
Having recognized the importance of knowledge as a key differentiator and the source
for sustainable competitive advantage, Unilever has made significant investments in IT
over the past decades. But the company soon realized that this was only part of the solution
and that it was becoming more important that the investments the firm was making in
knowledge contributed to top-line growth and profitability.
Most knowledge in the organization is not explicit, but tacit, residing in the heads of its
employees. In light of continuous restructuring, it is this tacit knowledge that is most under
threat. Trying to capture or transfer this tacit knowledge is not easy, as it stems from
personal experience and individuals are not always aware of the value of the knowledge
they hold. Moreover, knowledge is not static. In fact, it is the continuous creation of new
knowledge and learning, rather than static knowledge assets, which will produce a
sustainable advantage.
Networks have been interwoven with Unilever’s organization for many decades, both
on a personal, informal level and on a more structured, organizational level. However, as
the organization becomes leaner, and bottom-line improvements bear fruit, it has become
apparent that communities of practice depend on careful management and the appropriate NOTES
allocation of resources if they are to survive. For this reason, the Knowledge Management
Group (KMG) has put in place a more formal framework to help ensure the effective and
efficient operation of the firm’s communities of practice.
The communities’ framework advocates certain principles within which Unilever CoPs
operate in order to ensure added business value. These principles can be organized into
four pillars: deliverables, people, operations and leverage.
A clear distinction is made within the firm between communities of interest and
communities of practice. Communities of practice are defined around a knowledge domain
that is core to the company’s strategy. Therefore, clear, ongoing deliverables are identified
that contribute to Unilever’s business results. These deliverables can be knowledge
deliverables (such as improved insights, training programmes, good practices and so on)
and business deliverables (such as increased speed of implementation of business-
improvement projects, roll-out of specific innovations, safety improvements and the like).
The people pillar is about the roles and responsibilities of CoP members. Members
themselves are key experts, recognized as such both inside and outside the community.
They should represent the right mix of background, geographical representation and local
versus corporate resource. Equally important is the role of the activist. The activist ensures
continued strategic alignment in the activities of the community. Typically, the activist position
is a rotating role that all members can eventually fill. The people pillar also addresses the
stakeholders and sponsors external to the community, but necessary to validate its existence
and free up resources for the members.
The operations pillar is centered on the way the community functions. It forms the
basis for creating an open and trusting culture in which members feel safe to share and
create. As part of its launch, each community defines these ground rules itself, including the
ICT support needed to ensure effective ongoing communication and knowledge sharing.
In addition, the KMG works closely with activists and champions who are in the
process of setting up a community of practice. A champion identifies the need for networking
and knowledge development in their part of the business. The next step is then to clarify
what the objectives are, and whether setting up a CoP is the most effective way of realising
these objectives.
When this has been clarified, the champion looks to appoint an activist for the CoP.
An initial brief is then specified, outlining the broad objectives of the community and the
relevant stakeholders. This brief is further refined by the champion and other stakeholders.
Potential community participants are suggested and invited to join. A first proposal for
operational procedures and leverage of results is drawn up, the community kick-off meeting
is planned, and the agenda and process for the meeting are carefully designed, based on a
standardised approach and guidelines.
During the kick-off meeting, which lasts between two and five days, CoP participants
discuss the deliverables and potential ways of working within the community.
The constituent elements of the four pillars described above are specified and tailored
to the needs, focus and spirit of each community. Sessions on defining the role of the CoP
are interspersed with team-building activities aimed at building trust and relationships between
the participants.
The KMG works closely with the activist to prepare them for their role, such that
during and after the kick-off meeting they are confident in their ability to energise their
community and help it to deliver results. However, the KMG also maintains contact with
the activists, and the training material used by the KMG is adapted continuously according
to the learning’s and needs of the activists and their communities.
Once a CoP has been up and running for some time, a health check allows the company
to assess whether the community is still on track. It could be that, due to changes in the
organizational environment, a CoP needs to shift focus or include new members. A health-
check questionnaire and the recommendations that result can help to identify strengths and
gaps in the sustainability of a community. For example, after a number of years, one of
Unilever’s communities is looking to broaden its focus from sharing knowledge and good
practices to generating new knowledge. Knowledge visioning, one of the KMG’s other NOTES
offerings, can help the community to identify which areas of knowledge have the most
potential value. The company also recognises that, once a CoP is no longer adding value to
the business, it should be allowed to disband. However, it is important in such instances to
recognise and celebrate the community’s achievements. A debrief workshop can be a
useful tool to ensure that lessons learnt will be captured and transferred.
Walking the fine line between the empowered ‘anarchy’ of a purposeful network, and
the structure of a focused and result-oriented business team, the flexibility and speed of
CoPs have resulted in very impressive results for Unilever over the past seven years.
Ranging from efficiency improvement, increased innovation and improved risk management,
the payback is many times higher than the investments in starting up and operating the
communities.
Currently there are several dozen CoPs in Unilever that are highly active. Communities
originated in areas such as supply chain, technology and innovation – sectors in which the
value of knowledge is explicitly recognised, and resources tend to be scarce. More recently
communities have also emerged in areas like marketing and consumer insights, where
knowledge is of a more tacit nature. Due to a high turnover and the tacit nature of knowledge,
the urgency of sharing and leveraging knowledge in these areas is higher than ever. As
such, communities of practice are an essential element in Unilever’s organizational culture,
and will continue to be as the company strives to satisfy its customers’ needs, now and in
the future.
Question:
NOTES
Analyze the case of Unilever with light of principles learnt in Communities of Practice.
Solution:
Lesson learnt
• As CoPs bring together the most highly talented people in their area, it is often
difficult for them to balance community participation with the demands of their day
job. As such, it is critical to be clear about the investment needed and the resource
implications;
• Successful CoPs do not just happen; they need to be carefully designed and
supported, with clear and measurable objectives and roles, and a solid operational
plan;
• Training CoP activists provides them with an understanding of CoP terminology
and a common framework that can be applied across your organization. Training
helps to impart practical insights about communities, specifically about what makes
them work and how to generate the most business value;
• You get only one chance to launch a community, so a carefully designed kick-off
meeting is essential;
• It is crucial that you maintain a balance between the benefits for participants, their
departments and the broader organization;
• Balance longer-term projects with quick wins. A quick win can help in motivating
your participants (and their stakeholders) in the short run, but longer-term, high-
value projects are required for the company to benefit from the step-change
improvements a community can deliver;
• Avoid single-leader dependency. Stakeholders and champions will change, and
the CoP needs to be able to survive these changes;
• Do not sell communities as a separate, knowledge-based initiative, but as a more
effective way of achieving tangible business results.
The Agronomy community
Unilever is one of world’s largest processors of tomatoes. With products such as
Ragu Pasta Sauces, Chicken Tonight, Knorr soups and sauces, and many more, Unilever’s
tomato-processing plants are spread across the world. Seven years ago the Culinary division
organised a knowledge workshop, bringing together experts in the field of tomato production
and processing. Participants came from all over the world. Management, and indeed the
experts involved, felt it was so important to exchange and share knowledge in the area that
they decided to establish a community. The CoP that was formed remains active today.
The following section offers an example of the value that the community has generated.
The regions where tomatoes are grown and processed for Unilever are located in
North America, South America, Australia and Europe. Some tomato-growing locations NOTES
are situated in dry to very dry areas, and others in regions with more rainfall. In all areas, a
sufficient water supply is essential for growth. Depending on the local situation, various
types of irrigation systems are in use. In Brazil, plenty of water is available, unlike, for
example, in Australia.
In countries where water was scarce, Unilever worked with the local growers to
develop highly sophisticated and efficient drip irrigation systems. Instead of spraying the
fields overhead, the water was brought to the plants through a web of tubes, dripping
water, pesticides and herbicides close to the plants. Besides water, pesticide and fungicide
savings, the additional advantages turned out to be higher yields and less chance of disease.
However, in areas where water was plentiful, over-irrigation led to moulds and the prevalence
of bacteria.
Information exchange between the experts in the Agronomy CoP, in addition to local
technical support in Brazil, allowed Unilever to overcome these difficulties, and to the
introduce drip irrigation systems across its tomato-growing network. The relatively high
investment costs could be quickly paid back owing to the return on investment generated
by significantly higher yields and the lower costs of fighting diseases. The fact that different
experts from across the world had formed a CoP, developed professional trust and respect,
and were fully empowered by the organization, resulted in a rapid and effective
implementation, and the realization of considerable business benefits.
The Agronomy CoP meets twice a year, each time in a different country. During each
meeting, which lasts a couple of days, the CoP invites local growers to discuss cultivation
problems and plans, often locally in the field or in the grower’s own business. Both the
local growers and the Unilever agriculture managers appreciate this exchange of knowledge
and experience. Both groups make grateful use of the tips and experiences they exchange
in order improve the quality of the tomatoes and increase the yield.
Within Unilever, Global Supply Management is divided into Production Items (e.g.,
raw materials, packaging materials) and Non-Production Items (NPI) (e.g., lease contracts,
travel contracts, IT supplies, office supplies and market research). NPI is currently organized
regionally, with regional targets. In the summer of 2002, a workshop was organized where
representatives of all regions attended to discuss key issues and to identify must-win battles
for global NPI. From this workshop, one of the global initiatives that emerged focused on
communication, knowledge sharing and collaboration. One can easily imagine the enormous
potential of savings that can be reached by aligning and standardizing the global buying
programme of a company the size of Unilever.
The CoP course was tailored to the specific NPI context and needs, with specific
attention on the tools and techniques for a kick-off meeting that would follow straight after
the course. After the course, the participants of all the CoPs arrived at the venue and the
launch event began. The NPI CoPs were set up in three key areas: Engineering & Technical,
Travel and Marketing.
The CoPs are very active, both internally and in sharing with other communities. The
NPI communities have since contributed to significant cost savings, not least in creating a
common terminology. What’s more, new communities within NPI are emerging and being
integrated with the global initiative.
SUMMARY
Knowledge management tools and techniques are used to enhance and enable
knowledge generation, codification, transfer, generate knowledge to make knowledge
available for others and also transfer knowledge to decrease problems with time and space
when communicating in an organization.
Content creation and management tools are used to structure and organize knowledge
content for each retrieval and maintenance.
Groupware and other collaboration tools are essential enablers of knowledge flow
and knowledge-sharing activities among personnel.
Data mining and knowledge discovery techniques can be used to identify emergent
patterns that could not have otherwise been detected. Some of these techniques may
provide valuable insights.
Intelligent filtering agents are a KM technology that can help address the challenges
of information overload by selecting relevant content and delivering this in a just-in-time
and just-enough format.
A knowledge repository will often be the most frequently used and most visible aspect
of a KM technology. What is important is not so much the container but the content and
how this content will be managed.
KM auditing is often the first step in any KM initiative because it serves to inventory
what knowledge-intensive resources exist within a company. This provides snapshot of
the “as is” or current state of the organization with respect to KM and helps in measuring
progress toward organizational culture change and other KM goals.
SHORT QUESTIONS
LONG QUESTIONS
NOTES
1. Discuss the pros and cons of the major technologies used in the knowledge creation
and capture phase.
2. Discuss the pros and cons of technologies used in the knowledge-sharing and
dissemination phase.
3. Describe the pros and cons of major technologies used in the knowledge acquisition
and application phase.
4. What are the major categories of data mining technologies and what sorts of patterns
would this technology detect?
5. Describe an application of blog technology within an organization and its potential
benefits?
6. Describe some of the ways in which unstructured content may be managed?
7. What are some best practices in the management of the useful lifecycle of knowledge
content?
8. How would you categorise the different forms of groupware or collaboration
technologies? How would you adopt a cost benefit approach to such a technology
selection decision?
9. What role can a wiki play in promoting group collaboration? What advantages
does a wiki offer when compared to a discussion forum?
10. Describe push and pull technologies that can be used in conjunction with knowledge
repositories. What are some of the artificial intelligence technologies that can play
a role in knowledge management?
11. What role do e-learning tools play in KM?
12. How can intelligent agents help knowledge workers find relevant knowledge
content?
13. Describe the components of K-audit.
14. What are the different classifications of KM career? Explain each one of them
briefly.
15. ‘Measuring knowledge management is not simple’ – Do you agree with this
statement? If not, what are the approaches needed to measure KM?
16. Give your detailed analysis of balanced scorecard management system.
17. What are the duties and skills required for the positions of (i) K-architect, (ii) K-
strategist and (iii) K-engineer?
APPENDIX
Knowledge Management Glossary NOTES
After Action Review (AAR). A systematic process to extract the learning from an
event or activity. The process addresses the questions: What should have happened? What
actually happened? What lessons are there for the future?
Artificial Intelligence (AI). A set of computer techniques that make the computer
appear to behave with a degree of human intelligence. Rather than the procedural way of
programming, it draws on inferences and rules to guide its actions. Expert systems, intelligent
agents and natural language search are examples of the use of AI techniques in knowledge
management.
BBS. See Balanced Business Scorecard. Now a less common abbreviation than
BSC.
Best Practice. The distillation of accumulated wisdom about the most effective way
to carry out a business activity or process. Since ‘best’ is highly subjective and context
dependent, as well as implying that no further improvements are possible, many people
now prefer the term good practice.
Caves and Commons. Denotes two main types of physical working area: a cave is
a private area for concentrated thinking; commons are open areas for socialization and
meeting rooms for team discussions. Design of working space can significantly enhance
the productivity of knowledge workers.
Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO). A senior executive, often at board level with
responsibility for an organization’s knowledge agenda. Unlike other officers, they may not
manage a knowledge ‘function’, although they may directly manage a small knowledge
team, and hold budget responsibilities.
Community of Practice (CoP). A group of people who share and develop their
knowledge in pursuit of a common purpose or task, even though they do not necessarily
work in the same department or organization..
Content Analysis. Analysis of a body of content (text) into its key concepts. As well
as a method of discerning trends, this technique is used to generate keywords and thesaurus
terms to improve subsequent text search and retrieval. The latter result is increasingly
achieved through the use of automated classification systems.
Customer Capital. A measure of the intangible value that accrues through customer
relationships, including size of customer bases, knowledge of customers and their needs,
and related intellectual property such as brands. A component of intellectual capital.
by considering the interaction of many more variables than is achievable by humans. Contrast
NOTES with text mining.
Decision Diary. A diary in which decisions are recorded, together with the
assumptions and reasoning behind them. They are used to derive lessons and record
knowledge that will help future decision-making.
Digital Rights. The rights and conditions of use for a piece of digital content. These
rights may be part of the product’s wrapper, or may be embedded in the product as part
of a watermark to reduce illegal copying.
Discussion List. A mechanism used by to share information and knowledge using a
single email address to communicate to all members of a given list. Typically all messages
generated during one day are grouped together and sent as a single email in a ‘digest’.
Desktop Conferencing. Videoconferencing using a desktop PC. A small camera
(webcam) is usually mounted on top of the user’s display screen. Evidence suggests that
this often transfers expertise better than simply using email or documents.
Document Management System. A computer-based system for storing and
retrieving documents held in a variety of formats, including scanned images of paper
documents. Many provide version control and audit trails of changes and usage. The
distinctions between document management, content management and records management
systems are increasingly blurring.
EDRMS. Electronic (sometime Enterprise) Document and Records Management
System.
EIP. See Enterprise Information Portal.
Enterprise Information Portal (EIP). Strictly, an entry point (home page) into an
organization’s intranet, although the term now often refers to the intranet itself and its
content. Users have a personalized starting page that gives them a single point of access to
enterprise information, wherever it is held.
Expert System. A common class of AI computer system that applies the logic and
domain knowledge it has acquired from a human ‘expert’. A typical expert system has
three main parts - a knowledge base (that contains the rules), an inference engine (that
interprets the situation against the rules) and a human interface.
Explicit Knowledge. Knowledge which is codified and articulated. It appears in the
form of documents, procedures and in databases.
Externalization. One of four basic knowledge conversion processes described by
Nonaka and Takeuchi. It is the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge, articulating thoughts
through language or diagrams.
Expertise Directory. A database of personnel and their skills that allow users to
search for people with specific skills or relevant project experience. Often referred to as NOTES
‘Yellow Pages’.
Expertise Profiling. The identification and classification of personal knowledge and
skills. This may be done through manual completion of data forms or by computer systems
that infer people expertise according to what they write in emails and documents. The
output of the process may be an expertise directory or a database that is used in automated
question and answer systems.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). A list of questions that are most frequently
asked or are anticipated by website or intranet users, together with their answers. Information
providers use this technique to minimize the number of recurring queries and calls. Some
organizations use the term AAQs - actually asked questions - since many writers of FAQs
anticipate what might be asked or what questions their content answers.
IC Multiplier. The ratio of Structural Capital / Human Capital. It indicates how well
NOTES an organization leverages its human capital through it structural capital. A higher ratio indicates
good leverage and minimizes the loss of knowledge when people leave.
IC Reporting. The reporting of an organization’s intellectual capital in a similar
way that financial results are reported. Typically this is done as an annual IC supplement to
the formal accounts.
Implicit knowledge. Knowledge that is not explicitly identified but can be inferred
from its context or packaging. An example is the knowledge held in software that can be
deduced by reverse engineering.
Intangible Assets. Assets that is not physical or tangible in nature. They are therefore
more difficult to identify and count as discrete entities. Knowledge is one type of intangible
asset.
Intellectual Capital (IC). The intangible assets of a company not normally valued
on the balance sheet. It is roughly - but not exactly - the difference between the market and
book value of a company. It is often divided into the categories of human capital, customer
capital and structural capital. Some schemes separate out intellectual property, while
others use the broader term relationship capital instead of customer capital.
Intellectual Property (IP). Intellectual capital that is identifiable and protect able
in law. It includes copyrights, patents, designs, trademarks etc.
Intranet. An internal internet. In other words an internal computer network that runs
the Internet protocol (TCP/IP). Most intranets have a computer ‘gateway’ to the wider
Knowledge Café. Informal meeting area for the exchange of knowledge. Caf´s can
be virtual meeting rooms as well as real ones.
Knowledge Market. A marketplace for the buying and selling of knowledge. Online
knowledge markets are sometimes referred to as knowledge e-marketplaces. They
commonly allow the posting of knowledge needs and knowledge offers, and may conduct
sales by auction.
Learning Network. A network of individuals who share knowledge for the primary
purpose of personal development and learning. A specific example of a Community of
Interest.
Learning Organization. An organization which has in place systems, mechanisms
and processes that are used to continually enhance its capabilities and those who work
with it or for it, to achieve sustainable objectives - for themselves and the communities in
which they participate.
Mapping. See Knowledge Mapping or Social Network Mapping.
Message Board. An area on a website where messages can be exchanged and
viewed by a workgroup or community. Sometimes referred to as a bulletin board. The
conversational interaction via the Web is sometimes called Web conferencing.
Metadata. Data about data. A structured piece of data that describes the contents
of a database record. One common metadata format is that of the Dublin core (page
XXX) that defines metadata fields for bibliographic databases.
Meta-knowledge. Knowledge about knowledge. Knowledge inventories,
knowledge maps and expertise directories are examples of meta-knowledge.
Mind Mapping. A visual method of organizing ideas. In most mind mapping systems
the ideas branch out from a central point. In turn, each branch can have additional branches
or links to other mind maps. A specific form of concept mapping.
Natural Language Processing (NLP). The ability of a computer application, such
as a search engine to accept ordinary language input rather than highly specified instructions.
It processes text through analysis of syntax and semantics.
Project History. The main activities and decisions taken during a project, recorded
in a way that aids knowledge sharing and derives lessons for similar projects in the future.
Portal. The common term for Enterprise Information Portal. A portal is a single point
of entry on the Web or an intranet to a wide range of information and knowledge resources
and tools that enable a person to do their job more effectively. c.f. common definition of
“gateway”.
Recall (of search engine). The proportion of documents from the total that are
available that are retrieved as the result of a search. Contrast with Precision.
Richness. The depth of knowledge, such as contextual knowledge, that enhances a piece
of core knowledge. Multimedia also adds richness by giving the viewer more visual
information and cues. Contrast with Reach.
Search Engine. A piece of software or a service that indexes pages from the Web
and lists those that match or closely match a user’s search terms. Results are ranked by
relevance or other factors and include items from sources all over the Web. One of the
growing problems is the ‘hidden’ Web, content that is not indexed because it is generated
on the fly or held in databases. It is estimated that over four fifths of Internet content is now
hidden.
knowledge, typically by group processes where people learn together through a shared
experience. Contrast with Externalization, Internalization and Combination. NOTES
Stickiness. A property of knowledge that is difficult to transfer, i.e. it is heavily
dependent on personal knowledge and/or context. The term is also applied to a website
that encourages visitors to spend significant time there and return repeatedly. Portal sites
and search engines are very ‘sticky’.
Structural Capital. A measure of the intangible value of the firm embedded in its
processes, systems and other non-human elements. A component of Intellectual Capital.
Tacit knowledge. Knowledge that is not codified but held in people’s heads. Intuitive,
experiential, judgmental and context sensitive, it may be difficult to articulate. Contrast
with explicit knowledge.
Topic Map. An ISO standard (ISO 13250) for describing relationships of nodes in
an ontology independent of its underlying resources. Associations and Occurrences are
key constructs in the XTM (XML Topic Map) standard.
Text Mining. Extracting the essential concepts and meaning from large amounts of
textual information. The result of text mining a single document and producing a summary
which includes some of its key sentences. Typically, all the main concepts of a large document
can be summarized in less than twenty per cent of its original size.
Wiki. A collaboration tool that allows multiple authors to create and update Web
pages. KMWiki is an example of a Wiki devoted to KM. Contrast with a blog which is
authored by an individual.
‘Yellow Pages. A colloquial term for an expertise directory, since entries are organized
by category rather than by name.