What is KM?

Knowledge
Management Explained
The classic one-line definition of Knowledge
Management was offered up by Tom Davenport early on
(Davenport, 1994): “Knowledge Management is the
process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using
knowledge.” Probably no better or more succinct single-
line definition has appeared since.
However, Knowledge Management can best and most
quickly be explained by recapping its origins. Later in
this article, its stages of development will also be
recapped.
OK, what does KM actually consist of?

In short, what are the operational components of a KM system? This is, in a way, the
most straightforward way of explaining what KM is—to delineate what the operational
components are that constitute what people have in mind when they talk about a KM
system.

(1) Content Management

So what is involved in KM? The most obvious is the making of the organization's data
and information available to the members of the organization through dashboards,
portals, and with the use of content management systems. Content Management,
sometimes known as Enterprise Content Management, is the most immediate and obvious
part of KM. For a wonderful graphic snapshot of the content management domain go to
realstorygroup.com and look at their Content Technology Vendor Map. This aspect of
KM might be described as Librarianship 101, putting your organization’s information and
data up online, plus selected external information, and providing the capability to
seamlessly shift to searching, more or less, the entire web. The term most often used for
this is Enterprise Search. This is now not just a stream within the annual KMWorld
Conference, but has become an overlapping conference in its own right. See the
comments below under the “Third Stage of KM” section.

(2) Expertise Location

Since knowledge resides in people, often the best way to acquire the expertise that you
need is to talk with an expert. Locating the right expert with the knowledge that you need,
though, can be a problem, particularly if, for example, the expert is in another country.
The basic function of an expertise locator system is straightforward: it is to identify and
locate those persons within an organization who have expertise in a particular area. These
systems are now commonly known as expertise location systems. In the early days of
KM the term ‘Yellow Pages” was commonly used, but now that term is fast disappearing
from our common vocabulary, and expertise location is, in any case, rather more precise.

There are typically three sources from which to supply data for an expertise locator
system: (1) employee resumes, (2) employee self-identification of areas of expertise
(typically by being requested to fill out a form online), and (3) algorithmic analysis of
electronic communications from and to the employee. The latter approach is typically
based on email traffic but can include other social networking communications such as
Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Several commercial software packages to match
queries with expertise are available. Most of them have load-balancing schemes so as not
to overload any particular expert. Typically such systems rank the degree of presumed
expertise and will shift a query down the expertise ranking when the higher choices
appear to be overloaded. Such systems also often have a feature by which the requester
can flag the request as a priority, and the system can then match high priority to high
expertise rank.

(3) Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned databases are databases that attempt to capture and make accessible
knowledge, typically “how to do it” knowledge, that has been operationally obtained and
normally would not have been explicitly captured. In the KM context, the emphasis is
upon capturing knowledge embedded in personal expertise and making it explicit. The
lessons learned concept or practice is one that might be described as having been birthed
by KM, as there is very little in the way of a direct antecedent. Early in the KM
movement, the phrase most often used was "best practices," but that phrase was soon
replaced with "lessons learned." The reasons were that "lessons learned" was a broader
and more inclusive term and because "best practice" seemed too restrictive and could be
interpreted as meaning there was only one best practice in a situation. What might be a
best practice in North American culture, for example, might well not be a best practice in
another culture. The major international consulting firms were very aware of this and led
the movement to substitute the new more appropriate term. "Lessons Learned" became
the most common hallmark phrase of early KM development.

The idea of capturing expertise, particularly hard-won expertise, is not a new idea. One
antecedent to KM that we have all seen portrayed was the World War II debriefing of
pilots after a mission. Gathering military intelligence was the primary purpose, but a
clear and recognized secondary purpose was to identify lessons learned, though they were
not so named, to pass on to other pilots and instructors. Similarly, the U. S. Navy
Submarine Service, after a very embarrassing and lengthy experience of torpedoes that
failed to detonate on target, and an even more embarrassing failure to follow up on
consistent reports by submarine captains of torpedo detonation failure, instituted a
mandatory system of widely disseminated "Captain's Patrol Reports." The intent, of
course, was to avoid any such fiasco in the future. The Captain's Patrol Reports, however,
were very clearly designed to encourage analytical reporting, with reasoned analyses of
the reasons for operational failure and success. It was emphasized that a key purpose of
the report was both to make recommendations about strategy for senior officers to mull
over, and recommendations about tactics for other skippers and submariners to take
advantage of (McInerney and Koenig, 2011).

The military has become an avid proponent of the lessons learned concept. The phrase
the military uses is "After Action Reports." The concept is very simple: make sure that
what has been learned from experience is passed on, and don't rely on the participant to
make a report. There will almost always be too many things immediately demanding that
person's attention after an action. There must be a system whereby someone, typically
someone in KM, is assigned the responsibility to do the debriefing, to separate the wheat
from the chaff, to create the report, and then to ensure that the lessons learned are
captured and disseminated. The experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have made
this process almost automatic in the military.

The concept is by no means limited to the military. Larry Prusak (2004) maintains that in
the corporate world the most common cause of KM implementation failure is that so
often the project team is disbanded and the team members almost immediately reassigned
elsewhere before there is any debriefing or after-action report assembled. Any
organization where work is often centered on projects or teams needs to pay very close
attention to this issue and set up an after-action mechanism with clearly delineated
responsibility for its implementation.

A particularly instructive example of a "lesson learned" is one recounted by Mark Mazzie

(2003), a well known KM consultant. The story comes from his experience in the KM
department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Wyeth had recently introduced a new
pharmaceutical agent intended primarily for pediatric use. Wyeth expected it to be a
notable success because, unlike its morning, noon, and night competitors, it needed to be
administered only once a day, and that would make it much easier for the caregiver to
ensure that the child followed the drug regimen, and it would be less onerous for the
child. Sales of the drug commenced well but soon flagged. One sales rep (what the
pharmaceutical industry used to call detail men), however, by chatting with her
customers, discovered the reason for the disappointing sales and also recognized the
solution. The problem was that kids objected strenuously to the taste of the drug, and
caregivers were reporting to prescribing physicians that they couldn't get their kid to
continue taking the drug, so the old stand-by would be substituted. The simple solution
was orange juice, a swig of which quite effectively masked the offensive taste. If the
sales rep were to explain to the physician that the therapy should be conveyed to the
caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously at breakfast, then
there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine.

The obvious question that arises is what is there to encourage the sales rep to share this
knowledge? The sales rep is compensated based on salary (small), and bonus (large). If
she shares the knowledge, she jeopardizes the size of her bonus, which is based on her
comparative performance.

This raises the issue, discussed below, that KM is much more than content management.
It extends to how does one structures the organizational culture to facilitate and
encourage knowledge sharing, and that extends to how one structures the organization’s
compensation scheme.

The implementation of a lessons learned system is complex both politically and

operationally. Many of the questions surrounding such a system are difficult to answer.
Are employees free to submit to the system un-vetted? Who, if anyone, is to decide what
constitutes a worthwhile lesson learned? Most successful lessons learned
implementations have concluded that such a system needs to be monitored and that there
needs to be a vetting and approval mechanism for items that are posted as lessons
learned.

How long do items stay in the system? Who decides when an item is no longer salient
and timely? Most successful lessons learned systems have an active weeding or
stratification process. Without a clearly designed process for weeding, the proportion of
new and crisp items inevitably declines, the system begins to look stale, and usage and
utility falls. Deletion, of course, is not necessarily loss and destruction. Using carefully
designed stratification principles, items removed from the foreground can be archived
and moved to the background but still made available. However, this procedure needs to
be in place before things start to look stale, and a good taxonomically based retrieval
system needs to be created.

These questions need to be carefully thought out and resolved, and the mechanisms
designed and put in place, before a lessons-learned system is launched. Inattention can
easily lead to failure and the creation of a bad reputation that will tar subsequent efforts.
(4) Communities of Practice (CoPs)
CoPs are groups of individuals with shared interests that come together in person or
virtually to tell stories, to share and discuss problems and opportunities, discuss best
practices, and talk over lessons learned (Wenger, 1998; Wenger & Snyder, 1999).
Communities of practice emphasize, build upon, and take advantage of the social nature
of learning within or across organizations. In small organizations, conversations around
the water cooler are often taken for granted, but in larger, geographically distributed
organizations, the water cooler needs to become virtual. Similarly, organizations find
that when workers relinquish a dedicated company office to work online from home or on
the road, the natural knowledge sharing that occurs in social spaces needs to be replicated
virtually. In the context of KM, CoPs are generally understood to mean electronically
linked communities. Electronic linkage is not essential, of course, but since KM arose in
the consulting community from the awareness of the potential of intranets to link
geographically dispersed organizations, this orientation is understandable.

A classic example of the deployment of CoPs comes from the World Bank. When James
Wolfensohn became president in 1995, he focused on the World Bank's role in
disseminating knowledge about development; he was known to say that the principal
product of the World Bank was not loans, but rather the creation of knowledge about how
to accomplish development. Consequently, he encouraged the development of CoPs and
made that a focus of his attention. One World Bank CoP, for example, was about road
construction and maintenance in arid countries and conditions. That CoP was encouraged
to include and seek out not only participants and employees from the World Bank and its
sponsored projects and from the country where the relevant project was being
implemented, but also experts from elsewhere who had expertise in building roads in arid
conditions, such as, for example, staff from the Australian Road Research Board and the
Arizona Department of Highways. This is also a good example of the point that despite
the fact that KM developed first in a very for-profit corporate context, it is applicable far
more broadly, such as in the context of government and civil society.

The organization and maintenance of CoPs is not a simple or an easy task to undertake.
As Durham (2004) points out, there are several key roles to be filled. She describes the
key roles as manager, moderator, and thought leader. They need not necessarily be three
separate people, but in some cases they will need to be. Some questions that need to be
thought about and resolved are:
 Who fills the various roles of: manager, moderator, and thought leader?
 How is the CoP managed, and who will fill the management role?
 Who will have overall responsibility for coordinating and overseeing the various
CoPs?
 Who looks for new members or suggests that the CoP may have outlived its
usefulness?
 Who reviews the CoP for activity?
  Are postings open or does someone vet or edit the postings?
 How is the CoP kept fresh and vital?
 When and how (under what rules) are items removed?
 How are those items archived?
 How are the CoP files made retrievable? How do CoP leaders coordinate with
the enterprise search/taxonomy function?

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern

or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as
they interact regularly. Wenger, 2014. The basic premise behind
communities of practice is simple: we all learn in everyday life from
the communities in which we find ourselves.