Professional Documents
Culture Documents
(DISTANCE MODE)
DBA 1735
KNO
WLEDGE MAN
AGEMENT
KNOWLEDGE
MANA
IV SEMESTER
COURSE MATERIAL
Author
Dr
AP
ATHI
Dr.. R. SEN
SENAP
APA
Professor and Head
Department of Management Studies
Adhiparasakthi Engineering College
Melmaruvathur 603 319
Reviewer
DR.T
.V
.GEETHA
DR.T.V
.V.GEETHA
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Anna University Chennai
Chennai 600 025
Editorial Board
Dr
.T
.V
.Geetha
Dr.T
.T.V
.V.Geetha
Dr
.H.P
eer
u Mohamed
Dr.H.P
.H.Peer
eeru
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Anna University Chennai
Chennai - 600 025
Professor
Department of Management Studies
Anna University Chennai
Chennai - 600 025
Dr
.C
ppan
Dr.C
.C.. Chella
Chellappan
Dr
.A.K
annan
Dr.A.K
.A.Kannan
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Anna University Chennai
Chennai - 600 025
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Anna University Chennai
Chennai - 600 025
Copyrights Reserved
(For Private Circulation only)
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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.
3. Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques, edited by Madanmohan Rao, Butterworth-Heinemann,
An imprint of Elsevier, Oxford, UK, 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
UNIT I INTRODUCTION
Knowledge Economy Technology and Knowledge Management Knowledge Management Matrix
Knowledge Management Strategy Prioritizing knowledge strategies knowledge as a strategic asset.
UNIT II KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND PROCESSING
Knowledge Attributes Fundamentals of knowledge formation Tacit and Explicit knowledge Knowledge
sourcing, abstraction, conversion and diffusion.
UNIT III KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
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.
UNIT IV KNOWLEDGE CULTURE IN ORGANISATIONS
Developing and sustaining knowledge culture Knowledge culture enablers implementing knowledge culture
enhancement programs Communities of practice Developing organizational memory.
UNIT V KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT LOOKING AHEAD
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.
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CONTENTS
UNIT I
OVERVIEW OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.
INTRODUCTION
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1.3.1 Definitions of knowledge management
1.3.2 Objectives of knowledge management
1.3.3 Motivation for knowledge management
1.3.4 Knowledge management cycle
1.3.5 Domains of knowledge management
1.3.6 Uses of knowledge management
1.3.7 Nature of knowledge management
1.4.
DICIPLINES OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1.5.
EVOLUTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT
1.6.
SHORT HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT
1.7.
AREAS FOR RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1.8.
KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
1.8.1 Background of knowledge management
1.8.2 What is knowledge economy?
1.8.3 Impact of knowledge in the knowledge economy
1.8.4 Characteristics of knowledge economy
1.8.5 Key drivers of knowledge economy
1.8.6 Growth of IT industry in knowledge economy
1.8.7 Implications of knowledge economy
1.9.
INDIA AS A KNOWLWEDGE ECONOMY
1.10. TECHNOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
1.10.1 Electronic technology for knowledge management
1.10.2 Information technology for knowledge management
1.10.3 Knowledge management technology
1.11. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT MATRIX
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1.13.
1.14.
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UNIT II
KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND PROCESSING
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
INTRODUCTION
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES ON KNOWLEDGE
2.3.1 Data, Information and knowledge
2.3.2. Defining knowledge
KNOWLEDGE ATTRIBUTES
FUNDAMENTALS OF KNOWLEDGE FORMATION
2.5.1 Knowledge formation
2.5.2 Flows of knowledge
ORGANISATIONAL KNOWLEDGE
TACIT AND EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE
2.7.1 What is tacit knowledge?
2.7.2. What is explicit knowledge?
2.7.3 Typical application of tacit and explicit knowledge
2.7.4 Basic beliefs between tacit and explicit knowledge approaches
2.7.5 Comparison of properties of tacit Vs explicit knowledge
2.7.6 Advantages and disadvantages of tacit
Vs explicit knowledge approaches
2.7.7 Four modes of knowledge conversion
ORGANISATIONAL KNOWLEDGE CREATION
2.8.1 Knowledge sourcing
2.8.2 Knowledge abstraction
2.8.3 Knowledge conversion
2.8.4 Knowledge diffusion
2.8.5 Knowledge development and refinement
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UNIT III
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6.
3.7
3.8
3.9
3.10
3.11
3.12
INTRODUCTION
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND
ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING
HE CONCEPT OF ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING
3.4.1 Definitions of organizational learning
3.4.2 Benefits of organizational learning
3.4.3. What is learning organizations?
3.4.4 Orientation for effective knowledge dissemination
3.4.5 Characteristics of learning organization
3.4.6 Characteristics of the traditional Vs learning organization
3.4.7 Facilitators of organizational learning
3.4.8 The five learning disciplines
ARCHITECTURE FOR ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING
CATURING AND CODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
3.6.1 Capturing tacit knowledge
3.6.2 Other knowledge capture techniques
KNOWLEDGE CODIFICATION
3.7.1 Codifying knowledge
3.7.2 Codification tools and procedures
KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE
REPOSITORIES
3.9.1 Content of knowledge repository
3.9.2 Features of knowledge repository
3.9.3 The design of knowledge repository
3.9.4 The knowledge refinery
3.9.5 Repository life cycle
3.9.6 Repository structure
KNOWLEDE MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS
COLLABORATIVE PLATFORMS
3.11.1 Features of platforms
3.11.2 Tools for collaborative platform
3.11.3 Collaborative knowledge applications
CASE STUDY
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UNIT IV
KNOWLEDGE CULTURE IN ORGANISATION
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6.
4.7.
4.8
INTRODUCTION
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE
4.3.1 Knowledge cultures
4.3.2 Improving knowledge culture
KNOWLEDGE CULTURE ENABLERS
IMPLEMENTING KNOWLEDGE CULTURE
ENHANCEMENT PROGRAMS
MAINTANING THE KNOWLEDGE CULTURE
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
4.7.1. Defining communities of practice
4.7.2. Communities of practice in organizations
4.7.3. Importance of communities to organizations
4.7.4. Developing and nurturing communities of practice
DEVELOPING ORGANISATIONAL MEMORY
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UNIT V
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT - LOOKING AHEAD
5.1
5.2.
5.3.
5.4.
5.5.
INTRODUCTION
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
KNOWLEDGE MANGEMENT TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
5.3.1. Knowledge capture and creation tools
5.3.2. Knowledge sharing and dissemination tools
5.3.3. Knowledge acquisition and application tools
5.3.4. Strategic implications of KM tools
KNOWLEDGE MANAGENMENT AND MEASUREMENT
KNOWLEDGE MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES
5.5.1. Intangible asset measurement
5.5.2. Intangible asset monitor
5.5.3. IC Rating
5.5.4. Balanced scorecard
5.5.5. Implementation barriers
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5.6.
5.7.
5.8.
5.9
KNOWLEDGE AUDIT
5.6.1. Aims and objectives of knowledge audit
5.6.2. Key tasks of K-audit
5.6.3. Process mapping
5.6.4. Outcomes of knowledge audit
5.6.5. Components of knowledge audit
KNOWLEDGE CAREERS
5.7.1. Organisational knowledge role classification
CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT CAREERS
5.8.1 The qualities and attributes of CKO
5.8.2 Knowledge management analyst
5.8.3 Knowledge architect
5.8.4. Knowledge strategist
5.8.5. Knowledge manager
5.8.6. Research analyst
5.8.7. KM consultant
5.8.8. Media specialist
5.8.9. Senior market intelligence librarian
5.8.10 Knowledge engineer
5.8.11 KM specialist
5.8.12 Intranet developer
5.8.13 KM director
5.8.14 Director of ontologies
5.8.15 Ontologist
5.8.16 NLP specialist
5.8.17 Knowledge development manager
CASE STUDIES
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NOTES
UNIT I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Todays organizations are fundamentally different as compared to organisations that
existed two decades ago in terms of their functions, structures and style of management.
The new organisations put more premium on understanding, adapting and managing changes
and competing on the basis of capturing and utilizing knowledge to better serve customers,
improve the operations or to speed up the delivery of their products to markets. The
emergence of these new organizations calls for a new way of management, which is generally
known as Knowledge Management (KM).
To begin any topic, it is useful to have a perspective and background to understand
what is going on with respect to that topic. Now knowledge management is widely known
and practiced in many large organizations, it might be useful to get an overview on this
subject before we discuss the details of it. Knowledge management is the hottest subject
of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why it
is so important to each and every one of us? Why is it important to adopt this new
methodology of management? How to successfully implement KM in organizations? The
following section offers some emerging perspectives in response to these questions.
This chapter provides an introduction to the study of KM by looking at the overview
of KM with regard to its meaning, usefulness, history, future, limitations, etc, and also
briefly examines the nature and types of knowledge. The multidisciplinary roots of KM are
enumerated, together with their contributions to the discipline. The importance of KM
today is described together with the emerging roles and responsibilities needed to examine
KM implementation. The emergence of economic system with knowledge as its basic
ingredient is enumerated and the need to develop knowledge management strategies to
stay competitive in todays environment were pointed out and finally the need to prioritize
the knowledge strategy is justified.
DBA 1735
NOTES
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
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.
The major shift brought about by current perspectives on knowledge management is
the shift in the value proposition between employer and employee. Employees have become
more valuable assets because the knowledge they possess and use on behalf of customers
is now recognized as vital to the success of the organization. Yet, if knowledge is an asset,
it has to be managed in the same way as financial and physical assets. Estimates indicate
that 70 - 80 percent of what employees know is hidden. Many organizations today dont
know what they know and who knows it.
KM Viewpoint 1.1
In 1996, teams of leading heart surgeons from five New England medical centers observed
one anothers 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!
1.3.1 Definitions of knowledge management
Knowledge Management refers to the processes and/or tools an organization uses to
collect, analyze, store, and disseminate its intellectual capital. This intellectual capital can
include training materials, processes, procedures, documents, ideas, skills, experiences,
and much more. Besides deployment of appropriate technology and processes by a business
enterprise in order to maintain and retain its intellectual capital, an effective knowledge
management also refers to making optimum use of experience and understanding of human
resource in an organization as well as of the information artifacts, such as inherent knowledge
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DBA 1735
NOTES
based documents (reports) available internally within the organization, and also, the related
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 systems
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.
Simply put, a KM practice should let an organisation provide relevant information to
each and every user. As Sunil Kapoor, Head IT, Fortis Healthcare says, KM is nothing
but having customised information tailored to the needs of each user. As KM
practice provides a structured way of capturing knowledge that exists within the
organisation, it gives an organisation the ability to improve the productivity and knowledge
of its employees by means of knowledge sharing.
A KM practice that encompasses end-to-end processes owned by a department
can go a long way toward boosting productivity, says M D Agrawal, GM IS Refinery
Systems, BPCL.
According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, KM refers to the
strategies and processes of identifying, capturing, and leveraging knowledge to
enhance competitiveness.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
Knowledge is shared and used. When knowledge is shared and used, its modified
by the resources that use it. This takes us back to knowledge creation.
DBA 1735
NOTES
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
Competition
Global
Opportunities
Employee
Turn-over
Organization
Customer
Demands
Technological
Change
Regulatory
Change
Employees
Govt Reg.
Management of
Organizational
Knowledge
Products
Services
Customers
Channels
Competitors
Partners
Suppliers
DBA 1735
NOTES
Environmental data
Observation
and Analysis
Problems
Opportunities
Information
Knowledge
Consolidation
INFORMATION
Storage
Processing
Communication
Theory
Generation
Approach
Methods
Results
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 individuals 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.
Small organizations of 2 to 20 persons are able to emulate the knowledge management
cycle of an individual with some degree of success. Information and requests received
from customers, partners, and the government is stored within individual memories, in
documents and in simple database systems. Information processing takes place in individual
brains as well as at productive meetings where the strengths and weakness of the individuals
are well understood, accepted and utilized. Various small computer systems and possibly
a network server are shared by all. Communication is primarily via ad-hoc meetings
augmented by telephone, fax and email messages when a person is traveling or at home.
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
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.
1.3.5 Domains for Knowledge Management
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.
DBA 1735
NOTES
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NOTES
KM Viewpoint 1.2
Pfizer India has embarked on two initiatives that will gradually
evolve into a KM framework. The first one involves capturing
documents and creating a context sensitive repository. The second
initiative focuses on converting unstructured data into structured
data and warehousing the same. Together, these initiatives will
provide Pfizer with key metrics and information that will assist
decision making.
Reducing overheads
Empowering employees
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NOTES
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.
1.3.7 Nature of Knowledge Management
1. Knowledge Management is about people. It is directly linked to what people
know, and how what they know can support business and organizational objectives.
It draws on human competency, intuition, ideas, and motivations. It is not a
technology-based concept. Although technology can support a Knowledge
Management effort, it shouldnt begin there.
2. Knowledge Management is orderly and goal-directed. It is inextricably tied
to the strategic objectives of the organization. It uses only the information that is
the most meaningful, practical, and purposeful.
3. Knowledge Management is ever-changing. There is no such thing as an
immutable law in Knowledge Management. Knowledge is constantly tested,
updated, revised, and sometimes evenobsoletedwhen it is no longer practicable.
It is a fluid, ongoing process.
4. Knowledge Management is value-added. It draws upon pooled expertise,
relationships, and alliances. Organizations can further the two-way exchange of
ideas by bringing in experts from the field to advise or educate managers on recent
trends and developments. Forums, councils, and boards can be instrumental in
creating common ground and organizational cohesiveness.
5. Knowledge Management is visionary. This vision is expressed in strategic
business terms rather than technical terms, and in a manner that generates
enthusiasm, buy-in, and motivates managers to work together toward reaching
common goals.
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NOTES
Religion and Philosophy to understand the role and nature of knowledge and the
permission of individuals to think for themselves
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NOTES
AUTHOUR/ORGANISATION
CONTRIBUTION
1938
H.G.WELLS
1960
1986
PETER DRUCKER
Dr.K.WIIG
1989
1990
SENGE
1991 1995
1994
BROWN
1996
STEWART
1997
2000 2003
ACADEMIA
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NOTES
In past eras, most employees had to fit into their organizational structures by means
of performance standards based upon strictly defined job descriptions. Employment was
secure as long as they performed assigned tasks and minded their own business. Out-ofthe-box thinking was not likely and knowledge hoarding was the order of the day.
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.
In the past, consultancies practiced knowledge management on the fly. International
networks of consultants communicated through computer networks by sharing their own
problem-solving expertise with other consultants whose clients had the same problems.
But consultants are in the business of selling their own knowledge and had little inclination
to share it, especially with their colleagues and peers.
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.
As CEOs evaluated their knowledge management dynamics, it became apparent that
the people who drove their enterprises were those who were creating and accumulating
knowledge. And as time went on, the value of these people and what they knew was
exerting an increasing influence on the success of their organizations. The challenge then
became how to create the information, organizational intelligence, business models,
communication tools and learning systems around these extremely important people. This
goal had to become a central mission, a basic purpose for the existence of these consulting
organizations if they were to be successful.
The lessons learned by these early adopters of knowledge management indicated
that though they knew what knowledge was, finding out who has it, reorganizing operations
to nourish and manage it, changing the work culture to support it and building knowledge
networks around it were the real challenges of the future.
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NOTES
With the advent of networked resources, new ways to codify, share, store and
deliver knowledge enabled organizations to strategically use critical knowledge more easily
and cheaply. The challenge, however, became how to develop a successful knowledge
management modelthere 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.
1.7 AREAS FOR RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Based on differences between how individuals and organizations manage knowledge,
let us see several important areas of research in knowledge management for organizations,
particularly large organizations. The following table presents the major research topics by
each of the four steps of the knowledge management cycle described in the sub section
1.3.4.
Table 1.2 Areas of research within each step of the
knowledge management cycle.
Observation
and Analysis
1.
2.
3.
Theory
Generation
4.
5.
6.
Testing and
Application
7.
Knowledge
Consolidation
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
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 users
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.
NOTES
DBA 1735
NOTES
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NOTES
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New Growth Theory is based on work by Stanford economist Paul Romer and others
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 neoclassical 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. Romers theory
differs from neo-classical economic theory in several important ways:
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 countrys growth rate permanently. This
goes against traditional economics.
Enhancing human capital is critical for GDP growth. But sustained GDP growth doesnt
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 observers describe todays global economy as one in transition to a
knowledge economy, or an information society. But the rules and practices that
determined success in the industrial economy of the 20th century need rewriting in an
interconnected world where resources such as know-how are more critical than other
economic resources.
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
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5. India also has many of the other key ingredients for making itself as knowledge
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.
KM Viewpoint 1.1
National Knowledge Commission
Indias growing population of young people will give the country a
demographic advantage over many western countries and possibly even China
in the decades to come. As a result, Indias Prime Minister has said India
must position itself to leapfrog in the race for social and economic
development through the formulation of knowledge-oriented focus of
development. As a result of this initiative, the National Knowledge
Commission (NKC) was established in June 2005. The main objective of the
commission will be to take appropriate actions to give India a knowledge
advantage to create, apply and disseminate knowledge. This objective is
expected to be implemented through the following strategies:
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
flourished as the technological systems have increased in robustness, reliability and costeffectiveness.
NOTES
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solution. Some of the more user-friendly technologies are the traditional ones face-toface 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.
30
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NOTES
KM Viewpoint 1.4
KA Technology for KM at Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce plc is one of the worlds leading organisations in the design,
development and manufacture of jet engines and also a leading industrial
partner in SPEDE. The company identified the relevance of early findings from
SPEDE to its own KM programme and embarked upon a bilateral programme
with the University of Nottingham to exploit KA techniques for the rapid
development of components of the Rolls-Royce Capability Intranet.
Rolls-Royces Capability Intranet is intended to become the companys
quality system, providing quick and easy access to all the latest information
needed by staff in order to complete tasks accurately and reliably including the
capture of lessons learned and evolving best practices. The scope of the
Capability Intranet spans business processes, manufacturing processes, product
definitions, technical skills and training. It includes quality manuals, working
practices, information about technologies and capabilities and specific examples
of good (and bad) practice based on real case examples.
A technology transfer programme was conceived in early 1998 whereby
established KA tools and techniques could be applied and evaluated within the
context of developing knowledge-rich web sites for the Rolls-Royce Capability
Intranet. The programme has involved a series of coached projects, typically
comprising two company employees on secondment to a special facility based
at the University of Nottingham for a period of twelve weeks. Sixteen groups
have passed through the facility over the past year amounting to thirty-eight
Rolls-Royce employees. At the moment, a total of twelve Rolls-Royce
employees are on the programme, though this is expected to rise significantly
over the next year as personnel and facilities are expanded.
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Part of the problem here derives from a linguistic ambiguity: nowadays information
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.
1.10.3. Knowledge Management Technologies
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:
Some Key Technologies are as follows:
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.
(a) Intranet, Internet
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
32
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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
lists and private newsgroups often have the biggest short term impact.
NOTES
KM Viewpoint 1.5
Booz Allen & Hamiltons 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.
(b) Groupware - Lotus Notes
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 Lotuss 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.
(c) Intelligent Agents
The problem of information overload is becoming acute for many professionals.
Intelligent agents can be trained to roam networks to select and alert users of new relevant
information. Additionally they can be used to filter out less relevant information from
information feeds. However, in practice it seems that a well run knowledge center, such as
those at Price Waterhouse, the best intelligent agent is still a human being!
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.
(d) Mapping Tools
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.
(e) Document Management
Documents, and especially structured documents, are the form in which much explicit
knowledge is shared. With annotation and redlining facilities, they can become active
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knowledge repositories, where the latest version and thinking is readily shared amongst
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.
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NOTES
A well-organized knowledge base can save enterprise money by decreasing the amount
of employee time spent trying to find information about - among myriad possibilities - tax
laws or company policies and procedures. As a customer relationship management (CRM)
tool, a knowledge base can give customers easy access to information that would otherwise
require contact with an organizations staff; as a rule, this capacity should make the interaction
simpler for both the customer and the organization. A number of software applications are
available that allow users to create their own knowledge bases, either separately (these
are usually called knowledge management software) or as part of another application,
such as a CRM package.
In general, a knowledge base is not a static collection of information, but a dynamic
resource that may itself have the capacity to learn, as part of an artificial intelligence (AI)
expert system, for example. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in
the future the Internet may become a vast and complex global knowledge base known as
the Semantic Web.
(h) Artificial intelligence technology. AI is providing key components in a variety of
KM applications. Closely related domains include informatics, applied informatics,
knowledgebase management systems, and qualitative analysis.
(i) Case-based reasoning systems. CBR systems solve new problems by adapting
previously successful solutions to similar problems. Meeting customer-support requirements
is just one of the applications.
(j) Competitive intelligence applications. Collecting, analyzing, and communicating
the best available information about technological trends and developments outside a
companys walls is the purpose of competitive technical intelligence. It is sometimes referred
to as competitive analysis or competitive intelligence.
(k) Corporate portals and knowledge portals. It is concerned with gathering the
information resources of an organization into a centralized resource. Full-text retrieval and
various kinds of taxonomies are applied to provide access to the information. Related
terms: corporate portals, knowledge portals, business intelligence, digital dashboards.
(l) Data mining. Many large companies for example, pharmaceutical and chemical
corporations have major intellectual assets buried in their paper and electronic files.
Extracting them isnt easy. Related terms: knowledge discovery and automatic discovery.
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NOTES
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
External
Sales and marketing processes
Lead-time Information
Billing procedures
Internal
Logistics - Procurement & Inventory
Quality processes
HR processes
Financial processes
Lead time information for all the processes
Six-sigma processes
Project Execution Methodologies
Security policies: Network, data and
personnel
Manufacturing processes
KM
Database
External
Customer feedback reports
Product successes
Product failures
Competitive forces
Customer meetings
Internal
Tools information - various tools developed for
different purposes
Best things and worst things
Postmortem reports
External
Demographics
Legal policies: Customs & Tax information
Competitor analysis
Road shows/Meetings/Conferences
Research Publications
Customers care policies
Customer promotions
Corporate Vision and Culture
Articles/quotes on the organization appeared
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
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NOTES
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deliver products and services tailored to the market requirements. Building of teams,
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.
By establishing personal responsibility for knowledge, organizations are recognizing
that individuals must be supported and made accountable for identifying, maintaining, and
expanding their own knowledge as well as renewing and sharing their knowledge assets.
Companies are now realizing the value of each knowledgeable and capable employee and
recognize the key fact that the development of their skills lay with employee themselves
and not with the organization. Some firms building incentives into their appraisal system
and offering other motivators to encourage the development of a knowledge-intensive
culture.
Another important strategy revolves around leveraging assets such as patents,
technologies, operational and management practices, customer relations, organizational
arrangements, and other structural knowledge assets and concentrates on renewing,
organizing, valuing, safekeeping, increasing availability of, and marketing these assets.
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.
1.13 PRIORITIZING KNOWLEDGE STRATEGIES
Effective knowledge management is of vital importance for any enterprise with a
quest to ensure viability and survival. Enterprises need to develop a KM strategy which
impinges on all areas of the organization and requires a corporate approach to make it
work.
Knowledge strategy designs an organisations future based on using knowledge
effectively. Knowledge strategy starts with the notion that an organisations business strategy
should guide its planning for knowledge management. Therefore, knowledge strategy
40
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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.
1.14 KNOWLEDGE AS A STRATEGIC ASSET
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
41
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combine their traditional assets and capabilities in new and distinctive ways, providing
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 organizations fundamental ability to compete.
What is it about knowledge that makes the advantage sustainable? Knowledge,
especially context-specific, tacit knowledge embedded in complex organizational routines
and developed from experience, tends to be unique and difficult to imitate. And unlike
many traditional assets, it is not easily purchased in the marketplace in a ready-to-use
form. To acquire similar knowledge, competitors have to engage in similar experiences.
However, acquiring knowledge through experience takes time, and competitors are limited
in how much they can accelerate their learning merely through greater investment.
Knowledge-based competitive advantage is also sustainable because the more a firm
already knows, the more it can learn. Learning opportunities for an organization that already
has a knowledge advantage may be more valuable than for competitors having similar
learning opportunities but starting off knowing less.
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.
Sustainability of a knowledge advantage, then, comes from knowing more about
some things than competitors, combined with the time constraints faced by competitors in
acquiring similar knowledge, regardless of how much they invest to catch up. This represents
what economists call increasing returns. Unlike traditional physical goods that are
consumed as they are used, providing decreasing returns over time, knowledge provides
increasing returns as it is used. The more it is used, the more valuable it becomes, creating
a self-reinforcing cycle. If an organization can identify areas where its knowledge leads the
competition, and if that unique knowledge can be applied profitably in the marketplace, it
can represent a powerful and sustainable competitive advantage.
Organizations should strive to use their learning experiences to build on or complement
knowledge positions that provide a current or future competitive advantage. Systematically
mapping, categorizing and benchmarking organizational knowledge not only can help make
42
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NOTES
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Replacement cost: if you had a disaster (a team leaving, your computer records
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 companys
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
Knowledge management, as it is practiced today, is a system of technologies focused
upon the delivery of strategically useful knowledge and expertise, the availability of which
facilitates effective collaboration and timely decision-making. The major objectives of KM
are creating knowledge repositories, improving knowledge access, enhancing the knowledge
environment and managing knowledge as an asset. Effective knowledge management
typically requires an appropriate combination of organisational, social, and managerial
along with the deployment of appropriate technology. Technology is a facilitator of knowledge
management, a tool to assist individuals and groups in creation, capturing and distribution
of knowledge.
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Technology and knowledge are now the key factors of production. Various observers
describe todays global economy as one in transition to a knowledge economy, or an
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).
NOTES
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).
Effective knowledge management typically requires an appropriate combination of
organisational, social, and managerial along with the deployment of appropriate technology.
Technology is a facilitator of knowledge management, a tool to assist individuals and groups
in creation, capturing and distribution of knowledge.
Knowledge management strategy is termed as an approach undertaken by an
organization to use its information and knowledge resources for building competitive strength
and sustainable growth for realizing that pursuing KM strategy can enable it to dramatically
reduce cycle time and costs, increase sales, and to meet the customer needs.
Effective knowledge management is of vital importance for any enterprise with a
quest to ensure viability and survival. Enterprises need to develop a KM strategy which
impinges on all areas of the organization and requires a corporate approach to make it
work.
Knowledge strategy designs an organisations future based on using knowledge
effectively. Knowledge strategy starts with the notion that an organisations business strategy
should guide its planning for knowledge management. Therefore, knowledge strategy
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.
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
1.
2.
3.
4.
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NOTES
UNIT II
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NOTES
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.
The implication of the knowledge economy is that there is no alternative way to
prosperity than to make learning and knowledge-creation of prime importance. There are
different kinds of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowledge gained from experience,
rather than that instilled by formal education and training. In the knowledge economy tacit
knowledge is as important as formal, codified, structured and explicit knowledge.
A countrys capacity to take advantage of the knowledge economy depends on how
quickly it can become a learning economy. Learning means not only using new technologies
to access global knowledge, it also means using them to communicate with other people
about innovation. In the learning economy individuals, firms, and countries will be able to
create wealth in proportion to their capacity to learn and share innovation.
At the level of the organisation learning must be continuous. Organisational learning is
the process by which organisations acquire tacit knowledge and experience. Such knowledge
is unlikely to be available in codified form, so it cannot be acquired by formal education
and training. Instead it requires a continuous cycle of discovery, dissemination, and the
emergence of shared understandings. Successful firms are giving priority to the need to
build a learning capacity within the organisation.
2.3.1 Data, Information and Knowledge
Before we understand what knowledge means, let us understand the knowledge
hierarchy. In common parlance, it is often referred to as DIKW hierarchy. The four levels
that we deal with are data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.
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.
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NOTES
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perform. However, when we gain wisdom, we start dealing with the future as we are now
able to vision and design for what will be, rather than for what is or was.
KM Viewpoint 1.1
An Example
This example uses a bank savings account to show how data, information,
knowledge, and wisdom relate to principal, interest rate, and interest.
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.
Information: If I establish a bank savings account as the basis for context,
then interest, principal, and interest rate become meaningful in that context
with specific interpretations.
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NOTES
Knowledge is the process of translating information (such as data) and past experience
into a meaningful set of relationships which are understood and applied by an individual.
Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas - John
Locke
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:
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 Lockes definition we have within us a framework
(one idea) that we use for evaluating new experiences (the second idea).
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11. Knowledge relates to place and context. For example, your fathers knowledge
about farming is specific to a particular place and a particular time from say 1920 to
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.
NOTES
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 its 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.
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NOTES
Knowing where information can be found to achieve a specific result (Know where);
Know-what is the basic knowledge that individuals can acquire through extensive
Training;
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NOTES
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KM Viewpoint 1.1
An example of such an effort is the creation within Philips, the
global electronics company, of a yellow pages listing experts
with different kinds of knowledge within Philips many business
units. Today on the Philips intranet one can type in the key words
for a specific knowledge domain - say, for example, knowledge
about the design of optical pickup units for CD/DVD players and
recorders - and the yellow pages will retrieve a listing of the
people within Philips worldwide who have stated that they have
such knowledge. Contact information is also provided for each
person listed, so that anyone in Philips who wants to know more
about that kind of knowledge can get in touch with listed
individuals.
Case examples of tacit knowledge in practice
An example of the tacit knowledge approach to transferring knowledge within a global
organization is provided by Toyota. When Toyota wants to transfer knowledge of its
production system to new employees in a new assembly factory, such as the factory recently
opened in Valenciennes, France, Toyota typically selects a core group of two to three
hundred new employees and sends them for several months training and work on the
assembly line in one of Toyotas existing factories. After several months of studying the
production system and working alongside experienced Toyota assembly line workers, the
new workers are sent back to the new factory site. These repatriated workers are
accompanied by one or two hundred long-term, highly experienced Toyota workers, who
will then work alongside all the new employees in the new factory to assure that knowledge
of Toyotas finely tuned production process is fully implanted in the new factory.
Toyotas 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, Toyotas production system has become one of the highest
quality production processes in the world.
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NOTES
Tacit Knowledge
Contextual
Mental Processes
Difficult to Transfer
Tangible
Systematic
Ease of Transfer
Explicit
Knowledge
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
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 Toyotas teams of assembly line workers, those
suggestions are evaluated by Toyotas 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.
NOTES
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NOTES
Like most alternative approaches to managing, each of the two knowledge management
approaches we have discussed has both advantages and disadvantages. Let us now briefly
summarize the main advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Tacit Knowledge Approach
Advantages
1.
2.
3.
4.
Disadvantages
1. Individuals may not have the knowledge they claim to have.
2. Knowledge profiles of individuals need frequent updating.
3. Ability to transfer knowledge constrained to moving people, which is costly and
limits the reach and speed of knowledge dissemination within the organization.
4. Organization may lose key knowledge if key people leave the organization.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Explicit Knowledge Approach
Advantages
1. Articulated knowledge (explicit knowledge assets) may be moved instantaneously
anytime anywhere by information technologies.
2. Codified knowledge may be proactively disseminated to people who can use specific
forms of knowledge.
3. Knowledge that has been made explicit can be discussed, debated, and improved.
4. Making knowledge explicit makes it possible to discover knowledge deficiencies
in the organization.
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.
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From tacit
knowledge
From explicit
knowledge
To tacit
knowledge
Socialisation
To explicit
knowledge
Externalization
Internalization
Combination
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
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.
It can reduce time taken to learn new competencies and insights, and save significant costs
in lost opportunities. People develop knowledge as an ongoing process through their work.
Knowledge evolves as it is reshaped through encounters with new events, information or
other people. It may reside within an individual as personalized knowledge, be accessible
through others, or stored as a retrievable artifact. Artifacts derived from knowledge creation
are facts, concepts, processes, procedures, and principles. These, in turn, are used to help
create knowledge in others and are valuable mechanisms for sharing the outcome of
knowledge creation.
Organizational knowledge relies on collective and individual contributions. It evolves
as others review, use and learn from the original knowledge sources. Organizations are
increasingly regarding knowledge creation and innovation as core business, as more people
spend most of their work time creating and innovating. In projects, meetings and thinktanks, their individual knowledge becomes a part of a collective activity that seeks to build
a bank of knowledge for use by the organization. Figure 1.4 illustrates the five stages of
organizational knowledge development: knowledge sourcing, knowledge abstraction,
knowledge conversion, knowledge diffusion, and knowledge development and refinement.
The process of knowledge development is dynamic and responsive, drawing cues and
feedback from a range of sources throughout the stages. This feedback may influence
subsequent knowledge construction as it provides further cues and information which are
considered and evaluated. Let us see the detailed account of the phases of knowledge
creation.
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NOTES
Customer feedback
Marketing experts 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
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significant emphasis on capturing knowledge from every day work and from assignments.
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
peoples 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 anothers 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.
2.8.2 Knowledge abstraction
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.
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NOTES
From abstract foundations, knowledge converts into various forms of useful applications
that can be tested and shared with others. Knowledge conversion describes the phase
during which the various ideas and principles are refined into specific outcomes. Knowledge
can be either codified or embodied. Codified knowledge is knowledge that can be recorded
and accessed by others as required. It can be developed into artifacts, such as models,
equations and guidelines. Embodied knowledge is the tacit knowledge of individuals. It
can be shared through stories, metaphors or personal advice as required. Embodied
knowledge is more difficult to access without ongoing engagement with the knowledge
creators.
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.
2.8.4 Knowledge diffusion
Knowledge diffusion is the spread of knowledge once it is codified or embodied. In
organizational settings, diffusion can occur through communication media such as
newsletters, the Intranet, meetings, seminars etc., modeling of new practices, and
demonstrations or coaching in specialized procedures. The success of knowledge diffusion
depends on the level of previous knowledge held by the audience and the effectiveness of
the channels available to share the knowledge. Diffusion occurs best when the recipients
can understand and integrate the insights into their own mental constructs. Embodied
knowledge, which draws on significant expertise, learning and experience, may be harder
to transfer to others.
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.
2.8.5 Knowledge development and refinement
Knowledge is regularly reshaped and further tested through additional experience
and feedback. This revolutionary process of knowledge development and refinement is
one of the key features of knowledge management, ensuring the knowledge remains current
and useful. However, this also place more challenges on organizations that seek to capture
and hold knowledge for use by others; such organizations need to ensure that the created
knowledge is constantly reviewed and updated to reflect any new understanding that has
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been acquired. Consider the promotional scheme again. A pilot study of the scheme may
reveal some significant issues relating to the created process. The pilot study thus generates
new knowledge to be converted and diffused.
SUMMARY
Knowledge is regarded as valuable commodity that is embedded in products, and in
the tacit knowledge of highly mobile employees. The acquisition, creation, processing and
dissemination of knowledge have become important for competitiveness in an organization.
There are different kinds of knowledge that can usefully be distinguished. Knowwhat, 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.
Organizational knowledge is the collective sum of human-centered assets, intellectual
property assets, infrastructure assets, and market assets. It is processed information
embedded in routines and processes that enable action. It is also knowledge captured by
the organization systems processes, products, rules and culture.
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
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SHORT QUESTIONS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
NOTES
Define knowledge.
Illustrate by example the possible relationship between knowledge and data.
What is meant by organizational knowledge?
What is tacit knowledge?
What is explicit knowledge?
Compare the properties of tacit ant explicit knowledge.
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 Nonakas knowledge creation framework.
7. Write a detailed account on knowledge abstraction, conversion and diffusion.
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NOTES
UNIT III
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NOTES
can be from ones own experience, from each other, and from customers, suppliers and
business patterns.
Applying the concept of learning to organizations, organizational learning can be
described as the collective learning of the organization. While it does involve learning of
individual employees, it is more than just the sum of learning of its individual members.
Organizational learning is the process by which the organization acquires, retains and uses
information and ideas for its development and for strengthening its self-learning and selfrenewing capacity.
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.
3.4 THE CONCEPT OF ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING
The term organizational learning refers to continuous improvement of existing
approaches and processes and adaptation to change, leading to new goals and/or
approaches. Learning needs have to be embedded in the way the organization works. The
term embedded means that learning:
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
(d) These factors identify some of the qualities of an effective learning organization
that diligently pursues a constantly enhances knowledge base. This knowledge
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 organizations ability to survive and grow is based on
advantages that stem from core competencies that represent collective learning.
These can be generalized as follows:
NOTES
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
individuals 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.
Skill sets needed by individuals for organizational learning
1. Ability to understand the culture of the organization
2. Ability to let go of old myths
3. Ability to notice new patterns- language as an indicator
Multitasking
Miniaturization
Short-term memory overload
Low level depression and increasingly angry culture
Changes of speed
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NOTES
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NOTES
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KM Viewpoint 1.1
EIU Study
Survey: The Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) in co-operation with IBM Consulting
Group had conducted an intensive study of emerging Organizational Learning (OL) and
Knowledge Management (KM) practices around the globe. Responses were received
from 345 companies in 26 countries (1999). Typical OL activities undertaken are:
behavioral changes to improve teamwork;
changing individual and corporate behaviour,
facilitating ongoing, team based and collaborative management ,
leading individual or team training activities,
assembly of multi-disciplinary teams to solve business problems.
Learning Organizations are considered masters of managing change for financial gains
OL, in its broadest sense, refers to a variety of practices and values that enable a company
to explore continually new directions and anticipate or even lead change in the marke
place and society at large.
Benefits
1. Learning enhances a companys speed, innovative-ness and adaptability
Technological change, shorter product life cycle, market shifts and global competition
affect some industries more than others, but all companies need to synthesiz
information and generate knowledge faster. Learning addresses a companys desire to
better anticipate and adapt to changing market conditions, reach the market with mor
innovative products faster than competitors and maximize responsiveness to
customers needs. Learning organizations are effective not only at creating and/o
acquiring new knowledge; buy also in applying that knowledge to continually
improve their tasks and activities.
2. Learning builds shareholder value for the long term. Managerial accounting system
that currently guide investment and strategy offer little insight into the value tha
human know-how, creativity and experience add to products and services. Skandi
and other companies now report intangible assets in their balance sheet. They
recognize that learning is the key contributor to value addition, in the long run.
Enabling factors
1. Formal business procedures must be balanced with the freedom to create
Business organizations discourage people from learning all the time. Every tim
someone tells you to do something a certain way because that is the standard way
they are telling you not to learn. This type of over-prescription undermine
learning. A Companys official chain of command and formal busines
procedures must co-exist with informal personal networks. Best leadership create
a balance in the organization between reaping and sowing; production on on
hand and building capacity, competence and personal relations on the other.
2. Every company has a different approach. There is no roadmap to becoming
learning organization.
3. Culture is the key. A spirit of openness and enthusiasm for continues learning
occurs, when leaders actively and continuously promote that values.4. Individual
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NOTES
Element
Organization Structure
Availability of information
Trust culture
Communication
Innovation
Managers style
Learning systems
Traditional
Organization
Efficiency
Effectiveness
Control
Learning Organization
Excellence
Organizational Renewal
Facilitator
Coach
Top down approach
Everyone is consulted
Road map
Learning map
Hierarchy
Flat structure
Dynamic networks
People
who
know People who learn
(experts)
Mistakes tolerated as par
Knowledge is power
of learning
Adaptive learning
Generative learning
Measurement System
Financial measures
Teams
Working groups
Departmental boundaries
Shared Values
Management Style
Strategy/Action Plan
Structure
Staff Characteristics
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(2) Mental Models a mental model is ones way of looking at the world. It involves
each individual reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving his or her internal
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.
NOTES
(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 leaders 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 organizations 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.
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Once we embrace the idea that systems thinking can improve individual learning by
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.
3.5 RCHITECTURE FOR ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING
Learning Organisation is an organisation that purposefully takes steps to create
architecture to enhance and maximize the potential for explorative and exploitative
organizational learning to take place.
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.
Open Information - Information should be provided to everyone. Transparency in
decision-making must be maintained. Open information builds trust and confidence of
employees in the management and reduces the employee-management conflict. It also
leads to pooling & sharing of experience and mutual learning. Even information considered
obsolete or rudimentary may turn out to be of importance and may result into organizational
growth.
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
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
sharing. Over and above these elements, the most important ingredient for a learning
organization is Knowledge Management- being able to capitalize on the knowledge
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.
NOTES
Middle-Down-Up Management
An integrative architectural framework that unites the concepts of learning
organization and knowledge management is presented for the readers to get a
meaningful view. The model, depicted in Figure 3.1, is based on Senges five
disciplines of learning organizations:
1. Systems Thinking. A conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that
has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and
to help us see how to change them effectively.
2. Personal Mastery. The discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our
personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing
reality objectively.
3. Mental Models. Deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures
or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
4. Building Shared Vision. The practice of shared vision involves the skills of
unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and
enrollment rather than compliance.
5. Team Learning. The discipline of team learning starts with dialogue, the capacity
of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine thinking
together.
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NOTES
Learning occurs at three levels: individual (personal mastery), group (team learning),
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.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
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.
NOTES
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 contextindependent 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 MiddleDown-Up model.
3.6 CAPTURING AND CODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge capture is a process by which the experts 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:
1. Using an appropriate tool to elicit information from the expert
2. Interpreting the information and inferring the experts underlying knowledge and
reasoning process
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3. Using the interpretation to build the rules that represent the experts thought
processes or solutions.
NOTES
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.
3.6.1 Capturing tacit knowledge
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 experts know-how suits the project.
(a) Expert Evaluation
There are several indicators of expertise:
Indicators of expertise
o The expert commands genuine respect.
o The expert is found to be consulted by people in the organization, when some
problem arises.
o The expert possesses self confidence and he/she has a realistic view of the limitations.
o The expert avoids irrelevant information, uses facts and figures.
o The expert is able to explain properly and he/she can customize his/her presentation
according to the level of the audience.
o The expert exhibits his/her depth of the detailed knowledge and his/her quality of
explanation is exceptional.
o The expert is not arrogant regarding his/her personal information.
Experts qualifications
o The expert should know when to follow hunches, and when to make exceptions.
o The expert should be able to see the big picture.
o The expert should posses good communication skills.
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NOTES
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NOTES
Stimulates interaction.
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.
Disadvantages of working with multiple (team) experts:
Storyteller type:
Godfather type:
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.
Before making the first appointment, the knowledge developer must acquire some
knowledge about the problem and the expert.
The knowledge developer must be familiar with project terminology d he/she must
review the existing documents.
The knowledge developer should be able to make a quick rapport with the expert.
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NOTES
The expert is usually more comfortable in having his/her necessary tools and
information available close to him/her.
Individual approach: The knowledge developer holds sessions with one expert
at a time.
The knowledge developer hold sessions with the senior expert early in the
knowledge capture program for the clarification of the plan.
For a detailed probing, he/she may ask for other experts knowledge.
Experts gather together in one place, discuss the problem domain, and
usually provide a pool of information.
The knowledge developer must deal with the issue of power and its effect
on experts opinion.
Sometimes, the information gathered from the experts via interviewing is not precise
and it involves fuzziness and uncertainty.
The fuzziness may increase the difficulty of translating the experts notions into
applicable rules.
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).
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NOTES
These words are often paired with qualifiers such as highly, extremely.
Understanding experience:
The right question usually evokes the memory of experiences that produced good
and appropriate solutions in the past.
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.
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NOTES
o Multiple-choice questions.
o Dichotomous questions.
o Ranking scale questions.
In semi structured types, the knowledge developer asks predefined questions, but
he/she allows the expert some freedom in expressing his/her answer.
Guidelines for successful interviewing:
o Errors in part of the knowledge developer: validity problems are often caused by the
interviewer effect (something about the knowledge developer colours the response
of the expert). Some of the effects can be as follows
Gender effect
Age effect
Race effect
o
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NOTES
Issues: Many issues may arise during the interview, and to be prepared for the most
important ones, the knowledge developer can consider the following questions:
How would it be possible to elicit knowledge from the experts who can
not say what they mean or can not mean what they say?
How to set up the problem domain.
How to deal with uncertain reasoning processes.
How to deal with the situation of difficult relationships with expert(s).
How to deal with the situation when the expert does not like the knowledge
developer for some reason.
The knowledge developer does more listening than talking; avoids giving advice
and usually does not pass his/her own judgment on what is being observed, even
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if it seems incorrect; and most of all, does not argue with the expert while the
expert is performing the task.
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.
NOTES
(b) Brainstorming
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?
During the session, each expert sits on a PC and gets themselves engaged in a
predefined approach towards resolving an issue, and then generates ideas.
This allows experts to present their opinions through their PCs without having
to wait for their turn.
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This approach protects the introvert experts and prevents tagging comments
to individuals.
This eventually leads to convergence of ideas and helps to set final specifications.
In this case, protocols (scenarios) are collected by asking experts to solve the
specific problem and verbalize their decision process by stating directly what
they think.
Here the term scenario refers to a detailed and somehow complex sequence
of events or more precisely, an episode.
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NOTES
It is effective if and only if each expert has been provided with equal and adequate
opportunity to present their views.
The domain expert classifies and categorizes a problem domain using his/her own
model.
The grid is used for capturing and evaluating the experts model.
Two experts (in the same problem domain) may produce distinct sets of personal
and subjective results.
The grid is a scale (or a bipolar construct) on which elements can be placed within
gradations.
The knowledge developer usually elicits the constructs and then asks the domain
expert to provide a set of examples called elements.
Each element is rated according to the constructs which have been provided.
Here the panel of experts becomes a Nominal Group whose meetings are
structured in order to effectively pool individual judgment.
Idea writing is a structured group approach used for developing ideas as well as
exploring their meaning and the net result is usually a written report.
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Each experts contributions are shared with the rest of the experts by using the
results from each questionnaire to construct the next questionnaire.
NOTES
Concept Mapping
It is a structured conceptualization.
(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.
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NOTES
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NOTES
17. Often knowledge is not present in the proper location where it should be present.
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
3.7.2 Codification Tools and Procedures
(a) Knowledge Maps
Knowledge maps originated from the belief that people act on things that they
understand and accept.
Key can be extracted from database or literature and placed in tabular form as
lists of facts.
These tabled relationships can then be connected in networks to form the required
knowledge maps.
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NOTES
(b
You should link the knowledge map to some training program for career
development and job advancement
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.
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NOTES
We shall develop a decision table for their discounting decisions, where the condition
alternatives are Yes and No.
CONDITIONS AND ACTIONS
RULES
RULES
RULES RULES
Y
Y
N
N
X
Y
N
Y
N
Y
N
N
Y
N
-
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(d) Frames
NOTES
The premise is a Boolean expression that should evaluate to be true for the rule to
be applied.
The action part of the rule is separated from the premise by the keyword THEN.
Considering partial solutions and liking them through rules and procedures to arrive
at a final solution.
Role of inferencing:
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NOTES
(f
Case-Based Reasoning
It is reasoning from relevant past cases in a way similar to humans 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.
they can be programmed to interact with other agents or humans by using some
agent communication language.
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NOTES
PEOPLE
TECHNOLOGY
CONTENT
As the first step in knowledge architecture, our goal is to evaluate the existing
information/ documents which are used by people, the applications needed by
them, the people they usually contact for solutions, the associates they collaborate
with, the official emails they send/receive, and the database(s) they usually access.
All the above stated resources help to create an employee profile, which can later
be used as the basis for designing a knowledge management system.
The idea behind assessing the people core is to do a proper job in case of assigning
job content to the right person and to make sure that the flow of information that
once was obstructed by departments now flows to right people at right time.
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NOTES
Here the term technical core is meant to refer to the totality of the required hardware,
software, and the specialized human resources.
Usually a web browser represents the interface between the user and the KM
system.
The way the text, graphics, tables etc are displayed on the screen tends to simplify
the technology for the user.
The user interface layer should provide a way for the proper flow of tacit and
explicit knowledge.
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NOTES
o Consistency
o Relevancy
o Visual clarity
o Usability
o Ease of Navigation
This layer maintains security as well as ensures authorized access to the knowledge
captured and stored in the organizations repositories.
The access layer is mostly focused on security, use of protocols (like passwords),
and software tools like firewalls.
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NOTES
Intelligent agents (active objects which can perceive, reason, and act in a situation
to help problem solving) are found to be extremely useful in some situations.
In case of mobile agent computing, the interaction happens between the agent and
the server.
A mobile agent roams around the internet across multiple servers looking for the
correct information. Some benefits can be found in the areas of:
o Fault tolerance.
o Reduced overall network load.
o Heterogeneous operation.
In terms of the prerequisites for this layer, the following criteria can be considered:
o Security.
o Portability.
o Flexibility
o Scalability
o Ease of use.
o Integration.
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NOTES
Transport Layer
This layer associates with LAN (Local Area Network), WAN (Wide Area
Network), intranets, extranets, and internet.
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.
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NOTES
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NOTES
That there are four layers of organizational knowledge which needs to be shared
through repository:
1. factual (terminology, specific details and elements);
2. conceptual (theories, models, principles and generalizations);
3. procedural (skills, algorithms, techniques and methods) and
4. meta-cognitive (knowledge about knowledge, i.e. learning, thinking, problem
solving).
These forms of knowledge can be presented in a number of ways to facilitate effective
access with different needs. For example, users might seek guidance on the following:
They will have many different needs to be supported through the repository. A major
challenge is the anticipation of those needs so that a successful outcome is generally possible.
Each repository will be presented in a different way and with different content and features,
as it supports a specific knowledge community. The users expectations and priorities,
knowledge activities and core business priorities should all be reflected in the features of
the repository.
3.9.2 Features of knowledge repository
Knowledge repositories offer a range of options for users to explore, with the main
menu offering access to identified knowledge sources in the organization and beyond. The
repository may include the following:
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NOTES
A repository is unlikely to include all these features. Its design needs to reflect user
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.
3.9.3 The design of a knowledge repository
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.
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NOTES
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NOTES
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NOTES
At the other extreme, the producers and consumers are members of the same practice
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.
Regarding the organizational roles for managing integrative applications, acquisition
requires knowledge creators, finders, and collectors. Capturing verbal knowledge requires
interviewers and transcribers. Documenting observed experiences requires organizational
reporters. Surfacing and interpreting deeply held cultural and social knowledge may require
corporate anthropologists. Refining requires analysts, interpreters, abstractors, classifiers,
editors, and integrators. A librarian or knowledge curator must manage the repository.
Others must take responsibility for access, distribution and presentation. Finally, organizations
may need people to train users to critically interpret, evaluate and adapt knowledge to new
contexts.
Interactive Applications
Interactive applications are focused primarily on supporting interaction among people
holding tacit knowledge. In contrast to integrative applications, the repository is a byproduct of interaction and collaboration rather than the primary focus of the application.
Its content is dynamic and emergent.
Interactive applications vary by the level of expertise between producers and
consumers and the degree of structure imposed on their interaction. Where formal training
or knowledge transfer is the objective, the interaction tends to be primarily between
instructor and student, or expert and novice, and structured around a discrete problem,
assignment or lesson plan. We can refer these applications as distributed learning.
In contrast, interaction among those performing common practices or tasks tends to
be more ad hoc or emergent. We may broadly refer to these applications as forums. They
may take the form of a knowledge brokerage - an electronic discussion space where
people may either search for knowledge (e.g., Does anyone know) or advertise their
expertise. The most interactive forums support ongoing, collaborative discussions. The
producers and consumers comprise the same group of people, continually responding to
and building on each individuals additions to the discussion. The flow continually loops
back from presentation to acquisition. With the appropriate structuring and indexing of the
content, a knowledge repository can emerge. A standard categorization scheme for indexing
contributions provides the ability to reapply that knowledge across the enterprise.
Interactive applications play a major role in supporting integrative applications. For
example, a forum can be linked to an electronic publishing application for editors to discuss
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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
that those attempting to adopt a practice have an opportunity to discuss its reapplication
with its creators.
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NOTES
high degree of flexibility so that it is rendered meaningful, useful, and applicable across the
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.
3.11.1 Different features of platforms
(a) Collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering or deduction, gathers knowledge on general user traits, and
models this into a profile. A profile is compared to other profiles by detecting similarities
and opposites. It then makes predictions upon these comparisons. Sharing of knowledge
through peer recommendations is widely used mechanism distributing information.
Collaborative filtering can be built into a KM system by deploying one of two possible
mechanisms:
1. Active filtering: Users manually define filters and pointers to interesting content
and share across their work group.
2. Automated filtering: Statistical algorithms make recommendations based on
correlations between the users personal preferences and content ratings. Content
ratings can be generated either automatically (such as those produced by measuring
the average time all readers spent on reading the item) or by manually assigning an
average rating (aggregated across multiple readers).
(b
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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
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.
NOTES
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NOTES
(a) Intranets
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
A portal is a system of integrated applications, usually implemented through a web
browser that offers a single gateway into a universe of information about a specific subject
area. An organizational portal serves as an ideal tool that lets a member of an organization
to select what information the member wishes to receive, distribute selected information to
selected people, organize information and collaborate with others on how information
should be organized. They are also capable of handling information from structured as well
as unstructured data sources and include collaborative functions, which help put information
into action and thus directly contribute to a KM framework within an enterprise.
(c) Other collaborative tools
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:
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NOTES
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NOTES
Collaborative tools are great for bringing geographically dispersed teams together for
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 outthe
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 simultaneouslyonline, in real timeto 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 collaborativebased 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 theyll be able to deliver. This can reduce
time to market, and you can hopefully deal with quality issues upfront.
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(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
files online; one can access information from a laptop while on move. These systems
are now accessible through a standard Internet browser.
NOTES
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NOTES
However, it is blogging that has caught on quite rapidly. Almost 40,000-50,000 TCS
staff blog on the official intranet, including Krishnan.
I use my blog as a means to gathering inputs on some problem I might face or on
specific platform, he says.
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, 8,00010,000 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 Wikis 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
Tatas collaborative initiatives.
SUMMARY
Companies that build competitive advantage through effective information and
knowledge management must continually refresh and update their intellectual capital. This
is the process of organizational learning. Applying the concept of learning to organizations,
organizational learning can be described as the collective learning of the organization. Learning
Organization is an organization that purposefully takes steps to create architecture to enhance
and maximize the potential for explorative and exploitative organizational learning to take
place.
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.
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NOTES
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NOTES
LONG QUESTIONS
1. Describe in detail the individuals 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?
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NOTES
UNIT IV
Figure 4.1
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culture is required where each individual recognizes and accepts knowledge sharing as a
desirable behaviour.
NOTES
The relation between organizational culture and the business context and how
does culture contribute to organizational innovation and success
Discuss the key organizational culture enablers and the chief obstacles to effective
knowledge sharing and KM
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
needs to be embedded in the organizational culture and be evident in various ways to
ensure its acceptance and adoption by every employee.
NOTES
Know how knowledge sharing has helped the company in the past through the use
of case studies and best practices report
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.
(b) Promote trust
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
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few have access to knowledge, they become powerful individuals in the company and can
influence decisions that are made by top management.
To avoid this situation, managers must promote an environment where knowledge
workers can trust their colleagues regarding what they have discovered and analyzed. The
following strategies can be implemented to provide a safe and trusting department where
information will not be hidden and used for someones own purposes.
Select the right individuals. The department should not be made of individuals with
their own respective goals. Instead, it should be made of individuals who can form
a team to get tasks done. Team members who have been together for a long
duration seem to build relationships based upon trust.
Assess the environment. Managers must discover why there is a lack of trust
among colleagues. Finding out the root causes will lead to removing the barriers to
trust. Obtaining the input from the personnel working in the unit can accomplish
this goal.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
To ensure that the individuals who will be sharing information throughout the company
utilize the right tools, managers should consider:
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
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.
NOTES
Are the individuals unhappy with their current tasks within the department?
What contributions have the individuals made over the past 6 to 12 months?
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STRUCTURAL
SUPPORT
ENACTED
VALUES
Organizational
structure
Transparent
decision making
Information
access
Problem solving
Communication
channels
HRM
Models
Leaders
Opportunities
to
collaborate
Encouragement
to
collaborate
INTERACTION
WITH
COLLEAGUES
Quality of
interaction
Focus of
interaction
Mentorship
Team behaviour
Co-worker
interaction
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Further, it needs to encourage employees to look beyond immediate needs when sharing
and exploring knowledge potentials.
NOTES
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NOTES
organizational structure, systems and processes which the organization sponsors through
resource allocation and public affirmation. Structural supports, which may include
technological systems, human resource process and other forms of work related infrastructure, 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.
Organizational transparency stimulates the knowledge culture by keeping employees
informed of new and important initiatives which they may apply or contribute to. Open and
accountable decision making, collaborative problem solving and planning, and wide sharing
and accessibility of information contribute to the underlying culture. Openness breeds
collaboration, as it increases the level of trust and the willingness to share. Allied to this
openness is the need to encourage problem solving and exploration. In fact, some companies
encourage the seeking of problems and their resolution through group deliberation and
collaboration. This also affirms the importance and value placed on the knowledge
contributions of individuals.
To interact effectively, knowledge workers also require efficient and effective
communication mechanisms that encourage and enable sharing across the knowledge
community. These communication channels may be electronic (such as e-mail or the web
site) or based on interpersonal, group or written communication. Communication channels
strongly affect the capacity to share and to influence organizational commitment.
Organizational communication channels need to encourage openness and network building,
particularly in reducing structural boundaries which may operate.
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 employees 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.
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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
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
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NOTES
Communication may also be in the form of open forums, public messages from the chief
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 organizations community can seek
further affirmation and advice as the process continues.
To achieve acceptance of and commitment to the planned intervention, the knowledge
organization needs to effectively communicate the intended intervention, prepare members
for the likely impact of any changes, publicize any time frames or activities, and promote
the communication mechanisms available for both information and feedback.
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.
Accommodating difference within the knowledge culture
Knowledge intensive communities encourage adaptive behaviours. It is important for
members to make sense of the changes, as they test any proposed work or value
enhancements and then, following their affirmation of the worth of the proposed changes,
commit to trialing new behaviours or ideas. Thus, in keeping with the knowledge culture
precepts, members of the knowledge community need to be encouraged to test any new
strategies and communicate their insights and approaches that may be adopted.
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.
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NOTES
Employees and other knowledge users need to be well supported during cultural
intervention. Knowledge champions are particularly important. Members with significant
roles may need to be provided with time release so they can give their full support to the
initiative. Their positive outlook, knowledge of the full intervention plan, and response to
difficulties will facilitate the smooth running of the program. A help desk can also be of
great value during the initial implementation of key changes, as it gives users an easy access
point for registering difficulties, ideas, suggestions and ongoing concerns.
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 culturesit 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.
4.6. MAINTAINING THE KNOWLEDGE CULTURE
Each individual contributes to the organizations prevailing knowledge culture. Events,
messages and enacted values are reinterpreted constantly to ensure there is agreement
between personal beliefs, professional behaviours and desired consequences. Knowledge
communities rely on their members to maintain a culture of respectful interchange and
collaboration. However, slippage can occur if the organization does not actively sustain the
knowledge culture which has been established.
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 employees 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
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the community can be of great value. Larger organizations regard this role as an important
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.
Supporting leaders maintenance of the knowledge culture
An important element of sustaining community is to ensure the leaders are well
supported and nurtured. Knowledge champions play a significant role in sustaining positive
and informed approaches to knowledge sharing across the knowledge community. Their
leadership strategies also need to be supported as they seek to influence and guide the
knowledge culture. Their role can be a demanding and consuming process, and these
champions may not have extensive skills in leading guiding cultural change. Support may
therefore operate in a number of ways. Certainly, briefing sessions at the start of initiatives
are highly beneficial, as they offer guidance on the issues to be disseminated, and help build
leadership networks. Opportunities to get together and share learning and concerns with
other knowledge leaders can facilitate creative problem solving and maintain motivation.
The support for leaders is an important element of the knowledge development strategy,
since it ensures that there are strong and knowledgeable champions with a sound
understanding of the strategic needs of the organization.
Maintaining the cultural wellbeing of communities of practice
Communities of practices (CoPs) benefit from organizational development support
to help sustain their cultural wellbeing. Many start with a flourish, but gradually lose their
impetus. Organizations which encourage CoPs have a responsibility to support the
maintenance and ongoing development of groups identified as strategically important. Support
may be in the form of guidance on how to develop and sustain a positive constructive CoP,
or may more directly support particular groups with additional resourcing and expertise.
There are some simple approaches to ensure a healthy, respectful and viable CoP.
Clearly define the purpose or domain of the CoP so that the members have a good
understanding of the focus, likely scope of activities and expectations of each
contributor.
Support the groups identification and development of its individual and group
capabilities and identity. This support might consist of a designated meeting area,
ongoing team development activities, or simply a chance to remove the group
from the normal work routine. The stronger the organizational support, the greater
the willingness of the group members to commit to such networks.
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Provide opportunities to interact across CoPs. This wider interaction can greatly
help the various groups identify common interests, potential members and likely
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.
NOTES
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NOTES
One of the best-known examples of a CoP was formed by the copy machine repair
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).
Members of a community are informally bound by what they do togetherfrom
engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problemsand by what they have
learned through their mutual engagement in these activities. A community of practice is thus
different from a community of interest or a geographical community, neither of which implies
a shared practice. A community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:
What it is about its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated
by its members
How it functions - mutual engagement that bind members together into a social
entity
What capability it has produced the shared repertoire of communal resources
(routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have
developed over time.
Communities of practice also move through various stages of development characterized
by different levels of interaction among the members and different kinds of activities.
Communities of practice develop around things that matter to people. As a result,
their practices reflect the members own understanding of what is important. Obviously,
outside constraints or directives can influence this understanding, but even then, members
develop practices that are their own response to these external influences. Even when a
communitys actions conform to an external mandate, it is the communitynot the mandate
that produces the practice. In this sense, communities of practice are fundamentally selforganizing systems. CoP groups function through discussion lists, web-site forums or other
forms of virtual networking.
4.7.2. Communities of Practice in Organizations
Communities of practice exist in any organization. Because membership is based on
participation rather than on official status, these communities are not bound by organizational
affiliations; they can span institutional structures and hierarchies. They can be found:
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Communities of practice are not a new kind of organizational unit; rather, they are
a different cut on the organizations structureone that emphasizes the learning
that people have done together rather than the unit they report to, the project they
are working on, or the people they know. Communities of practice differ from
other kinds of groups found in organizations in the way they define their enterprise,
exist over time, and set their boundaries:
NOTES
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NOTES
A community of practice is different from a team in that the shared learning and
interest of its members are what keep it together. It is defined by knowledge rather
than by task, and exists because participation has value to its members. A community
of practices life cycle is determined by the value it provides to its members, not by
an institutional schedule. It does not appear the minute a project is started and
does not disappear with the end of a task. It takes a while to come into being and
may live long after a project is completed or an official team has disbanded.
People belong to communities of practice at the same time as they belong to other
organizational structures. In their business units, they shape the organization. In their teams,
they take care of projects. In their networks, they form relationships. And in their
communities of practice, they develop the knowledge that lets them do these other tasks.
This informal fabric of communities and shared practices makes the official organization
effective and, indeed, possible.
Communities of practice have different relationships with the official organization.
The table Relationships to Official Organization shows different degrees of institutional
involvement, but it does not imply that some relations are better or more advanced than
others. Rather, these distinctions are useful because they draw attention to the different
issues that can arise based on the kind of interaction between the community of practice
and the organization as a whole.
Relationships to Official Organization
Relationship
Definition
Legitimized
Officially sanctioned as a
valuable entity
Scrutiny, over-management,
new demands
Strategic
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
Communities of practice fulfill a number of functions with respect to the creation, accumulation,
and diffusion of knowledge in an organization:
a) They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information. Because
members have a shared understanding, they know what is relevant to communicate
and how to present information in useful ways. As a consequence, a community of
practice that spreads throughout an organization is an ideal channel for moving
information, such as best practices, tips, or feedback, across organizational
boundaries.
b) They can retain knowledge in living ways, unlike a database or a manual. Even
when they routines certain tasks and processes, they can do so in a manner that
responds to local circumstances and thus is useful to practitioners. Communities of
practice preserve the tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture.
For this reason, they are ideal for initiating newcomers into a practice.
c) They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge.
Members of these groups discuss novel ideas, work together on problems, and
keep up with developments inside and outside a firm. When a community commits
to being on the forefront of a field, members distribute responsibility for keeping
up with or pushing new developments. This collaborative inquiry makes membership
valuable, because people invest their professional identities in being part of a
dynamic, forward-looking community.
d) They provide homes for identities. They are not as temporary as teams, and
unlike business units, they are organized around what matters to their members.
Identity is important because, in a sea of information, it helps us sort out what we
pay attention to, what we participate in, and what we stay away from. Having a
sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations. Consider the annual
computer drop at a semiconductor company that designs both analog and digital
circuits. The computer drop became a ritual by which the analog community asserted
its identity. Once a year, their hero would climb the highest building on the companys
campus and drop a computer, to the great satisfaction of his peers in the analog
gang. The corporate world is full of these displays of identity, which manifest
themselves in the jargon people use, the clothes they wear, and the remarks they
make. If companies want to benefit from peoples creativity, they must support
communities as a way to help them develop their identities.
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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
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:
NOTES
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NOTES
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
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NOTES
The software engineering requirements for supporting this type of corporate memories,
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 culture describes the collective perceptions, beliefs and values of
employees in the workplace. Culture penetrates to the essence of an organization. Individuals
learn their organizational culture from the day one he or she joins the organization and
these learned experiences help them to interpret the work environment so that they can
conform and operate effectively in that setting.
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.
When building an effective knowledge culture, organizations need to have a range of
strategies to ensure the values inherent in knowledge management are enacted (i.e. followed
in practice) by each employee. Knowledge culture enablers are those influences that
contribute to the creation of an effective and positive knowledge community.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people in organizations that form to
share what they know, to learn from one another regarding some aspects of their work and
to provide a social context for that work. Communities of practice structure an organizations
learning potential in two ways: through the knowledge they develop at their core and
through interactions at their boundaries.
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
1.
2.
3.
4.
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
LONG QUESTIONS
NOTES
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NOTES
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NOTES
UNIT V
Communication
Collaboration
Content creation
Content management
Adaptation
E-learning
Personal tools
Artificial intelligence
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 organizations overall business strategy.
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Compare and contrast different types of intelligent agents and show how they can
be used to personalize KM technologies.
Characterize the major groupware tools and explain how they would be
implemented within an organization.
Identify the various career opportunities emerges in the field of KM and qualities
and attributes required for knowledge career.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
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.
NOTES
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).
(b) Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
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
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mined with data mining applications. These are often unexpected correlations that upon
further study yield some useful (and often actionable) insights into what is occurring.
Data mining tools that are currently in use include:
Consulting/outsourcing tools such as EDS, IBM, and Epsilon. (Note that these
are models, not just software).
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 persons 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
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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
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.
NOTES
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.
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NOTES
Personal portals- which were once known as enterprise portals- are now focused
n needs of the individual- all a persons 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.
5.3.2. Knowledge sharing and dissemination tools
Although there is a distinction between communication technologies (such as telephone
and e-mail) and collaboration technologies (such as workflow management), it is very
difficult to draw a line between the two. Communication and collaboration are invariably
intertwined, and it is quite difficult to establish where one ends and the other begins. Both
types of tools have been grouped under the category of groupware or collaboration tools.
Although all organizational members will make use of communication and collaboration,
including project teams and work units, communities of practice will be particularly active
in making use of many, if not all, of the communication and collaboration technologies
described in this section.
(a) Groupware and Collaboration Tools
Groupware represents a class of software that helps groups of colleagues (workgroups)
attached to a communication network (e.g. Local Area Networks [LANs]) to organize
their activities. Typically, groupware supports the following operations:
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The most commonly used communication technologies include the telephone, fax,
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 continues to be one of the most frequently used communication channels in
organizations. Although e-mail messaging is dyadic, it can also be used in a more broadcast
mode (e.g. group mailings) as well as in an asynchronous group discussion mode (by
forwarding previous discussion threads).
Communication technologies are almost always integrated with some form of
collaboration, whether it be planning for collaboration or organizing collaborative work.
Collaboration technologies are often referred to as groupware or as workgroup productivity
software. It is technology designed to facilitate the work of groups. This technology may
be used to communicate, cooperate, coordinate, solve problems, compete, or negotiate.
Although traditional technologies like the telephone qualify as groupware, the term is ordinarily
used to refer to a specific class of technologies relying on modern computer networks,
such as e-mail, newsgroup, videophones, or chat.
Groupware technologies are typically categorized along two primary dimensions
1. Whether users of the groupware are working together at the same time (realtime or synchronous groupware) or different times (asynchronous groupware).
2. Whether users are working together in the same place (colocated or face-toface) or in different places (non-colocated or distance).
Following are the different categories of taxonomy of groupware:
1. Electronic mail and messaging
2. Group calendaring and scheduling
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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 ondemand service), while mailing lists deliver messages as they become available (an
interrupt-driven interface).
Workflow systems allow documents to be routed through organizations by means of
a relatively fixed process. A simple example of a workflow application is an expense report
in an organization: an employee enters an expense report and submits it, a copy is archived
and then routed to the employees manager for approval, the manager receives the document,
electronically approves it, and sends it on, and the expense is registered to the groups
account and forwarded to the accounting department for payment. Workflow systems
may provide features such as routing, development of forms, and support for differing
roles and privileges.
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 others 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
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web) is allowing any user to create links from any page, so that others can be informed
when there are relevant links not known to the original author.
Group calendars allow scheduling, project management, and coordination among
many people and may provide support for scheduling equipment as well. Typical feature
detect when schedules conflict or find meeting times that will work for everyone. Group
calendars also help to locate people. Typical concerns are privacy (users may feel that
certain activities are not public matters) and completeness and accuracy (users may feel
that the benefits of the calendar do not justify the time it takes to enter schedule information).
Collaborative writing systems may provide both real-time and non-real-time
support. Word processors may provide asynchronous support by showing authorship and
by allowing users to track changes and make annotations to documents. Authors
collaborating on a document may also be given tools to help plan and coordinate the
authoring process, such as methods for locking parts of the document or linking separately
authored documents. Synchronous support allows authors to see each others changes as
they make them, and usually needs to provide an additional communication channel to the
authors as they work (via videophones or chat systems).
Synchronous or real-time groupware is exemplified by shared workplaces, tele- or
videoconferencing, and chat systems. For example, shared whiteboards allow two or more
people to view and draw on a shared drawing surface even from different locations. This
system can be used, for instance, during a phone call, where each person can jot down
notes (e.g. a name, phone number, or map), or people can work collaboratively on a visual
problem. Most shared whiteboards are designed for informal conversation, but they may
also serve structured communications or more sophisticated drawing tasks, such as
collaborative graphic design, publishing, or engineering applications. Shared whiteboards
can indicate where each person is drawing or pointing by showing telepointers, which are
color-coded or labeled to identify each person.
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.
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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
unmoderated real-time communication, including anonymity, following the stream of
conversation, scalability with number of users, and abusive users.
NOTES
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.
An example of wiki is wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written, literally, by thousands
of people around the world. Wikis exist for thousands of topics, and if one does not exist
for your favorite subject, you can start one on it and add it to the list. Wikis support new
types of communications by combining internet applications and websites with human voices.
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
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instantly, and it is more efficient than e-mail since each team member does not have to
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 companys 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.
(c) Networking technologies
Networking technologies consist of intranets (intraorganizational networks), extranets
(interorganzational networks), knowledge repositories, knowledge portals, and web-based
shared work places. Knowledge repositories can be defined as an online computer based
storehouse of expertise, knowledge, experiences, and documentation about a particular
domain of expertise. In creating a knowledge repository, knowledge is collected,
summarized, and integrated across sources. Such repositories are sometimes referred to
as experiences bases or corporate memories. The repository can either be filled with
knowledge through passive collection where some people in the organization are scanning
communication processes to detect knowledge.
There are three types of knowledge repositories:
1. External knowledge repositories (such as competitive intelligence)
2. Structured internal knowledge repositories (such as research report and productoriented market material).
3. Informal internal knowledge repositories (such as lesson learned).
A knowledge repository differs from a data warehouse and an information repository
primarily in the nature of the content that is stored. Knowledge content will typically consist
of contextual, subjective, and fairly pragmatic content. Content in knowledge repositories
tends to be unstructured. Knowledge repositories also tend to be more dynamic than
other types of architectures because the knowledge content is continually updated and
splintered into varying perspectives to serve a wide variety of different users. To this end,
repositories typically end up being a series of linked mini-portals distributed across an
organization.
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NOTES
2. Procedural knowledge (e.g. processes, events, activities, actions, manualsknowledge of how or know-how)
3. Casual knowledge (e.g. rationale for decisions, for rejected decisions-knowledge
of why)
4. Context (e.g. circumstances of decisions, informal knowledge, what is and what is
not done, accepted, etc. - knowledge of care-why.)
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.
Personalization in the form of personalized news services through push technologies,
in the form of mini-portals for each community of practice, and so forth will help maintain
the repository in a manageable state. To this end, use of a term such as knowledge
warehouse should be strongly discouraged. The knowledge repository should instead be
visualized as a lens that is placed on top of the organizations data and information stores.
The access and application of the content of a repository should be as directly linked to
professional practice and concrete actions as possible.
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.
Knowledge portals provide access to diverse enterprise content, communities,
expertise, and internal and external services and information. Portals are a means of sorting
and disseminating organizational knowledge such as business processes, policies,
procedures, documents, and other codified knowledge. They typically feature searching
capabilities through content as well as through pull technologies (intelligent agents) may
exist. Communities can be accessed via the portal for communication and collaboration
purposes. There may be a number of services that users can subscribe to as well as webbased learning modules on selected topics and professional practices. The critical content
will have the best practices and lessons learned that have been accumulated over the years
and to which many organizational members have added value.
The purpose of a portal is to aggregate content from a variety of sources into a onestop-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
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making. Ideally, portals will take into account the different needs of the users and the
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.
Portals serve to promote knowledge creation by providing a common virtual space
where knowledge workers can contribute their knowledge to organizational memory. Portals
promote knowledge sharing by providing links to other organizational members through
expertise location systems. Communities of practice will typically have a dedicated space
for their members on the organizational portal and their own membership location system
included in the virtual workspace. The portal organizes valuable knowledge content using
taxonomies or classification schemes to store both structured and unstructured contents.
Finally, portals support knowledge acquisition and application by providing access to the
accumulated knowledge, know-how, experience, and expertise of all those who have
worked within that organization.
5.3.3 Knowledge acquisition and application tools
A number of technologies play an important role in how successful knowledge workers
are in acquiring (i.e. understanding) and applying (i.e. making use of) knowledge content
that is made available to them by the organization. E-learning systems provide support for
learning, comprehension, and better understanding of the new knowledge to be acquired.
Tools such as electronic performance support systems (EPSS), expert systems, and decision
support systems (DSS) help knowledge workers to better apply knowledge on the job.
Adaptive technologies can be used to personalize knowledge content push or pull.
Recommender systems can detect similarities or affinities between different types of users
and make recommendations of additional content that others like them have found to be
useful to acquire and apply. Knowledge maps and other visualization tools can help to
better acquire and apply valuable knowledge, and a number of tools derived from artificial
intelligence can at least partially automate processes such as text summarization, content
classification and content selection.
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
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NOTES
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 evenhanded decisions. Primarily designed to facilitate meetings, they encourage equal
participation by, for instance, providing anonymity or enforcing turn-taking.
Visualization technologies and knowledge mapping are good ways of synthesizing
large amount of complex content in order to make it easier for knowledge workers to
acquire and apply knowledge.
Artificial intelligence (AI) research addressed the challenges of capturing, representing,
and applying knowledge long before the term knowledge management entered popular
usage. AI developed automated reasoning systems that would make use of explicit
knowledge representations in order to provide expert level advice, troubleshooting, and
other forms of support to knowledge workers. Expert systems are decision support systems
that do not execute an a priori program but instead deduce or infer a conclusion based on
the inputs provided. Natural language processing also grew out of AI research. Linguistic
technologies resulted in automating the parsing (breaking into subsections) and analysis of
text. Common applications today are voice interfaces or natural language queries that can
be typed in to search databases. Similar AI technologies can also be applied to analyze
and summarize text or automatically classify content. Many of the automated reasoning
capabilities studied in AI research are encapsulated in autonomous pieces of software
code, called intelligent agents or software robots (softbots). These agents act as proxies
for knowledge workers and can be tasked with information searching, retrieving, and
filtering functions.
(a) Intelligent Filtering Tools
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.
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Information studies research has examined information seeking behavior for over five
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.
(b) Adaptive technologies
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.
Customization refers to the knowledge workers manually changing their knowledge
environment- for example, selecting user preferences to change the desktop interface,
specifying certain requirements in content to be provided to them (language, format), or
subscribing to certain news or listserv services.
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 popdown 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.
Communities of practice are affinity groups to some extent, and personalization
technologies are often used to target or push certain types of content that are of interest to
a given community. Community profiles ca be established just as individual profiles and
can be used in the same moment in order to better adapt content and interfaces to the
community members.
5.3.4. Strategic implications of KM tools and techniques
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
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Stage 1 is the time for advocating the potential of KM to the stakeholders and after that
more concrete measures will be necessary.
NOTES
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Measure for Progress: Measure the progress you make in developing and growing
sponsorship and support from top management.
(a) Measure the Gap
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.
(b) Measure Against a Benchmark
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.
(c) Measure Your Cultural Readiness
It is important at this stage to build the foundation to develop a knowledge-sharing
culture. Critical practices that foster employee information exchange, teamwork,
collaboration, and trust development can be built upon through crediting the contributors.
Teams that operate in this manner, their norms, practices and insights needs to be observed
and incorporated into other teams. Document stories to encourage role model behavior.
Stage 3 Implementation Stage
This stage signals the formal implementation of a knowledge management initiative.
The goal of Stage 3 is to provide evidence of knowledge managements business value by
conducting pilots and capturing lessons learned that can be transferred and used to help
the organization better implement KM on a larger and expanding scale. The framework
for communities of practice begins to be formalized at this stage, and funding and support
are derived from a mix of central resources as well as the donation of time, people, and
money from within organizations that are enthusiastic about enabling knowledge sharing.
Measures Appropriate for Stage 3
There is a convergence at Stage 3 of the three main categories of measurement that
exist in the early stages of KM implementation: anecdotal, quantitative, and qualitative.
The degree of rigor and refinement becomes more defined and focused on business strategy
in Stage 3. The key here is to begin to ensure that direct business value is perceived by the
organization as a result of the knowledge-enabling projects. It is important to establish a
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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
Time spent per hit. This can reveal if individuals entering the site are actually reviewing
its content (indicates quick review and rejection vs. what would constitute an
individual actually digesting some content). This would have to be correlated with
the number of individuals using it for an extended period of time and repeat users.
Are the IP addresses those of repeat users? The intent for this measurement is to
track repeat customers. Repeat customers indicate two thingseither specific
information is of repeated use to them or they find value in the additional information
continually added to the application.
What percentage of total hits represents repeat users? Value can be measured by
repeat business.
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.
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Measure the Cultural Impact: In Stage 3, the issues surrounding the potential for
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?
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many areas of fitness that, in aggregate, help the organization determine whether the projects
in its KM portfolio are of high impact and beneficial to the success of the company. Project
criteria may include:
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 mindset.
Although most corporate KM programs have been well-established and proven by
Stage 4, it is still important to show that KM is working and will work going forward. To
estimate ROI, add the costs of a community (including labor, meetings, and facilities) and
then define how much effort is spent on KM by knowledge management experts. Then
decide how much effort has been saved by sharing solutions in the community. Another
way to approach ROI estimation might be by looking at sub communities and their generation
of solutions in terms of community projects. If a group needs a solution and embarks on a
knowledge-creation effort, determine how much has been saved in time to market,
competitive positioning, etc.
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NOTES
In some ways, Stage 5 is the continuation of Stage 4 to its logical conclusion of full
enterprise-wide deployment. However, Stage 5 differs from Stage 4 in three fundamental
ways:
Sharing and using knowledge become part of the organizations 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.
5.5. KNOWLEDGE MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES
This section outlines a non-financial measurement system for intangible assets.
5.5.1. Intangible asset measurement
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 students performance in terms of marks, employee satisfaction and retention as
a measure of competence by most business organizations.
How are The Intangibles Metrics Computed?
Why measure intangible assets? Evaluating profitability and performance of business
enterprise, by say, return on investment, assets or equity (ROA, ROE) is seriously flawed
since the value of the firms major asset intangible capitalis missing from the
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Intangibles. Dividing the above-average earnings by the companys average cost of capital
or an interest rate, one can derive an estimate of the value of its intangible assets or intellectual
capital.
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Intangible Assets
External Structure
Indicators
Indicators of Growth
Organic Growth.
Internal Structure
Indicators
Competence
Indicators
Indicators of Growth
Investment in IT
Investments in Internal
Structure
Indicators of Growth
Competence Index
Number of Years in the
Profession.
Level of Education.
Competence Turnover.
Indicators of
Renewal/Innovation
Indicators of
Organization Enhancing
Renewal/Innovation
Customers.
Image Enhancing Customers
Proportion of new
Sales to new customers
products/services
New processes implemented
Indicators of
Efficiency/Utilization
Profitability per Customer.
Sales per Customer.
Win/Loss Index.
Indicators of
Efficiency/Utilization
Proportion of Support Staff
Indicators of
Renewal/Innovation
Competence-Enhancing
Customers.
Training and Education
Costs.
Diversity
Indicators of
Efficiency/Utilization
Proportion of Professionals.
Leverage Effect.
Value Added per Employee.
Value Added per
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
Professionals Turnover.
Age of the organization.
Customers.
Relative Pay.
Support Staff Turnover.
Age Structure.
Seniority
Rookie Ratio.
Devoted Customers Ratio.
Seniority.
Frequency of Repeat Orders.
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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 companys 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.
An IC Rating provides management with a foundation for optimizing the
competitiveness of the organization by functioning as:
A foundation of a modern business control system with clear and measurable goals
for maximizing future profitability. This analysis can be repeated in order to measure
the goal achieved.
A basis for improvement and change activities which can be used on both
management and operational levels. The area of improvement can be identified
after which decisions about changes can be made.
A structured image of value creating assets that can be used in market communication
(investor relations, annual reports) as well as within the organization where the tool
creates a new basis and a new language for internal aspects important to business
activity.
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all future success the organizations people and infrastructure. Adequate investments in
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 businesss 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.
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Measurement
NOTES
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NOTES
Customer connectivity
Internal process efficiency and effectiveness
Individual and group innovation and learning
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.
5.5.5. Implementation Barriers
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.
1. Lack of leadership at the top
2. Abandoning the effort of measurement when initial problem in execution is felt
3. Resistance from individuals from the fear of specific and measurable objectives to
achieve
4. Fear of cultural change in organization owing to the measurement system
5. Non-availability of data and its integrity while measurement
6. Unnecessary variation to the measurement system due to varying formats between
operation and between review periods
7. Standardization itself would be a factor contributing to resistance among employees.
5.6. KNOWLEDGE AUDIT
The knowledge audit (K-Audit) is a systematic and scientific examination and
evaluation of the explicit and tacit knowledge resources in the company. The K-Audit
investigates and analyses the current knowledge-environment and culminates, in a diagnostic
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and prognostic report on the current corporate knowledge health. The report provides
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.
Knowledge audit is a systematic examination and evaluation of organizational
knowledge health, which examines organizations knowledge needs, existing knowledge
assets/resources, knowledge flows, future knowledge needs, knowledge gap analysis as
well as the behavior of people in sharing and creating knowledge. In one way, a knowledge
audit can reveal an organizations knowledge strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats
and risks. A knowledge audit should also include an examination of organizations strategy,
leadership, collaborative, learning culture, technology infrastructure in its various knowledge
processes.
In order to transform an organization into a learning organization and ensure an effective
knowledge management strategy, a knowledge audit should be conducted, which will
provide a current state of knowledge capability of the organization and a direction of
where and how to improve that capability in order to be competitive in this fast changing
knowledge era.
The first stage in adopting a knowledge strategy is performing an audit of existing
data, information and knowledge contained within the organization.
This section will cover four main areas of the knowledge audit:
The aims and objectives of the audit.
The key tasks involved.
Process mapping.
The audit outcomes.
5.6.1. Aims and objectives
There are three broad aims of a knowledge audit:
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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4) Design and pilot knowledge needs survey: The importance of a pilot project is
that it sets an achievable object in the foreseeable future, say, six to twelve months.
Senior managers are often very keen on pilots as, if they fail to work, resources
used are limited and lessons learnt can be recorded quickly.
5) Organise feedback session: This is particularly important where you have a project
steering group for the audit. This steering group, through its involvement with the
strategy, will feel empowered and capable of enthusing and empowering others.
An effective steering group should consist of:
Email List: Discussion List for core, active and peripheral members
6. Draft strategy: This should demonstrate key findings, be well analyzed and the
data should be arrayed in an accessible format.
5.6.3. Process mapping
Process mapping is a simple exercise. It helps an organisation to know where to start
making improvements that will have the biggest impact. A good definition of a process
describes it as a series of connected steps or actions to achieve an outcome. A process has
the following characteristics:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Process mapping is one of the most powerful ways for multi-disciplinary teams to
understand the real problems from the individuals perspective, and to identify opportunities
for improvement.
A map will give you:
1. A key starting-point to any improvement project, large or small.
2. The opportunity to bring together multi-disciplinary teams from primary, secondary,
and tertiary organizational levels to create a culture of ownership, responsibility
and accountability
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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 dont 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.
5.6.4. Outcomes of knowledge audit
The outcome of a knowledge audit tends to be marked by the production of a
document. This document should be made available in both hard and soft copy. It should
be accessible both as a dynamic Intranet site and interactive CD ROM.
5.6.5. Components of a Knowledge Audit
A Knowledge audit can have the following components (not necessarily need to be in
order):
A.
B.
C.
D.
K-Needs
Analysis
K-Inventory
Analysis
K-Flows
Analysis
K-Mapping
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The organization and access of the knowledge (how knowledge resources are
organized and how easy is it for people to find and access them)
Purpose, relevance and quality of knowledge (why do these resources exist, and
how relevant and appropriate they are for that purpose, are they of good quality up to date, reliable, evidence based, making sense, relevance to the organization)
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Usage of the knowledge (are they actually being used by whom, when, what for
and how often)
Staff directory and their academic and professional qualifications, skill & core
competency levels and experience
NOTES
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.
By making comparison between knowledge inventory and the earlier analysis of
knowledge needs, an organization will be able to identify gaps in their organizations
knowledge as well as areas of unnecessary duplication.
(C) Knowledge Flows Analysis (K-Flows Analysis)
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?
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
NOTES
Technical positions
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Knowledge Analyst
Knowledge Mapping Specialists
Knowledge Content Creators
Knowledge-Base Architects and Administrators
Non-Management Positions
(a) Librarians
(b) Cybrarians
(c) Information Brokers
5.8.1. The qualities & attributes of CKO
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 peoples ideas, incorporate them and nurture
them if they fit the knowledge vision.
As for managing qualities, he needs to be techno-savvy. The CKO has to understand
which technologies can contribute to capturing, storing, exploring, and in particular sharing
of knowledge. His second competence lies more in the management of tacit knowledge.
His role here is more of creating a social environment that stimulates and encourages
knowledge creation and exchange.
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
CKOs role is perhaps deeper than the CEOs and is often broader than the CIOs (Chief
Information Officer) can or has the time to be. The CKOs primary focus is on the intangible
assets as against the CFOs (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.
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Primary duties
Ensure the proper coverage of a domain area by, for example, locating and including
FAQs and common problems.
Ensure a logical and user-friendly structure for knowledge-base to allow easy-tofind solutions.
Ensure the quality of the structure by performing structural level quality assurance
tasks.
NOTES
Secondary duties
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.
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
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Primary duties
Responsibilities include conducting on-line assessments of clients 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
Broad understanding of IT systems and leading edge software, including webbased technologies.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Position description
NOTES
The primary broad objective of this role is to define and manage the organizational
KMS.
Primary duties
Required skills
DBA 1735
NOTES
Thorough knowledge of the internet and its available resources is a must, as well
as a comfortable level of technical knowledge.
Must have a strong user-focus and a passion for solving business problems using
technological solutions.
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NOTES
Position description
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
Primary duties
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Required skills
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
Strong knowledge of web authoring, HTML, W3C standards and definitions, and
internet development.
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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
Desired competencies
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
Responsibilities
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.
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.
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5-7 years instructional design with proven abilities in needs assessment, creating
educational programming and documentation.
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 Steels 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:
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
NOTES
The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) selected Tata Steel as one of
the Best Practice Partners in the area of Leveraging Knowledge across the Value Chain.
The other organizations selected as best-practice partners are Buckman Labs, Raytheon,
Caterpillar, and the US Air Force Material Command. All the Best Practice Organizations
has been recognized on January 24-25, 2006 at Houston at the Knowledge Transfer
Session.
The message received from APQC is as follows:Congratulations on being selected as a best-practice partner in APQCs Leveraging
Knowledge across the Value Chain consortium benchmarking study! The study sponsors
are impressed with the work Tata Steel is doing and are eager to learn from your organization
as we continue through this study. The other organizations selected best-practice partners
are Buckman Labs, Raytheon, Caterpillar, and the US Air Force Material Command.
APQC is involved in conducting consortium benchmarking study on various business
processes. They have a structured methodology for identifying and selecting Best Practice
Partner for a particular consortium benchmarking study. In the process they have identified
Tata Steel as one of the potential best practice partners and after one and a half hour of
teleconferencing APQC prepared a case study for Tata Steel which was then discussed
with the sponsors of the benchmarking study. After going through the case study of each
potential partner, sponsors select the best practice partner.
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.
TATA STEEL Launches Knowledge Manthan - The KM programme, which
so far was primarily focused on officers and a few supervisors who were computer savvy,
was brought within the reach of other employees working at the shop floor through a new
initiative named Aspire Knowledge Manthan.(Churning of Knowledge). This new initiative
was launched by Dy. Managing Director (Steel), Dr T Mukherjee on 2nd March, 2004.
This is an initiative to capture and share the tacit knowledge directly from the grass-root
level. Knowledge Manthan is conducted every month on certain selected topics (e.g. Motor,
Leveling and alignment, Lubrication, Water Treatment, etc.) in which supervisors from all
corners of the plant including the sister concerns of Tata Steel participate. They discuss
and share their knowledge on a common topic through various methods like Story-telling
method or through case studies to generate initial interest in the group. In order to facilitate
the discussion, all these Manthan sessions are chaired by one Champion and an Expert
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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
memory and knowledge management initiatives.
NOTES
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 didnt find, that
enables users to inform the KM team about their knowledge requirements which are not
available in the portal, Ramkumar explains.
Communities of Practice (CoP)
Another important facet of KM at Cognizant is the communities of practice. Ramkumar
has this anecdote to share whenever he is asked to explain the power of CoP. In the
punch-card days, Indian Railways sourced out some of the processing operations that its
existing staff could not handle in their eight-hour work shifts. At one point, the management
decided to provide extra monetary benefits for its staff, who could work extra time to
finish those additional processing operations. The staffs were motivated by the monetary
incentives but they were not happy about working long hours. So they started exploring all
ways to share their experiences and knowledge together in creative and free-flowing ways
that fostered new approaches for completing the additional work well within office hours.
Finally, they were able to process all the additional processing work well within the eight
hours. This is a classic example of communities of practice (CoP) in practice.
He points out that CoPs have been instrumental in driving the World Banks 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.
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Metrics data should be collectable without undue burden since its not the measures
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 programs
perceived value. The best measures would therefore be the ones that would be the natural
outcome of peoples 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?
Case III - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
The informal, closely-knit communities of practices (CoPs) have existed at Tata
Consultancy Services (TCS) since the eighties, when its team size was just around a
thousand. However, with the phenomenal growth in size (now, 25,000 plus), expansion
into new domains and markets, this geographically dispersed software firm uses online
platforms to facilitate the formation of more CoPs on new technology domains and
managerial practices.
Considerable care had gone even into the architecture of TCS own development
centers located across the country to encourage employee conversationsthe 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.
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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 dowith the help of IT. His understanding is that vibrant communitiesthe
repositories of organizational memoryenhance 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) portalUltimatix. Supported by this Web portal and several Intranet
sub- portals are 26-odd divisions of CoPsone 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
operationalthat 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.
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The groups kicked off formal documentation practices with the members writing down
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 communityat 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.
Measuring the success
Measuring the return on investment and the success of CoP is not entirely possible.
However, the level of participation of the members could indicate the vibrancy and activeness
of a particular CoP. Krishnan informs, Between January 2003 and June 2003, CoP
members had exchanged around 10,000 document transactions (uploads and downloads)
pertaining to the industry practices and 21,000, service practices via Ultimatix. The telecom
CoPs alone had 6,000 transactions. This excludes the intranet-based community activities.
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Diversified groups
Mahalingam emphasis that the sole objective of knowledge creation is knowledge
dissemination, especially to diversified functional groups. In his opinion though EKM and
CoPs are evolved confining to the people who create solutions, the knowledge they create
should be extended to the staff of other functional areas as well. From the strategic point
of view, you have to extrapolate all sorts of data to do business. The marketing team with
access to seemingly technical, project related data can actually understand, for instance,
whether China is an emerging market in a particular segment. Though the CoPs exist for
human resource, marketing and other functional areas, TCS, which is emerging as an IT
consulting service firm, rather than just a software development company, can expect to
have more CoPs on management practices in the future.
The future
The challenge before the company is to make collaboration more cost effective. We
want to bring the cost incurred on travel, telephone and physical meetings down. The
company has already minimized the cost of the first point communication by establishing
mailing lists for the members. Now the cost of the first touch is almost nothing thanks to the
Web. However, cost is involved in the second level of in-depth, comprehensive collaboration
among the members of the CoPs, involving phone, travel, etc, says Krishnan. He points
out, We do video conferencing but a lot has to be simplified. It should not be like walking
into a room to use a video conferencing facility. It should be simple at the desktop level and
not in one designated area. People should be able to do this with relative ease.
To facilitate interaction among members working in other offices, TCS will be rolling
out new systems that would make it far easier for more comprehensive collaborations
among employees working in geographically dispersed areas.
Question: What are the causes of success of CoP practices at TCS?
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 Cant Believe Its Not Butter, Breyers, Omo, All, Calvin Klein
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Cosmetics, Elisabeth Arden and Dove. A truly global company, Unilever employs almost
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 Unilevers 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.
From knowledge workshops to communities of practice
Taking this learning-organization perspective as a starting point, Unilever has put
numerous knowledge-management initiatives in place across the company. In order to
capture what was known and identify what was not (knowledge gaps), knowledge
workshops were organized. Key experts and practitioners from around the world discussed,
in an interactive and structured way, a specific, strategically relevant knowledge domain.
The aim of the workshops was to come to a common understanding about the knowledge
strengths and weaknesses of the company as a whole. Existing good practices were captured
and rolled out to the wider community. At the same time, innovation and R&D programmes
were put in place to address the knowledge gaps that were identified.
From these workshops, communities of practice emerged groups of experts acting
as the custodians of a specific knowledge domain. However, it soon emerged that the
most strategically relevant communities were not necessarily the most active ones, primarily
because the experts that worked in an area that was of high strategic value were also in
high local demand. To their own frustration, they found it difficult to keep the community of
practice alive, given their day-to-day pressures.
Networks have been interwoven with Unilevers organization for many decades, both
on a personal, informal level and on a more structured, organizational level. However, as
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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
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 firms communities of practice.
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Unilevers communities is looking to broaden its focus from sharing knowledge and good
practices to generating new knowledge. Knowledge visioning, one of the KMGs other
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 communitys achievements. A debrief workshop can be a
useful tool to ensure that lessons learnt will be captured and transferred.
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Question:
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;
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, highvalue projects are required for the company to benefit from the step-change
improvements a community can deliver;
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The regions where tomatoes are grown and processed for Unilever are located in
North America, South America, Australia and Europe. Some tomato-growing locations
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.
NOTES
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 growers 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.
The NPI-Buying communities
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.
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NOTES
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.
As KM field expands, organizations increasingly rely on knowledge workers to
generate, classify, manage, and distribute tacit and explicit knowledge. The CKO represents
the pinnacle position in a knowledge enabled organization. The unit presented the various
opportunities that exist in various organizations employing KM professionals, classified
based on the various organizational knowledge processes with clear picture of qualities
and attributes required for the K-careers. Some selected case studies were given to know
more about the KM practices and lesson to be learned from them.
SHORT QUESTIONS
1. Why are intellectual assets difficult to measure?
2. Distinguish between content creation tools and content management tools.
3. Define data mining.
4. What is a chat room?
5. Define newsgroup and mailing lists.
6. What is the function of filtering tools?
7. Define KM measurement.
8. What is a tangible asset monitor?
9. Compare efficiency with effectiveness.
10. What is meant by balanced scorecard?
11. Define knowledge audit.
12. What are the objectives of K-audit?
13. What is process mapping?
14. What are the responsibilities of a CKO?
15. Who is a chief learning officer (CLO)?
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LONG QUESTIONS
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) Kstrategist and (iii) K-engineer?
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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?
Answernet. A service provided by a network of experts who answer questions posed
online.
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.
Balanced Scorecard. A performance measurement system that incorporates a
balanced set of measures, both financial and non-financial. It adds customer, internal
processes and innovation and learning indicators to financial ones to provide a more balanced
view. Contrast with the more specific intellectual capital measurement methods.
Benchlearning. A structured approach whose focus is on learning from others to
create distinctive improvements. Developed by Bengt Karlof and colleagues, it overcomes
the often narrow focus of benchmarking on quantitative comparisons, which downplays
the key role of knowledge transfer.
Benchmarking. A systematic process for comparing the performance of an activity
or process across a range of organizations or departments. Identifying gaps in performance
leads to on to benchlearning and learning good practice from high performers.
Benefits Tree. A diagrammatic depiction of cause-effect relationships from knowledge
processes to business outcomes. Helpful in making the business case for knowledge
management. See also the Benefits Tree tool.
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.
BSC. See Balanced Business Scorecard.
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by considering the interaction of many more variables than is achievable by humans. Contrast
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 products 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 users 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
organizations 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.
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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
Yellow Pages.
NOTES
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IC Multiplier. The ratio of Structural Capital / Human Capital. It indicates how well
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 organizations 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.
Information Audit. See Knowledge Audit.
Instant Messaging. An Internet or intranet facility in which users type messages
into a window that is simultaneously viewed by other participants in that chat room or area.
While commonly associated with informal social groups, the tool is a useful adjunct for
synchronous knowledge exchange in a corporate context, for example as a way of interaction
during a webinar.
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.
Intangible Assets Monitor (IAM). A method of IC Measurement developed by
Karl Erik Sveiby for recording intangible assets. It divides intangible assets into three main
categories - competencies, external structure and internal structure. Indicators are divided
into four distinctive groups - growth, renewal, efficiency and stability.
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.
Internalization. One of four basic knowledge conversion processes described by
Nonaka and Takeuchi. Internalization is conversion of explicit to tacit, for example through
applying explicit knowledge and learning from the experience. Contrast with
Externalization, Combination and Socialization.
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
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knowledge, typically by group processes where people learn together through a shared
experience. Contrast with Externalization, Internalization and Combination.
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