Author: Ariel

Successful KM implementations in business settings prioritize attention on soft issues – including human and cultural aspects, personal motivations, change management methodologies, new and improved business processes enabling multidisciplinary knowledge sharing, communication and collaboration – and see technology as an enabler. 

Despite this, most efforts so far at addressing the challenge of KM in business environments have typically taken a “technology-push” approach, concentrating major effort on putting in place IT tools that will “solve the knowledge creation, sharing and reuse problem”. 

The overall intention has been to provide meaningful and useful guidelines to companies, and notably SMEs (see below), as to how they might align their organizations culturally and socially to take advantage of the opportunities of knowledge sharing within and beyond their organizational boundaries. 

If the Framework helps an organization achieve a common understanding of KM, align and focus its actions, identify what KM aspects are relevant to that organization, understand what is the right combination of these aspects, which processes should be tackled and how to develop KM both an organizational and individual level – then it has value. 

Why KM in SMEs? 

Owners and managers of SMEs differ in what they term success. Survival and continuity, profit, return on capital employed, numbers of employees and customers, pride in product, skills and service, employment for family members, and enjoyable work life, are frequently mentioned criteria. 

This European KM Framework is designed to promote a common European understanding of KM, show the value of the emerging KM approach and help organizations towards its successful implementation. 

The Framework should be considered as a starting point for developing, if appropriate, an organization-specific framework that serves best the needs of a particular organization’s KM approach. 

The KM Framework considers three layers as most important for KM: 

a)  The business focus should be in the centre of any KM initiative and represents the value-adding processes of an organization, which may typically include strategy development, product/service innovation and development, manufacturing and service delivery, sales and customer support.

b)  Five core knowledge activities have been identified as most widely used by organizations in Europe: identify, create, store, share and use.

c) The enablers represent the third layer and comprise two main categories, called personal and organizational knowledge capabilities, which complement each other. These capabilities should be seen as the enablers for the knowledge activities outlined above. 

Core value-adding processes

In addition to supporting the improvement of the core processes of an organization, KM methods can also be applied within its supporting processes: competence management is one such example from the HR arena; developing best practice databases to capture and exchange knowledge about optimum procedures throughout the organization is another example from the area of continuous improvement processes; methods for intellectual property management (e.g. patents, copyrights) is a further example from the area of management of financial and non-financial assets. 

Small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs) in particular are increasingly building networks to supply their products, to share their resources and to learn from each other. Long-term partnerships are established in order to develop new products and services that a single organization could not cope with alone. Therefore partners and suppliers, as well as clients, should often be involved within the scope 

Empirical research, practical experiences and the analysis of more than 150 KM frameworks worldwide have shown that the following areas are, in most cases, the most important to address: 

1. describe how knowledge is used
2. raise awareness about the required KM activities
3. reduce complexity
4. design a KM solution.

The five core knowledge activities are: 

• Identify knowledge
• Create New Knowledge
• Store Knowledge
• Share Knowledge
• Use Knowledge

Two important requirements have to be fulfilled to achieve improvements from these core knowledge activities: 

• First, the core activities have to be aligned or integrated into the organizational processes and daily tasks.
• Second, the core activities have to be carefully balanced in accordance with the specificities of each business process and organization. A KM solution should not focus only on one or two activities in isolation.

4.1 Personal knowledge capabilities 

the following personal knowledge capabilities are usually required for a successful implementation of a KM solution: 

• a)  Ambition;
• b)  Skills;
• c)  Behaviour;
• d)  Methods, T ools and T echniques;
• e)  Time management;
• f)  Personal knowledge.

Just asking simple questions like… 

• Is there somebody else who might have knowledge that could help me further here? 
• What did we learn in this project? 
• With whom should we share what we learn?
  …could have a significant impact on the way knowledge is developed, shared and used in an organization. 

An often-used saying related to KM is “an hour of work in the library could save you a month of work …”. 

Research indicates that the pressures of knowledge-based work are increasing in modern societies. These can include the need to solve unforeseen problems, taking greater levels of personal self-responsibility and decision-making, carrying out more coordination tasks in cooperative work settings, a greater number of information processing tasks and a higher dependency on the speed of input from colleagues and clients. 

Organizational knowledge capabilities 

Organizational knowledge capabilities describe the conditions that the leadership of an organization has to establish in order to facilitate effective knowledge use within its value-adding processes, by its managers, employees and other stakeholders. 

The following organizational knowledge capabilities are typically relevant for a successful implementation of a KM solution: 

• g)  Mission, Vision & Strategy; 
• h)  Culture; 
• i)  Process & Organization; 
• j)  Measurement; 
• k)  Technology & Infrastructure; 
• l)  Knowledge Assets.

Culture 

Since most knowledge processes are on a more or less voluntary basis and knowledge is to a large degree personal, there needs to be within an organization a culture of motivation, a sense of belonging, empowerment, trust and respect before people really start to engage themselves in developing, sharing and using knowledge. It requires a culture in which people are respected, based on the knowledge they have and the way they are putting it to use for the organization. 

4.2.6 Knowledge Assets 

The biggest challenge for any organization is to develop and make optimal use of the employees’ knowledge (their so-called “human capital”) and that of their external stakeholders (their so-called “customer capital”) by transforming this know-how into shared knowledge assets (so-called “structural capital”). Knowledge assets are those , which remain with the company when the employees walk out through the door –such as manuals, customer databases, process descriptions, patents etc. Typically, human capital is more related to the internal or tacit component of knowledge (experience, skills, attitude) and structural capital more related to explicit information. 

European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management – Part 5: KM Terminology 

Best/Good Practices: KM practices that have produced outstanding results in other situations, inside or outside of a particular organization and which can be validated, codified and shared with others and recommended as models to follow. 

Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO): The individual with overall leadership of KM in an organization. Typically, the CKO will articulate and champion the KM vision, provide leadership for implementing and sustaining KM initiatives, and has the ultimate responsibility for knowledge creation, sharing and application. 

Community of Practice (CoP): Informal, self-organized, collaboration of people, within or between organizations, who share common practices, interests or aims. When the CoP proves useful to its members over time, they may formalize its status by adopting a group name and a regular system of interchange through enabling tools. (Other types of KM communities include Communities of Interest and Communities of Purpose). 

Core Competences: The set of skills, experience and attributes recognized by an organization as critical to their success in KM. – for example: information literacy, a sharing culture etc. 

Customer Capital: Refers to the value of an organization’s network of satisfied clients, and their loyalty to the organization. 

Data: Discrete, objective facts (numbers, symbols, figures) without context and interpretation. 

Explicit Knowledge: Individual and collective knowledge that has been codified, typically in objects, words, and numbers, in the form of graphics, drawings, specifications, manuals, procedures etc. and can therefore be easily shared and understood. 

Human Capital: Describes the value of the know-how and competencies of an organization’s employees. An organization which systematically develops its Human Capital is more likely to become a successful learning organization (see definition 23). 

nformation: Is based on data, and adds value to the understanding of a subject and in context, is the basis for knowledge. 

Information Management: Covers the processes of selecting, capturing, categorizing, indexing and storing information. Typically this involves active and continuous review of content stored in, or distributed through a range of tools (databases, taxonomies (see definition 30), human networks etc). 

Intangible Assets: Assets that can have a great value to an organization, but which typically have no physical presence and have traditionally not been recognized from a financial perspective, except when sometimes grouped together as “goodwill” on balance sheets. Comprises assets such as reputation, brand value, monopoly rights and other non-balance sheet items such as “potential” –i.e. the capacity to generate competitive advantage in the future. 

Intellectual Capital: Intellectual Capital (IC), a subset of the intangible assets (see definition 11) is commonly accepted to include three sub-categories: Human Capital, Structural Capital, Customer Capital (see definitions [8, 28 and 5 respectively). IC can include the knowledge of employees, data and information about processes, experts, products, customers and competitors; and intellectual property such as patents or regulatory licenses. 

Knowledge: A set of data and information (when seen from an Information Technology point of view), and a combination of, for example know-how, experience, emotion, believes, values, ideas, intuition, curiosity, motivation, learning styles, attitude, ability to trust, ability to deal with complexity, ability to synthesize, openness, networking skills, communication skills, attitude to risk and entrepreneurial spirit to result in a valuable asset which can be used to improve the capacity to act and support decision making. Knowledge may be explicit and/or tacit (see definitions 7 and 29 respectively), individual and/or collective. 

Knowledge Audit: A systematic review, typically based on questionnaires, interviews or narrative techniques, of the knowledge within an organization. Often also includes a mapping of knowledge interactions and flows within and between organizations, teams and individuals. 

Knowledge-Based Economy: A recently coined term that refers to the stage of economic evolution in which knowledge is considered as the key factor of production and competitiveness. This major change has significant implications for the strategy, operations, and structure of all types of organization, large or small, public or private, commercial, not-for-profit or academic. 

Knowledge Management (KM): Planned and ongoing management of activities and processes for leveraging knowledge to enhance competitiveness through better use and creation of individual and collective knowledge resources. 

KM Framework: Describes the most essential factors (assets, people, processes, tools) influencing the success or failure of a KM initiative, and their interdependent relationships. Typically, a framework is built up into a pictorial representation which serves as an aide-memoire for implementing KM within an organization, helping users to position individual KM initiatives with within a wider context (see also booklet 1 of this CEN guide). 

Knowledge Life Cycle: Describes the principle phases of managing knowledge, such as selecting, maintaining, measuring, sharing and applying knowledge in given contexts. 

KM Measurement: One of the KM life cycle phases (see definition 18) Aims to help organizations measure the value created by their KM projects, programmes and strategies. For example, measuring return on investment in KM is often possible through a range of both quantitative and qualitative techniques (see also booklet 4 of this CEN guide). 

KM Roles: To implement KM successfully sometimes requires specific and clearly- defined roles. These are not always formal, but can include such roles as CKO (see definition 2), content managers, change management experts, knowledge brokers and harvesters etc. 

KM Strategy: A declaration of how the organization will use KM methods, tools, processes, and practices to achieve business objectives by leveraging its content, people and processes and how KM will support the organization’s overall strategy. 

KM Tools: The generic sets of tools that enable implementation of KM processes. These can be either IT systems (e.g. databases, intranets, extranets, portals), or methodologies, or human networks (e.g. CoPs – see definition 3). 

Learning Organization: An organization that views its future competitive advantage as based on continuous learning and use of knowledge and an ability to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances. 

Narrative Techniques: Techniques employed in the context of KM to describe complicated issues, explain events, communicate lessons learned, or bring about cultural change (see also booklet 2 of this CEN guide). Such techniques include oral story-telling, drama and some styles of written knowledge capture., which can richness to communication and carry more complex messages and sub-text than non-narrative techniques. 

Organizational Culture: The way of perceiving, thinking and feeling, shared and transmitted among organizational members. Often referred to as: “the way things are done around here” (see also booklet 2 of this CEN guide). 

Organizational KM: Unlike personal KM (see definition 27), which centres on the individual, organizational KM depends upon an enterprise-wide strategic decision to actively manage knowledge through a range of processes, tools and people. 

Personal KM: A set of concepts, disciplines and tools for organizing often previously unstructured knowledge, to help individuals take responsibility for what they know and who they know. 

Structural Capital: Describes the knowledge that has been captured and institutionalised within the structure, processes and culture of an organization. SC is a subset of explicit knowledge (see definition 7). It could include patents, copyrights, proprietary software, trademarks, trade secrets etc. It can be stored in the form of documented procedures, databases, expert systems, decision-support software and KM systems. SC is everything left at the office when the employees go home, and can clearly be regarded as an organization’s property.

Tacit Knowledge: Tacit knowledge (sometimes also called implicit knowledge) consists of mental models, behaviours and perspectives, largely based on experience. This knowledge is difficult to codify, but KM techniques such as learning by doing or collaboration between communities (see definition 3) can help people to share this knowledge.

Taxonomy: An outcome from knowledge mapping and structuring processes. A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification which helps users understand how explicit knowledge can be grouped and categorized. A good taxonomy helps users of knowledge by improving their search and retrieval experiences. 

You can read the entire European Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management – Part 2 Organizational Culture here.

Below are some of the passages I found most valuable.

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Culture is perhaps the most important factor in successfully managing knowledge. It is a key influence on behaviours. This booklet looks at what culture is, how it develops and how you can work with it to ensure your KM programme is successful. It attempts to give some answers to:

1)  How to get the support and active involvement of the members of the organization (issues related to human resources: motivation, competencies, etc). 

2)  How to organize for the implementation of KM (issues related to the formal and informal structure of the organization). 

3)  How to get the appropriate climate for KM implementation (issues related to specific activities and tools to be used). 

Organizations, even small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), rarely involve a single culture; there will be subcultures (groups which exhibit cultural characteristics, i.e. values, norms and practices that differ from the main organizational culture and from other subcultures). One common manifestation is “departmental differences”, which can lead to the phenomenon of departmentalization or so-called “silo thinking”.

There are personal, team and organizational ‘agendas’ containing conflicting aspirations. This gives rise to the complexity of human relationships in organizations and organizations’ behaviour as so-called “complex adaptive systems”. 

Individuals employment puts them in a contractual relationship in which there are expectations and responsibilities. Individuals’ “psychological contract” (i.e. their beliefs about what they owe the organization and what the organization owes them) drives them to seek, to find and to modify the culture to better serve their psychological contract. This does not necessarily imply a selfish or self-seeking motive. Public service, duty, or care for others may well be a strong value within the individual, group, or organization. The more supportive the culture the more productivity, trusting and sharing will be exhibited by individuals. 

People’s identity is fundamental to their motivation and commitment. It drives what they feel is important knowledge, what, how and with whom they will share that knowledge and how they value their contribution to colleagues and the organization. It is important when mapping knowledge to identify those people whose self- worth is related to being perceived as key personnel in knowledge flows.

Managing the boundaries between individual and corporate knowledge requires negotiation and high emotional intelligence, particularly if tacit knowledge is to be exchanged, and for KM tools such as expertise directories or “lessons learned” to be comprehensive. 

Some obstructive properties of groupthink include the following:

• Illusion of invulnerability: members believe that past successes guarantee future successes and so take extreme risks.
• Collective rationalization: members collectively rationalize away information that contradicts their assumptions.
• Illusion of morality: members believe that they are all moral and so could not make a bad decision.
• Shared stereotypes: members dismiss evidence that is contradictory by discrediting the source of that information.
• Direct pressure: sanctions are placed on members who dissent from the majority opinion by, for example, using assertive language to enforce compliance.
• Self-censorship: members keep quiet about any misgivings they have so that they do not voice concerns.
• “Mind guards”: members screen out information from outsiders where this might challenge the group’s assumptions and beliefs.
• Illusion of unanimity: given these other symptoms, it appears that there is consensus within the group, even though there may be many of those involved who do not agree with the group decision.

There are three common types of community, which can be found both within an organization and across organizations:

• Communities of interest are groups with a mutual interest in a particular topic whose members wish to learn more and further develop their interest in the subject.
• Communities of Practice (CoPs) bring together people to share insights, develop expertise and to foster good practice through the exchange and creation of knowledge in a specific area. They are often a focus for building specific capability in their organization and ensuring that this is protected and retained in the organization as people move on. Formal functions (e.g. Finance, Marketing, Human Resources) often offer excellent potential for inter-organizational CoPs. 
• Communities of purpose have a shorter time horizon and are accountable for delivering a specific business goal. These could include project teams, steering groups and task forces.

When individuals are asked to introduce their knowledge into an organizational system, e.g. a client database, they often tend to think that they have lost the ownership of know-how that until then remained exclusive to them. The objectives set for KM in the organization therefore need to take into account the rules and habits concerning the ownership and control of specific knowledge, in order to encourage the transition from personal to organizational knowledge. 

A positive experience normally means that there has been a positive and important gain for the individual; it might be increased credibility, recognition, monetary or promotional reward etc. 

There are two main categories of trust, personal trust and competence (or identity) based trust. For effective KM it does not need to be at the level of personal trust, but can be competence-based. So it can take a number of forms: 

• Identity based – I trust you because of your role or position – e.g. a doctor. 

• Reciprocity based – I engage in trust behaviour because I believe you will too.
• Elicitative Trust – By engaging in acts of trust I will elicit trust from the other person.
• Compensatory trust – Some, but not all, will fail to engage in the needed behaviour and therefore I must take a lead.
• Moralistic Trust – I will act in a trustworthy way irrespective of what others do.

Leaders should provide purpose, direction and behavioral role models. They share ideas with, walk among and listen to members of the enterprise, customizing the message and sensing employees’ understanding of the enterprise’s direction. These qualities are important at all levels in the organization, but have more impact the higher the position held. Management involves interpreting the enterprise vision and mission in a way that makes sense and resonates with employees. Managers guide performance and offer suggestions for corrective action. KM frequently involves guiding people’s actions rather than directing; managers therefore need the skills and competences to create a climate that fosters the creation, sharing, and application of knowledge; i.e. a broader basis of leadership skills.

Credibility is strongly related to trust and qualities of leadership, both already recognized as fundamental to a knowledge–enabled organization.

• High credibility and reliability means that when you give advice or make a judgment on your area of credible expertise it is based on sound knowledge or wisdom;
• People in the organization know that when you say something will happen, it will;
• People in the organization know that when you say something will not happen, it will not;
• People accept that you have the necessary judgment, skill and insight to be able to choose correctly between what should and should not happen;
• People accept that you have the necessary backing, levers of influence, resources and if necessary weapons at your disposal to ensure certainty of chosen outcome, once determined;
• When you obtain agreement or commitment from them to deliver something, they know they have to deliver it.

For a KM intervention to succeed, those involved must feel it is important enough that they must participate, that mistakes made in learning will be accepted and that time for change will be allowed.

In a consulting company, where the members of the organization viewed knowledge as their personal possession, and therefore refused to share, the management team encouraged knowledge sharing by changing the new project allocation process. Rather than giving projects to individual consultants, they were given to a group of consultants with the necessary expertise, forcing the consultants to network and market their expertise internally to participate on projects. Only by getting invited to join new projects could they be rewarded, thus giving them a built-in incentive to advertise their expertise internally. As a result the competition for status drove knowledge sharing rather than hoarding.

The iterative process for knowledge creation involves:

Empathizing – sharing and developing ideas together through social exchange 

Articulating – into explicit form

Connecting – using different explicit forms to help the idea move forward 

Embodying- incorporating into a product/process/service that has value.

Part of your KM program should therefore involve mapping existing competencies, e.g. by means of “knowledge skill tests” and deciding what to do about those that are missing, by offering training or including learning by doing programs in the organization. 

For sharing knowledge to become a cultural norm, the benefits of sharing must exceed the benefits of retention in the eyes of the individuals concerned. This may mean that they are better known and get invited to do more interesting work, or are more visible (e.g. leading to promotion), or enjoy being helpful to others, or receive rewards etc. Individual preferences will suggest what sort of benefits will be important for any one individual. 

One electronics company developed a so-called “virtual Hollywood“ and asked “directors” (employees) to present “scripts” (improvement ideas) to “investors” (general managers) who would choose the ones to “produce” (implement). The project promoted out-of-the-box thinking and in the first year generated over 200 submissions, addressing process improvement and product development.

A learning organization is an organization creating, acquiring and transferring competence and being able to change its behavior according to new knowledge and views. (Garvin, 1993)

What does a learning organization learn?

• To use learning to reach its goals.
• To help people value the effects of their learning upon their organization.
• To avoid making the same mistakes again.
• To share information in ways that prompt appropriate action.
• To link individual performance with organizational performance.
• To tie rewards to key measures of performance.
• To take in a lot of environmental information at all times.
• To create structures and procedures that support the learning process.
• To foster ongoing and orderly dialogues.
• To make it safe for people to share openly and take risks.

What does a learning organization look like?
• Learns collaboratively, open and across boundaries.
• Values how it learns as well as what it learns.
• Invests in staying ahead of the learning curve in its industry.
• Gains a competitive edge by learning faster and smarter than competitors.
• Turns data into useful knowledge quickly and at the right time and place.
• Enables every employee to feel that every experience provides him/her a chance to learn something potentially useful, even if only for leveraging future learning.
• Exhibits little fear and defensiveness.
• Takes risks but avoids jeopardizing the basic security of the organization.
• Invests in experimental and seemingly tangential learning (related but not conforming to existing learning patterns) and in serendipity.
• Supports people and teams who want to pursue action-learning projects.
• Depoliticizes learning by not penalizing individuals and groups for sharing information and conclusions.

How does a learning organization evolve? By…

• Questioning current assumptions about learning.
• Getting an outside perspective.
• Tying the goal of becoming a learning company to organizational vision.
• Funding or creating a champion in top management.
• Looking for the `pain’ in the organization – the place(s) where more effective learning could help.
• Articulating learning organization ideas plainly.
• Rewarding group as well as individual learning success and failure.
• Finding an external competitor or other focus point to spur greater co-operative learning.
• Finding ways to collaborate internally, unhampered by boundaries.

In order to drive the community forward one should consider:

• Identifying or electing a coordinator.
• Establishing the community infrastructure – tools available to support interaction between community members – such as e-mail, discussion groups, an intranet, other tools to build/share knowledge resources.
• A launch aimed at attracting potential members, securing commitment, agreeing initial priorities and actions and consolidating the active members.
• Move into ongoing community operation, ensuring that the steering group, the sponsor and the community coordinator work with members to deliver the community’s goals.
• Evaluate outcomes, celebrate and communicate success within and outside the community, in order to keep interest and energy levels high.

The process of creating a community cannot be rushed because some self-adjusting mechanisms first need to be put in place, in order to make the community robust. The general stages that communities go through are:

• Excitement when forming – something new
• Confusion – about the purpose
• Clarification – who is to do what
• Growing – trust and respect building up
• Arrival – the community is self-directing.

Mentoring involves matching new or inexperienced employees with more experienced senior personnel, so that the intangible, tacit knowledge of an industry or organization can be passed on effectively. It allows the newer employees to grow without necessarily just learning the hard way and should create a bond between mentor and protégé. This technique can be particularly useful for organizations with a substantial proportion of employees approaching retirement age, or where there are steep learning curves, or high turnover rates.

When researching, designing, implementing or evaluating any KM program, consider using story, since it can:

• Enable organizations to value, capture and translate individual experiences into a shared resource (lessons learned).

• Develop a culture that values rich, effective and meaningful dialogue both in conversation and in records.
• Develop tools and techniques to capitalize on project team experiences.
• Explore roles and relationships.
• Tangible objects provide meaningful ‘hooks’, thereby stimulating the creation of new meanings, communities and memories.
• Provide the ‘cultural glue’ for communities and networks.
• Help explore the risks and opportunities presented by any KM experience.

Dialogue, rather than discussion, usually provides the best environment for surfacing true experiences safely and dealing with them. Therefore an environment that encourages dialogue must establish ground rules for behavior. It requires those involved to be willing to work towards co-creating an outcome and a willingness to listen without provoking justification or defensiveness. 

Each community is a subculture within an organization which has developed its own cultural norms. These norms encourage or limit the acceptance of processes, technology or trust-based relationships. The experience of using technology can affect the norms of the community. The implementation of technology provides experiences for the individuals within the community and their experiences thereby modify the cultural norms. If the experience is beneficial the move towards a knowledge sharing culture is enhanced. If the experience is frustrating, more difficult than existing methods, or in other ways unrewarding, it will be seen as detrimental.