For any initiative to succeed and be accepted across an organization it requires some level of leadership buy-in, Knowledge Management is no different.

There are certain things that leaders can do to promote the sharing of knowledge in the organization.

• Tie your initiatives to your vision:
• Create and publish an integrated mission, vision, and values statement that endorses and sustains learning and transfer. It’s very important to showcase success stories at each executive meeting. Unless there is a clear indication of progress the executive backing for an initiative like this will quickly die out.
• There has to be an emphasis on re-enforcing management commitment to identifying new ideas and removing barriers to progress.
• This has to be built on top of a robust rewards and recognition program, and most importantly, make sure you have the right people working on this.
• The management as a rule is always looked up to for direction, and its the same with knowledge management, lead by example and show commitment to learning through action. Tell employee groups that the most important thing is to share and use best practices.

Once this has been accomplished start rolling out these initiatives across the rest of the organization.

Aggressive Marketing, Rewards and Recognition programs are but the first steps to spreading awareness on KM. However if are in the business of Knowledge Management for the long haul, culture changes need to be made as executive backing can only take you so far.

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Is there a way to ensure that Best Practices are identified for re-use at the beginning of a project? Not to mention following through with this idea across the entire length of a projects life?

We all know that in medium / large IT organizations there are a lot of changes made to the project delivery approach depending  on a variety of factors ( new environment, client request, new ideas, crunched timelines, etc ).  Invariably during the course of this change people stumble across newer and more efficient ways of doing work that deliver higher value.

So the question really is how do we capture these best practices and make them readily available to the next set of people trying to start a new project?

This is a great way of creating a process that allows new project members to bring themselves up to speed with the current project.

What is also important to understand is that capturing best practices alone, while effective, is not the best way to ensure the value spreading through your organization. Capturing critical resource information is just as important, which means once you’ve identified a resource you can update your best practices records to indicate who the “go-to” person for an identified best practice or lesson learnt is. This will start dialogue between people and drive knowledge sharing.

Over time you will see a steady shift as more and more people start using this as a platform to do a quick “read” before getting started with a project.

Stumbling Blocks:

You need to figure out creative ways of getting project members to translate the experiences they have gained into best practices. There is an effort to this, however you need to judge whether this investment in time is justified in the long run for your organization.

Benefits  of doing it correctly :

This will enable to achieve detailed task in projects faster, and also ensure quality in those tasks, as it reduces rework effort, and brings in consistency in work across different members.

Eventually it should help achieve better productivity, and lower defect density both at in process, and post delivery stage.

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I thought it was time to give the Gridlock Forum a face lift since the Blog just went through one just a short while ago.

Currently the Forum has the following sections :

• Jobs
• Lessons Learnt
• Forum Features and FAQ’s
• Geography
• Technologies
• Thoughts
• Best Practices
• Resources
• Gridlock the Blog
• General

Feel free to suggest new sections if you feel like it.
Check it out and let me know what you think..

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Teleos has announced the 15 Winners in the 2007 Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study. For the first time, Samsung SDS has been recognized as the overall Asian MAKE Winner. India took top honors this year with 7 winners, followed by Japan (3 winners) and South Korea (2 winners). Australia, Indonesia and Singapore had one winner each.

The 2007 Asian MAKE Winners were recognized during a special Awards Ceremony at the 8th World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea.

Astra International (Indonesia)
Eureka Forbes (India)
Honda Motor (Japan)
Infosys Technologies (India)
Larsen & Toubro, E&C Division (India)
Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (S. Korea)
Samsung SDS (S. Korea)
Satyam Computer Services (India)
Singapore Airlines (Singapore)
Sony (Japan)
Tata Consultancy Services (India)
Tata Steel (India)
Toyota Motor Corporation (Japan)
Westpac Banking Corporation (Australia)
Wipro Technologies (India)

The 2007 Asian MAKE Winners were chosen by a panel of Asian Fortune Global 500 business executives and leading knowledge management and intellectual capital experts. Only organizations founded and headquartered in Asia were eligible for this MAKE study.

The expert panel rated organizations against the MAKE framework of eight key knowledge performance dimensions which are the visible drivers of competitive advantage. The 2007 Asian MAKE Winners have been recognized as leaders in:

- creating a knowledge-driven corporate culture
- developing knowledge leaders and workers
- innovation
- maximizing corporate intellectual capital
- collaboration and knowledge sharing
- creating a learning organization
- managing customer knowledge
- transforming corporate knowledge into shareholder value

This year’s Asian MAKE Winners were recognized for delivering superior financial performance. Return on Assets for the 2007 Asian MAKE Winners was 14.2% - nearly four times that of the US Fortune 500 company median. Leaders in this metric were Infosys Technologies, Satyam Computer Services, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies.

Return on Profits for the 2007 Asian MAKE Winners was 12.3% - twice that of the US Fortune 500 company median. Leaders in this metric were Infosys Technologies, Satyam Computer Services, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies.

Rory Chase, Managing Director of Teleos, said: “The Asian MAKE Winners are effectively transforming organizational knowledge into wealth-creating ideas, products and solutions. They are building portfolios of intellectual capital which will enable them to out-perform their global competitors.”

Read the full article here.

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In her latest examination of knowledge management best practices, KM thought leader Carla O’Dell reveals the new competitive advantage—a special class of communities of practice known as networks.An expansion of traditional communities of practice, networks are organization-wide forums for knowledge sharing among functional practitioners. These networks are integrated into the workflow and produce bottom-line results in industries demanding exceptional speed and accuracy.

Your organization can benefit from what others have learned. Using case examples from Air Products and Chemicals, BHP Billiton, Buckman Laboratories International, Chevron, Fluor, and Halliburton, O’Dell explains how best-practice organizations leverage networks to maintain their industry-leading status and examines the cultural and technological enablers of thriving networks.

Share the knowledge. Download this insightful report for you and your organization today.

Get the book Here.

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An extract from an article i found on CIO.com

What is knowledge management (KM)?

Unfortunately, there’s no universal definition of knowledge management (KM), just as there’s no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it’s best to think of KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices. It’s important to note that the definition says nothing about technology; while KM is often facilitated by IT, technology by itself is not KM.

Think of a golf caddie as a simplified example of a knowledge worker. Good caddies do more than carry clubs and track down wayward balls. When asked, a good caddie will give advice to golfers, such as, “The wind makes the ninth hole play 15 yards longer. ” Accurate advice may lead to a bigger tip at the end of the day. On the flip side, the golfer — having derived a benefit from the caddie’s advice — may be more likely to play that course again. If a good caddie is willing to share what he knows with other caddies, then they all may eventually earn bigger tips. How would KM work to make this happen? The caddie master may decide to reward caddies for sharing their tips by offering them credits for pro shop merchandise. Once the best advice is collected, the course manager would publish the information in notebooks (or make it available on PDAs), and distribute them to all the caddies. The end result of a well-designed KM program is that everyone wins. In this case, caddies get bigger tips and deals on merchandise, golfers play better because they benefit from the collective experience of caddies, and the course owners win because better scores lead to more repeat business.

Read the complete article Here..

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Content - a Taxonomy Perspective

“The basic idea behind creating and implementing a taxonomy structure is to get people to the content they want in the least possible time using the least possible effort. You use this simple idea as your bedrock principle and build other complexities around it.

In order to this a significant portion of your time must be dedicated towards identifying and mapping the content in your organization. This exercise ensures that you have the information required to create a successful Taxonomy framework.

If you have been part of the creation of a Taxonomy framework you know the amount of hard work that needs to be put in to establish a comprehensive, concrete structure. The biggest uncertainty of the framework however is its use. Long term studies on Taxonomy structures have shown that unless you have a process in place to ensure documents and files get tagged or stored properly even the most robust system will come apart at the seams.”

What prompts the need to capture Best Practices?

“There are a number of reasons that spur an organization to institutionalize a best practices capturing mechanism. Here we discuss five of the most prevalent reasons.

Demonstrated Success : There have been many instances where one particular unit of a corporation has started doing much better than the rest. A causal analysis of its processes generally finds certain modifications and improvements that lead to this dramatic rise in performance. In an effort to replicate this process improvement across all other units considerable effort is put into identifying these process changes and trying to replicate them, this is one of the main causes for companies to implement a best practices capturing methodology.

Decentralizing : In order to maintain a light support overhead most companies have started downsizing their corporate support teams that were initially responsible for inventing, discovering and transferring best practices. Now most of the individual business units are expected to handle this load. However with an increasing need is being felt to re-establish these teams that can help with identifying and transferring these best practices across business units, as the cost savings associated with these best practices far outweight the costs of maintaining a corporate support team.”

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Communication Strategies for Knowledge Management

“Communication is one of the biggest enablers for knowledge management in any organization. Your people need to know the what, where and why of the KM initiative if you want to ensure its success.

The number of methods of communication strategies have increased in leaps and bounds since we entered the age of information technology. E-mail, RSS feeds, posters, etc are just some of the methods to enable the distribution of information. The extensive use of clever visuals also aids tremendously with getting the message across. Some companies have even gone so far as to create video clips of success stories in their organization. Even something as simple as a screen saver can be a powerful tool when it comes to reaching out to your people.”

Blogs and SharePoint 2007

“In “Its all about the Blog” we discussed how the Blog has gone from being a simple medium of communication to a powerful media tool, and “Blogs and KM” addressed the issue of managing knowledge in an organization through Blogs. Since the last few posts have focused on certain aspects of the Sharepoint 2007 server ( MOSS 2007 ) i decided to do a small article on how Blogs were implemented in this environment.

Microsoft realized that in creating a content authoring platform they couldn’t afford to leave out the one aspect that has revolutionized the method by which content authoring is being tackled today, namely blogs. So in an effort to harness Blogs and promote their use in a corporate setting Microsoft introduced Blogs in their latest version of Sharepoint.”

List of Blogging Tools

“While I’ve focused a considerable portion of this blog to various topics from strategies to best practices in Knowledge Management. I think it’s time i featured a list of technologies / tools that can be used under the KM umbrella.

This first article is dedicated to a list of blogging softwares available in the market, i have however only focused on open source applications/free applications.”

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