An excerpt from the paper ” European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management - Part 1: Knowledge Management Framework” at CEN.

Why KM?As organizations strive to improve their business performance and capacity for innovation, their attention is increasingly focused on how they manage knowledge. Experience has shown that 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”.

Given this, it has been the objective of this guide to investigate those soft areas related to KM which can be the subject of common approaches, good practice identification or standardization initiatives, and to situate and describe these in the wider organizational context. 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.

These guidelines therefore take the form of a European Guide to Good Practice in KM which describes how to implement KM successfully within an organization, and lists the benefits awaiting those organizations that are able to do it. Through its soft, culturally focused approach, the guide aims to add value to other more technology-focussed initiatives underway within companies and standardization bodies. The overall result will
be a greater complementary benefit for European companies, large and small. In short we have aimed to identify and develop good practices which can be applied to all types of European businesses, including SMEs, to ensure that these organizations can be assisted as they seek to put in place the cultural, human and environmental ecology necessary to take full advantage of their collective knowledge as they do business in the knowledge economy.

Read the full article Here.

About CEN :

CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, was founded in 1961 by the national standards bodies in the European Economic Community and EFTA countries.

Now CEN is contributing to the objectives of the European Union and European Economic Area with voluntary technical standards which promote free trade, the safety of workers and consumers, interoperability of networks, environmental protection, exploitation of research and development programmes, and public procurement.

CEN is a non-profit making technical organization set up under Belgian law.

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While a Blog is a great way to share your thoughts and ideas it does tend to limit the level of collaboration that can occur with readers.

With a count of 100 users ( and growing ) subscribing to the Gridlock blog i felt it was time that a forum was set up to allow these users to be able to talk to one another and post questions that are relevant to them. Hence the birth of Gridlock’s first forum ( http://forum.arjunthomas.com ), you can also get to it from the navigation bar at the top of the Blog.

As time progresses i shall try adding additional features to the forum to enable greater collaboration. For the time being, do drop in and sign up…

Send an invite out to your friends and colleagues to grow this forum, the greater the number of collaborators the more the benefit to each of you.

Gridlock, the Blog, will continue in its present state with my thoughts on KM.

Cheers,

Arjun Thomas.

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I just completed reading a rather interesting survey done by The McKinsey Quarterly. This was done to identify if and how businesses are using Web 2.0 within their organization. I was pleasantly surprised to note that a large percentage of companies have started taking a serious look at Web 2.0 technology implementations within their ranks.

This perhaps is driven by the fact that user-driven online services like MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube are gaining popularity. The technologies that these applications use however are known to most corporates, social networks, blogs, p2p networking and web services.

However most of the companies that have invested in Web 2.0 technologies have stayed away from popular trends like blogs, instead they’ve placed greater emphasis on technologies that enable automation and networking.

Over 50% of the executives surveyed said they were pleased with the results of their investments, the early movers however were much more satisfied than those that started out later. The general feel was that a majority of the respondents wished they had started this a lot earlier. Of all the Web 2.0 technologies, Web services seemed to be the most popular with collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking coming in a close second.

A survey by industry showed that Retail and Hi-tech leads the pack when it comes for future plan in Web 2.0 investments. In the Region category, India leads the pack with an 80% of respondents stating that they have plans to implement web 2.0 technologies over the next year.

How they use them : Another interesting observation was the end use for these technologies. 70% of the respondents said they use it for interfacing with customers, 51% use it to interface with suppliers and partners and 75% for managing collaboration internally.

Again, the most popular Web 2.0 technology being used by corporate today seems to be Web-services.

From a purely Knowledge Management perspective, the most popular Web 2.0 Technologies seem to be Collective intelligence ( 36%), Peer to peer networking ( 65%), Social networking (60%) and Mash-ups (70%).

The most successful of these implementations were performed at the grass roots level. The advantage of this approach was that most of these projects were taken up by their natural owners within the organization.

The value of these technologies are already having an impact on business, customers are now able to have dialogues with the companies.

Read the full survey here:

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“Go the distance alone” - competitiveness is one of the biggest challenges to a Knowledge sharing culture. Unless you’ve been raised by Marxists, chances are competing with your classmates and colleagues has become a full time job for you. Schools and colleges stress individuality and competition, not collaboration and sharing, and so does the corporate world.

Knowledge Management is based on the foundation of selflessly sharing information. Now as naive as that sounds, it does work. There are certain challenges that need to be overcome however, that goes without saying. The biggest of these, as you probably guessed, is getting employees to part with their knowledge and share it with their peers.

The question i’m always asked when i propose this is ” Why should i share what makes me unique and valuable to the organization?”. A very serious concern that needs to be addressed. Unless the senior management changes their outlook on what makes an employee valuable, the culture of knowledge hoarding will continue to thrive.

So what makes an employee valuable, really valuable, to an organization? Well, if he manages to teach his colleagues to replicate this methods for success. Unlike most other initiatives Knowledge Management isn’t something that can be driven using a carrot and stick approach. Threatening or forcing KM down your employees throats would be the most counter productive move you could ever make. This will virtually guarantee that any future KM endeavors are regarded with scorn and dread.

While rewards are a direct means of getting a KM initiative off the ground, recognition and benefit are the actual factors that sustain KM in the long run.

What can you as managers and leaders do to facilitate a knowledge sharing culture in your organizations? Simple though it sounds, the best way is to recognize knowledge sharing and reward it.

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YouTube a KM Platform?? Are you out of your mind? thats probably the first reaction you had when you read the title of this post. Honestly? i dont blame you , i was having the same thoughts a week ago , but then as you know when an idea takes hold it takes a while to shake off.

So I asked myself this very simple question, What makes a good KM platform? and then started listing the points down one by one. This is what i’ve come up with so far ( this is a very basic list, so bear with me) .

1. Communities of Practice
2. Expertise Map
3. Great Search feature
4. Collaboration
5. Information Repositories

The whole idea behind institutionalizing KM anywhere is to for people to get to the right information at the right time. While there are hundreds of applications out there ( open source and otherwise ) the fundamental success factor for any KM initiative is to establish a self sustaining knowledge sharing culture that uses the platform to facilitate collaboration. Something YouTube has excelled at, now whether this fits your corporates definition of a KM tool is question that we shall tackle on another day.

Right, back to the question at hand. Analyzing what YouTube has to offer gives us a pretty good insight on how the knowledge ( headbanging teens and American idol wannabes ) is stored and structured. Here you can get to any information using a category tab, a great way to structure your information. Tags are another huge feature here which makes structuring and subsequently locating information a lot simpler.

Channels allow you to subscribe to your favourite information sources and receive a steady stream of information without searching for it. Finally and most importantly a Community section which gets people of similar interest together to discuss about information / interests that they have in common.

As with any self respecting KM tool the option to rate information is a must, YouTube accomplishes that with aplomb. Users are allowed to rate videos, post comments and so on enabling the “weeding” out of less desirable content.

Information like which are the most viewed videos, favourited videos and such add as a bonus to the information seeker as it gives him/ her the opportunity to feel the pulse ( so to speak ) of the community.

Statistics on how many videos were viewed /submitted by individual users can be pulled up very easily enabling ( further down the line ) a creation of an “expertise map”.

There you have it, while YouTube is not what one would call an ideal KM tool it addresses one of the most difficult issues KM practitioners face, getting people to share information. Filling the other functional gaps shouldn’t be too difficult. Now if only we can get our corporates to start shooting embarrassing videos of themselves.

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We’ve known for a while now that Microsoft was slow in catching up with the rest of the world when it came to online collaboration and social networking. SharePoint 2003 is still being used to this day by a large number of corporations, and is widely renowned as the product that failed as a Knowledge Management tool.

SharePoint 2007 has made huge leaps ahead with incorporating social networking features like RSS, Wiki’s and Blogs as part of its basic setup. Sticking to the simplicity that we’ve come to expect from Microsoft products a person with zero technical knowledge can make use of these features. Though there will be a slight learning curve for new comers as most corporate users aren’t aware of what a wiki is and how it can be leveraged to generate information.

Creating a wiki is a pretty simple process, its like creating a document library , and once you’ve set it up the process of building on it is pretty straightforward. It even incorporates a full set of rich text tools and buttons that we have gotten used to on Word. They’ve even provided a provision to track the history of every wiki page!!

I’m still in the process of experimenting with the wiki’s on Sharepoint but from what i can see the future looks very promising. Sharepoint as a Knowledge Management platform? never thought i’d say those words, but looks like Microsoft have finally gotten their act together. A blessing for the organizations running 2003, if you still indend on sticking to the same platform i’d suggest upgrading, and upgrading fast.

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While i haven’t actually gotten around to doing a comprehensive write-up on this new application from Microsoft i figured that prospective users out there might be interested in knowing how different this new version is from the older one.

I’ve spent the last 2 years working with SharePoint V2 ( 2003 ) amongst many other KM tools and honestly while perfectly suited as a document management tool it is FAR from being even close to a KM application.

Sharepoint V3 has made up for it by providing a very tightly integrated platform to facilitate sharing of knowledge. Having worked on it for the past couple of months i can say this is the first time i have felt Microsoft has a KM contender. This excel sheet ( put together by Microsoft ) is a feature comparison between the various types of Sharepoint. Go through it when you have the time, will give you some insight on what you can expect from this new tool.

The areas covered in this document are as follows :

You can pick up this document from here.

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Estimates have blogs growing at the rate of 20,000 every day. Now that’s quite a figure. Just imagine if you were able to tap into that vast array of blogs and extract something useful. Then imagine you could do this on a daily basis, would make your life a lot easier wouldn’t it?

So what makes them such marvelous information houses? well for one, it can be run by pretty much anyone, a single individual, a group or an organization. A simple layout allows people to collaborate , share presentations and other documents. It’s very well structured, allowing articles to be grouped by specific categories and to top it all of it search able. Now put a couple of hundred of these together and you get the picture.

A platform that’s easy to manage , that can easily be scaled up to meet requirements of any size and the best part, most blogging software is available free of cost and even the ones that aren’t are reasonably inexpensive. Always a bright idea if you can cook up ways of saving your company a couple of bucks.

Individual blogs allow corporates to communicate with their employees, clients, vendors. Putting a human face to the company unlike the memo’s that every corporate employee receives when something of any significance ( well, most of the time ) occurs.

Blogs at the team level allow much greater collaboration that was possible before, ideas, thoughts and musing can be captured. Information that is generally lost in a large forum of ideas. Simply, they are perfect tools for capturing and harnessing tacit knowledge in the organization.

So, if you’re company hasnt started using blogs you might want to broach the topic to them. Start small, stay internal till you come up with a blogging strategy to maximize the effectiveness of the message and you might just surprise yourself.

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