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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I presume that a number of us agree that Knowledge Management is a necessity when running a project. This might be a formal process ( like a knowledge management initiative) or something that has, over time,  become an ingrained part of your project management approach.

During the course of a long running ( generally support / maintenance )  project there is a good chance that you will see team members leave and new people come on board. Whether by accident or design.

Great pressure is put on projects to ensure that they start delivering more value with less cost year on year. So how do you do this? Traditionally you figure out a way of delivering the same quality of work using a resource with less experience ( i.e : cost saving ). This would involve rotating your resources to ensure that your project expenses stay under control.

This is where an induction plan becomes very important.

In order to effectively manage the induction of every new member while ensuring that the time and effort spent in doing so is kept under control a well documented, and managed , induction training plan is necessary.

When the project is first started there is a lot of effort put into planning and executing a well orchestrated knowledge transfer, that way when you finally take over the work from your client you encounter as few hiccups as possible. Unfortunately this focus is generally lost after the project starts running properly and in a number of cases new team members are not given the same quality knowledge transition that the original people experienced. Needless to say this causes a lot of problems, including a gradual reduction in your service quality.

Using a simple document to map out ( day by day ) what a new team member is supposed to learn will allow you to keep track of how he / she is progressing and to ensure that every element of the transition process is covered.

Benefits of doing this correctly :

1. Increased service levels on a sustained basis
2. Reduces lead time for a new resource to be effective
3. Ability to track training progress and make changes as necessary
4. Increased client satisfaction
5. Creating a knowledge base that can be grown over time.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I received an invite for a very interesting online session that i thought might interest the readers  here.

USING SOCIAL SEARCH TO DELIVER WEB 2.0 TO THE AIR FORCE
THE SKY’S THE LIMIT!

Tuesday, February 24, 2009 — 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET
REGISTER NOW ( free )

As companies struggle with how to bring Web 2.0 into their organizations, the U.S. Air Force has already found the answer. The Air Force is using social search to harness the power of its greatest asset – its people. Through Air Force Knowledge Now, service members are able to tag, annotate, rate and share search results leading to greater collaboration among the armed forces.

Listen as Randy Adkins, Director of the Air Force Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management, describes how he chose social search as an enabling technology – and how he was able to get the project funded. Jim Murphy, Research Director at AMR Research, and Rebecca Thompson, Vivisimo Vice President, will also provide valuable insight on Web 2.0, social search and collaboration.

Join the Air Force, AMR and Vivisimo at 11 am PT on Tuesday February 24 (2 pm ET) to learn:

• How the Air Force is using social search to jump-start collaboration among service members
• How enterprise search provides the “glue” that enables others in your organization to tap into your existing work – and eliminate rework
• How to leverage the Air Force’s lessons learned for the enterprise
• Other practical Web 2.0 technologies and tips that companies can use

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

How much does culture contribute to the creation of a knowledge based company? Is this something that can be done easily?

There is a dire need to promote KM in many organizations and I’ve seen first hand the impact it has on people as well as business goals.

So what differentiates a Knowledge Based company from a “normal” one?

I think the most noticeable difference would be a cultural shift in the thought processes of a company’s leaders. A collaborative work environment that has rich social networks and intense knowledge sharing is driven when the organization makes it part of its work ethic. While it is true there are always pockets of collaboration I’ve noticed most “innovative” companies have one thing in common. A commitment to knowledge sharing and collaboration by its leadership team, which is then trickled down through the corporate rungs to the grass root level.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A very interesting article on Knowledge Spillover.

Multinational companies (MNCs) invest abroad for many reasons, but invariably the quest for knowledge and information will be a part of the mix. In this paper, shortly to be published in the Journal of International Business Studies, Jasjit Singh, Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD, uses patent citations from 30 countries to explore whether the flow of knowledge between a MNC and host country is one-sided, or if everybody wins.

Global economic growth is highly dependent on the diffusion of knowledge around the world, but it rarely comes in a form that can be easily transferred, such as a blueprint or an engineering diagram. Practical skills such as management, distribution and marketing know-how are just as important to growth.

To gain these tacit skills, many countries focus on attracting foreign direct investment, developing incentives intended to encourage multinational companies to establish subsidiaries and work with local companies. But while these local subsidiaries can be a significant source of knowledge for the host country, they also provide a very effective mechanism whereby the MNC can access host country technology. As a result, technologically advanced countries may fear that such subsidiaries gain significantly more than they contribute in terms of knowledge, and that foreign direct investment may come at a cost.

To establish whether fears that foreign subsidiaries lead to knowledge drain are justified, Singh used patent citation data from 1986-95 to examine bi-directional knowledge flows between MNC subsidiaries and host country organisations in 30 countries. Patent citations are a useful tool because applications must report relevant ‘prior art’, so the trail of knowledge that has preceded each patent application can be traced. Patent citations also provide a very large volume of data for this analysis - during the study period, 83% of the approximately 1.01 million patents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) were owned by organisations.

His analysis found that knowledge flows were far from standard. In some cases, overall knowledge flow was towards the MNC and away from the host country, in others it was roughly symmetrical, and in still others the overall flow of knowledge was from the MNC towards the host country. Further analysis explored how knowledge flow was related to movements of personnel between the MNC and the host country.

The author discusses the importance of these results and how they impact both policymakers and MNCs, weighing the benefits of foreign direct investment policies, and considering the strategic implications of different locations in the light of possible net gains or losses of knowledge.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

For those of you interested in KM, here is how NASA does it….

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create knowledge and share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of NASA and its partners. For NASA this means delivering the systems and services that will help our employees and partners get the information they need to make better decisions. There are three priority areas where KM systems and processes can help NASA’s ability to deliver its missions: To sustain NASA’s knowledge across missions and generations KM activities will identify and capture the information that exists across the Agency To help people find, organize, and share the knowledge we already have KM processes will help to efficiently manage the Agency’s knowledge resources To increase collaboration and to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing The Knowledge Management Team will develop techniques and tools to enable teams and communities to collaborate across the barriers of time and space Where Is NASA Headed? For more information on these undertakings, review the Strategic Plan For Knowledge Management at NASA. Our 25-Year roadmap for how knowledge management will support our space missions. Click on the image above to learn more about where NASA’s Knowledge Management Team is going in the future and how its activities will be integrated into future projects.What would this future working environment be like?Imagine yourself in a future knowledge-enabled NASA You have a great idea for an Earth-orbiting satellite that will seek out and collect 10% of all on-orbit debris, chemically bonding it to the satellite, thereby making shuttle and Space Station operations safer and delivering a significant cost savings to the tracking operations at the Deep Space Network. You see an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) and decide to submit a proposal. You already have a group of folks you know would be good; some at NASA Centers, a clear industry partner, and researchers at universities in Russia and Canada. At the kickoff videoconference for the AO, you were given access to the Program and Project Management portal, which gave you many of the collaborative capabilities you need to work with your team. As you start working online, you realize you also need to involve a chemist. The portal links you to a directory of experts across NASA, you narrow your search to a chemist at Goddard who has recent experience on a flight instrument; you can read her publications and see the notes and webcast video clips from an international workshop she recently led. You want to send out some information to your team, so you go to the portal and establish an online forum for ideas on the technology innovation and set up a robotic agent to search for articles and postings on chemical bonding. You really need to talk to your team face-to-face, so you schedule a desktop videoconference for your team and DSN and shuttle experts (you found the experts in the directory and can schedule across everyone’s calendar), then you reserve a room and time for a working meeting at Langley for a follow up discussion. You see your team members putting up lots of ideas and many postings coming from the “knowbot” agent, it’s like having extra people researching for you! As the proposal effort proceeds, your team uses the portal to publish and retrieve ideas, working documents, and links to related information. (In the background, you know the system is marking certain documents for long-term archive, as well as ensuring you will be ISO and ITAR compliant.) At a critical design point, another knowbot in the system notifies you that a specific lesson learned on a previous project may be applicable given your current design parameters. You review the lesson and the decision tree and design trade-offs related to it, and realize that the flight environments are different, so you’re probably okay. You note the lesson and its attendant data should be reviewed again at PDR; you can include the author of the lesson at your review. Congratulations! You win the proposal and you begin working on moving from your proposal concept to actual implementation. You already have a working environment that you are familiar with and that contains all your research and documentation. You can hit the ground running. How Will We Measure Success? Successful implementation of KM is truly measured by its contribution to mission success. However, our research shows that there are four primary success factors for KM: culture, an architecture, services, and a robust infrastructure.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

An interesting video on KM deployments to NYC schools.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

One of most difficult questions I’ve had to answer with respect to the subject of Knowledge Management is why Technology is so important.

The people asking these questions do not confuse Knowledge Management with Content Management ( as a lot of people very often do ). More often than not they do understand what KM is about and what it could potentially achieve.

So what is the answer? Is technology really that important to KM?

I tried drawing a correlation between the various KM initiatives I’ve been a part of over the years and whether technology did play an important role in it. The results were pretty startling, in over 80% of the initiatives technology did play a vital role. The most common role being the ability to bridge the huge geographical divide that comes with the day to day runnings of a Multi-national corporation.

As I’ve stated in many of my previous posts Knowledge Management is very simply creating channels of communications ( in essence, getting people to talk to one another ). With the breadth of communication enablers that we have at our disposal today its no wonder KM has started relying heavily on technology.

Lets not forget another valuable contribution of technology to the implementation of KM in an organization. The ability to derive metrics! a necessary task for those of us battling with the leadership teams for funds. As with all companies success speaks volumes when it is in the form of a verifiable number. KM is held to the same level of accountablility as any other function. You need to know where and how KM helped achieve a particular organization goal.

Bottom line…. For KM to survive in todays organization a technology framework is vital.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!