Module 1

General Overview of Knowledge Management

INTRODUCTION
Welcome!

This course is taught using a mastery approach. Objectives

It is designed to give you the best opportunity for
After studying this module,
success. Your instructor will guide you through the
you will able to:
process, but below are some important things to keep in
mind as you begin. 1. Define knowledge
Quite frankly, this section is too much short for management;
you to gain a thorough understanding of these 2. Identify the
principles. That`s why I encourage you to try to get hold
composition of
of any of the reference materials listed at the end of the
knowledge
module.
management

What is Knowledge Management (KM)?

Knowledge management definition: The organization, capture, use, and analysis of the
impact of a group's collective knowledge. In the business world, the definition of
knowledge management also
includes the maintenance of a
knowledge base or portal where
specific knowledge related to the
company is housed. Only a few
initiatives are able to truly
transform how an organization
operates, and knowledge
management is one of them.

The classic one-line

definition of Knowledge
Management was offered up by
Tom Davenport early on
(Davenport, 1994): “Knowledge Management is the process of capturing, distributing,
and effectively using knowledge.” Probably no better or more succinct single-line
definition has appeared since.

A few years after the Davenport definition, the Gartner Group created another
definition of KM, which has become the most frequently cited one (Duhon, 1998), and it
is given below:

"Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to

identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's
information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies,
procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers."

The one real lacuna of this definition is that it, too, is specifically limited to an
organization‟s own information and knowledge assets. KM as conceived now, and this
expansion arrived early on, includes relevant information assets from wherever relevant.
Note, however, the breadth implied for KM by calling it a “discipline.”

Both definitions share a very organizational and corporate orientation. KM,

historically at least, was primarily about managing the knowledge of and in
organizations. Rather quickly, however, the concept of KM became much broader than
that.

However, Knowledge Management can best and most quickly be explained by

recapping its origins. Later in this module, its stages of development will also be
recapped.

The Origins of KM

The concept and the terminology of KM sprouted within the management

consulting community. When the Internet arose, those organizations quickly realized
that an intranet, an in-house subset of the Internet, was a wonderful tool with which to
make information accessible and to share it among the geographically dispersed units
of their organizations. Not surprisingly, they quickly realized that in building tools and
techniques such as dashboards, expertise locators, and best practice (lessons learned)
databases, they had acquired an expertise which was in effect a new product that they
could market to other organizations, particularly to organizations which were large,
complex, and dispersed. However, a new product needs a name, and the name that
emerged was Knowledge Management. The term apparently was first used in its current
context at McKinsey in 1987 for an internal study on their information handling and
utilization (McInerney and Koenig, 2011). KM went public, as it were, at a conference in
Boston in 1993 organized by Ernst and Young (Prusak 1999).

What is KM trying to accomplish?

Rich, Deep, and Open Communication

First, KM can very fruitfully be

seen as the undertaking to replicate,
indeed to create, the information
environment known to be conducive to
successful R&D—rich, deep, and open
communication and information
access—and to deploy it broadly across
the firm. It is almost trite now to observe
that we are in the post-industrial
information age and that we are all
information workers. Furthermore, the
researcher is, after all, the quintessential
information worker. Peter Drucker once
commented that the product of the pharmaceutical industry wasn‟t pills, it was
information. The research domain, and in particular the pharmaceutical industry, has
been studied in depth with a focus on identifying the organizational and cultural
environmental aspects that lead to successful research (Koenig, 1990, 1992). The
salient aspect that emerges with overwhelming importance is that of rich, deep, and
open communications, not only within the firm, but also with the outside world. The
logical conclusion, then, is to attempt to apply those same successful environmental
aspects to knowledge workers at large, and that is precisely what KM attempts to do.

Situational Awareness

Second, Situational Awareness is a term only recently, beginning in 2015, used

in the context of KM. The term, however, long precedes KM. It first gained some
prominence in the cold war era when studies were commissioned by all of the major
potential belligerents to try to identify what characteristics made a good fighter pilot. The
costs of training a fighter pilot were huge, and if the appropriate characteristics leading
to success could be identified, that training could be directed to the most appropriate
candidates, and of those trained the most appropriate could be selected for front-line
assignment. However, the only solid conclusion of those studies was that the salient
characteristic of a good fighter pilot was excellent “situational awareness.” The problem
was that no good predictive test for situational awareness could be developed.

The phrase then retreated into relative obscurity until it was resuscitated by Jeff
Cooper, a firearms guru, and others in the context of self-defense. How do you defend
and protect yourself? The first step is to be alert and to establish good situational
awareness. From there the phrase entered the KM vocabulary. The role of KM is to
create the capability for the organization to establish excellent situational awareness
and consequently to make the right decisions.

OK, what does KM actually consist of?

In short, what are the operational components of a KM system? This is, in a way,
the most straightforward way of explaining what KM is—to delineate what the
operational components are that constitute what people have in mind when they talk
about a KM system.

(1) Content Management

So what is involved in KM? The most obvious is the making of the organization's
data and information available to the members of the organization through dashboards,
portals, and with the use of content management systems. Content Management,
sometimes known as Enterprise Content Management, is the most immediate and
obvious part of KM. For a wonderful graphic snapshot of the content management
domain go to realstorygroup.com and look at their Content Technology Vendor Map.
This aspect of KM might be described as Librarianship 101, putting your organization‟s
information and data up online, plus selected external information, and providing the
capability to seamlessly shift to searching, more or less, the entire web. The term most
often used for this is Enterprise Search. This is now not just a stream within the annual
KM World Conference, but has become an overlapping conference in its own right. See
the comments below under the “Third Stage of KM” section.

(2) Expertise Location

Since knowledge resides in people, often the best way to acquire the expertise
that you need is to talk with an expert. Locating the right expert with the knowledge that
you need, though, can be a problem, particularly if, for example, the expert is in another
country. The basic function of an expertise locator system is straightforward: it is to
identify and locate those persons within an organization who have expertise in a
particular area. These systems are now commonly known as expertise location
systems. In the early days of KM the term „Yellow Pages” was commonly used, but now
that term is fast disappearing from our common vocabulary, and expertise location is, in
any case, rather more precise.

There are typically three sources from which to supply data for an expertise
locator system: (1) employee resumes, (2) employee self-identification of areas of
expertise (typically by being requested to fill out a form online), and (3) algorithmic
analysis of electronic communications from and to the employee. The latter approach is
typically based on email traffic but can include other social networking communications
such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Several commercial software packages to
match queries with expertise are available. Most of them have load-balancing schemes
so as not to overload any particular expert. Typically such systems rank the degree of
presumed expertise and will shift a query down the expertise ranking when the higher
choices appear to be overloaded. Such systems also often have a feature by which the
requester can flag the request as a priority, and the system can then match high priority
to high expertise rank.

(3) Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned databases are databases that attempt to capture and make
accessible knowledge, typically “how to do it” knowledge, that has been operationally
obtained and normally would not have been explicitly captured. In the KM context, the
emphasis is upon capturing knowledge embedded in personal expertise and making it
explicit. The lessons learned concept or practice is one that might be described as
having been birthed by KM, as there is very little in the way of a direct antecedent. Early
in the KM movement, the phrase most often used was "best practices," but that phrase
was soon replaced with "lessons learned." The reasons were that "lessons learned" was
a broader and more inclusive term and because "best practice" seemed too restrictive
and could be interpreted as meaning there was only one best practice in a situation.
What might be a best practice in North American culture, for example, might well not be
a best practice in another culture. The major international consulting firms were very
aware of this and led the movement to substitute the new more appropriate term.
"Lessons Learned" became the most common hallmark phrase of early KM
development.

The idea of capturing expertise, particularly hard-won expertise, is not a new

idea. One antecedent to KM that we have all seen portrayed was the World War II
debriefing of pilots after a mission. Gathering military intelligence was the primary
purpose, but a clear and recognized secondary purpose was to identify lessons learned,
though they were not so named, to pass on to other pilots and instructors. Similarly, the
U. S. Navy Submarine Service, after a very embarrassing and lengthy experience of
torpedoes that failed to detonate on target, and an even more embarrassing failure to
follow up on consistent reports by submarine captains of torpedo detonation failure,
instituted a mandatory system of widely disseminated "Captain's Patrol Reports." The
intent, of course, was to avoid any such fiasco in the future. The Captain's Patrol
Reports, however, were very clearly designed to encourage analytical reporting, with
reasoned analyses of the reasons for operational failure and success. It was
emphasized that a key purpose of the report was both to make recommendations about
strategy for senior officers to mull over, and recommendations about tactics for other
skippers and submariners to take advantage of (McInerney and Koenig, 2011).

(4) Communities of Practice (CoPs)

CoPs are groups of individuals with shared interests that come together in
person or virtually to tell stories, to share and discuss problems and opportunities,
discuss best practices, and talk over lessons learned (Wenger, 1998; Wenger & Snyder,
1999). Communities of practice emphasize, build upon, and take advantage of the
social nature of learning within or across organizations. In small organizations,
conversations around the water cooler are often taken for granted, but in larger,
geographically distributed organizations, the water cooler needs to become virtual.
Similarly, organizations find that when workers relinquish a dedicated company office to
work online from home or on the road, the natural knowledge sharing that occurs in
social spaces needs to be replicated virtually. In the context of KM, CoPs are generally
understood to mean electronically linked communities. Electronic linkage is not
essential, of course, but since KM arose in the consulting community from the
awareness of the potential of intranets to link geographically dispersed organizations,
this orientation is understandable.
Why KM is important?

Knowledge management is important because it boosts the efficiency of an

organization‟s decision-making ability.

In making sure that all

employees have access to the
overall expertise held within
the organization, a smarter
workforce is built who are
more able to make quick,
informed decisions that
benefit the company.

Innovation is easier to
foster within the organization,
customers benefit from
increased access to best
practices and employee
turnover is reduced.

The importance of knowledge management is growing every year. As the

marketplace becomes ever more competitive, one of the best ways to stay ahead of the
curve is to build your organization in an intelligent, flexible manner. You want to be able
to spot issues from a distance and respond quickly to new information and innovations.

Benefits of knowledge management

 More efficient workplace

 Faster, better decision making
 Increased collaboration
 Building organizational knowledge
 Employee onboarding and training process is optimized
 Increased employee happiness and retention, due to the valuing of
knowledge, training, and innovation
 References
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Davenport, Thomas H. (1994), Saving IT's Soul: Human Centered Information

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Durham, Mary. (2004). Three Critical Roles for Knowledge Management

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