Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow E-Book

Frank Leistner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: SAS Institute Inc
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 303

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Get your organization's expertise out of its silos and make it flow-with lessons from over a decade of experience

Looking at knowledge management in a holistic way, Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work puts the proper emphasis on non-technical issues. As knowledge is deeply connected to humans, the author moves away from the often overused and therefore burned-out term "knowledge management" to the better-suited term "knowledge flow management."

• Provides lessons learned and case studies from real experience
• Discusses key knowledge flow components, success factors and traps, and where to start

Covering topics such as the power of scaling, internal marketing, measuring success, cultural aspects of sharing, and the role of Web2.0, Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work allows you to stay up-to-date with today's knowledge flow management, and implement best practices to position your organization to take advantage of all of its assets.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

WILEY & SAS BUSINESS SERIES

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1 - The Human Touch

WHY THIS BOOK?

TERMINOLOGY AND DEFINITIONS

TAKING A HOLISTIC VIEW

GETTING INTO THE FLOW

CASE STUDY: TOOLPOOL

NOTES

CHAPTER 2 - Getting Started

PROJECT VERSUS INITIATIVE

TEAM STRUCTURES

STRATEGY AND ASSESSMENT

BIG BANG OR SMALL

NOTES

CHAPTER 3 - Roles

WHO SHOULD INTRODUCE AND DRIVE KNOWLEDGE FLOW MANAGEMENT?

WHO SHOULD WORRY ABOUT KNOWLEDGE FLOW MANAGEMENT?

KNOWLEDGE INTERMEDIARIES

NOTES

CHAPTER 4 - Basic Requirements for Successful Knowledge Flow Management

PASSIONATE INITIATIVE SUPPORT

CULTURE

TRUST

EXECUTIVE SUPPORT

MULTIPLE DRIVERS

NOTES

CHAPTER 5 - Driving for Success

INTERNAL MARKETING: THE MYTH OF BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME

THE PULSE

KEEP IT SIMPLE

GO GLOBAL: THE POWER OF SCALING

MOTIVATION

WHAT IF YOUR KNOWLEDGE TAKES A WALK?

NOTES

CHAPTER 6 - Barriers

BARRIERS HINDERING THE FLOW

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: HOW LONG?

SHARING KNOWLEDGE TAKES EFFORT

I NEED TWO MORE WEEKS

LESS CAN BE MORE

LEGAL LIMITATIONS

NOTES

CHAPTER 7 - The Technology Trap

ASSET OR POINTER?

TOOLS: NOT ONLY TECHNOLOGY

COPS

SKILLS MANAGEMENT

“KNOWLEDGE BASES”

PORTALS

OPEN SPACE TECHNOLOGY

SEARCH

STORIES

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER SESSIONS

NOTES

CHAPTER 8 - Measure and Analyze

MEASURE TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

MEASURING QUALITY

ANALYZE YOUR INITIATIVE

FEED IT BACK

NOTES

CHAPTER 9 - Knowledge Flow Management: The Next Generation

THE ROLE OF WEB 2.0++

SOCIAL MEDIA INTERNALLY

WHAT ABOUT 2020?

SPECIAL ROLES AND JOBS

STONE AGE: CREATIVITY LEAP THROUGH COMMUNITIES

TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURES

NOTES

CHAPTER 10 - Final Thoughts

APPENDIX A - Key Success Factors

APPENDIX B - Additional Resources

About the Author

Index

WILEY & SAS BUSINESS SERIES

The Wiley & SAS Business Series presents books that help senior-level managers with their critical management decisions.

Titles in the Wiley and SAS Business Series include:

Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing

Competitive Advantage by Gloria J. Miller, Dagmar Brautigam, and Stefanie Gerlach

Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy by Olivia Parr Rud

Case Studies in Performance Management: A Guide from the Experts by Tony C. Adkins

CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology by Joe Stenzel

Credit Risk Assessment: The New Lending System for Borrowers, Lenders, and Investors by Clark Abrahams and Mingyuan Zhang

Credit Risk Scorecards: Developing and Implementing Intelligent Credit Scoring by Naeem Siddiqi

Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth by Jill Dyché and Evan Levy

Demand-Driven Forecasting: A Structured Approach to Forecasting by Charles Chase

Enterprise Risk Management: A Methodology for Achieving Strategic Objectives by Gregory Monahan

Fair Lending Compliance: Intelligence and Implications for Credit Risk Management by Clark R. Abrahams and Mingyuan Zhang

Information Revolution: Using the Information Evolution Model to Grow Your Business by Jim Davis, Gloria J. Miller, and Allan Russell

Marketing Automation: Practical Steps to More Effective Direct Marketing by Jeff LeSueur

Performance Management: Finding the Missing Pieces (to Close the Intelligence Gap) by Gary Cokins

Performance Management: Integrating Strategy Execution, Methodologies, Risk, and Analytics by Gary Cokins

The Data Asset: How Smart Companies Govern Their Data for Business Success by Tony Fisher

The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics by Thornton May

Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean by Ian Cox,

Marie A. Gaudard, Philip J. Ramsey, Mia L. Stephens, and Leo Wright (Publishing December 2009)

For more information on any of the above titles, please visit www.wiley.com.

Copyright © 2010 by SAS Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leistner, Frank.

Mastering organizational knowledge flow : how to make knowledge sharing work / Frank Leistner. p. cm.—(Wiley & SAS business series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-61746-5

1. Knowledge management. I. Title.

HD30.2.L453 2010

658.4’038-dc22

2009050975

To my father, who taught me by example that optimism should be a guiding principle for anything you do

Foreword: The Generations of Knowledge Management

Sometime in the early 1990s, the idea caught on in several organizations that it was actually possible to do something about knowledge in their organizations. The “something” that could be done was often hotly debated among the knowledge practitioners, consultants, academics, and internally competing functions. However, a general consensus emerged by the middle of the decade that could be summarized in this way:

• Knowledge in organizations is most likely to be found in existing or emergent documents.

• The key to managing these documents are better systems—either technology systems or cleverer taxonomies.

• Incentives can easily be developed to encourage the production and use of these documents.

• All of these activities can be measured for their effectiveness within the organization and their costs can be justified this way.

• Knowledge was the result of individual action and thinking and the individual is the most efficient unit of analysis for working with knowledge in the firm.

• Knowledge management projects had a very strong technological component.

These general ideas were termed knowledge management (KM) by many (including myself, alas), and by 1995 these ideas had taken hold and much effort and expenditures were being burned up in putting them into practice. Ideas have consequences and these surely did as knowledge practitioners, consultants, and technology vendors all jumped on the KM bandwagon to implement these systems.

Unfortunately, the ideas were flawed. They were not so much wrong as misguided in their approach. Since almost all new movements build on the skeletons of earlier movements, KM looked very much like information management, and, not surprisingly, the results produced by these new KM projects were quite similar to earlier KM projects—disappointing the knowledge advocates and especially the users and clients who were expecting great things from the more effective use of knowledge within the organization.

However, rather then admitting defeat and leaving the field, practitioners rethought many of their assumptions and came up, again with the help of consultants and academics, with some new working hypotheses that seemed much closer to the reality of how knowledge actually works in organizations.

Needless to say, this was not the case for all KM projects. Many stuck with the old models and some still do. But it can be fairly said that these retro efforts almost all became absorbed into more traditional information technology projects and lost their focus and user enthusiasm. They are still fading from sight.

What were some of these new assumptions?

• Knowledge can be best understood as a social phenomenon, and efforts to work with it are better structured as some group effort than by individuals.

• Working with knowledge needs some mixture or combination of technology, strategy, human capital, and social capital approaches.

• It is almost impossible to effectively measure knowledge, and it is not worth the effort to do so.

• A holistic approach is therefore called for—difficult as this may be to formulate and implement.

Luckily for practitioners, there are more than a few people who are offering guides on how to go about doing this. This book you are reading represents one of the clearest and most comprehensive attempts at getting one’s hands around this most elusive and valuable resource: organizational knowledge.

Frank Leistner is a true hybrid: a practitioner who has read all the important texts and has thought long and hard about how to go about working with knowledge. He has had the good fortune to have worked for an organization that believes both in using knowledge well and in developing new knowledge. Frank has seen his ideas put into action and has had been able to evaluate them in practice. His ideas are holistic, comprehensive, and, most important, grounded in practice.

All readers should be able to make use of these ideas and continue on the journey of making better use of what we know and how we can know new things.

LARRY PRUSAK Visiting Professor Copenhagen Business School

Preface

Many organizations still struggle to make best use of the knowledge that exists within them. While individuals might use their knowledge on a daily basis and for their decisions, frequently that knowledge is not shared and leveraged across the organization from one person to another. A common notion of how to make this transfer of knowledge happen is via technical systems. Those systems play a role as an enabler, but they are only one piece of the puzzle to make the flow of knowledge work in an organization. This book looks at the other factors that are involved and specifically focuses on human aspects. What motivates people to share their knowledge, and how can you overcome some of the barriers that are in the way of a good flow of knowledge in your organization? How should you deal with measuring? What are some of the best drivers that you can put in place not only to get a knowledge flow initiative started but to make sure it survives and can provide longer-term value?

When I started my first initiative (named ToolPool) back in 1997, it was purely to solve a very specific business problem: to leverage technical tools, tips, and tricks around a global organization. Over the years, it turned out that lasting success was based on a lot of factors of which the technical infrastructure was actually a smaller piece than anticipated. I was fortunate enough to get management support to pursue a number of approaches that helped drive ToolPool to what it eventually became. I was also fortunate enough to have a great team that understood the key principles and invested their energy and passion into driving it to success.

Over the last decade I have used a number of the lessons learned and applied them to a range of initiatives designed to improve the knowledge flow at my current company. The more I recognized patterns of what worked and what did not and the more I discussed those findings with others interested in making knowledge flow better, the clearer it became that putting the key findings into a book would be a good idea. Whenever I presented the ideas at internal meetings, external conferences, or company keynotes, the feedback was positive and spawned many fruitful discussions.

During the winter holidays leading into 2009 I came to the conclusion that this might be the year to get started. The end result of the effort offers you 10 chapters of experiences, lessons learned, examples, and stories to illustrate the main key success factors.

Chapter 1 sets the stage with clarifying some of the terminology used. It also introduces what I understand as a holistic view of managing the flow of knowledge. At the end of the chapter the main case study used in the book, ToolPool, is introduced.

Chapter 2 discusses a number of elements that are important to see clearly before starting or in the early phase of launching an initiative. What should the support organization look like? What are some of the key questions you need to ask before you start?

Chapter 3 takes a closer look at a number of roles that participants will or should play over the lifetime of an initiative.

Chapter 4 discusses passionate initiative support, culture, and trust and how they influence the success of enhancing the knowledge flow.

Chapter 5 goes deeper into some of the main drivers for success. How can you use marketing not only to get started but to sustain an initiative? What are some of the ways to grow an initiative and keep your participants motivated to contribute to it?

Chapter 6 takes a different angle by looking at barriers that might be hindering the flow of knowledge and giving a range of examples and solutions on how it might be possible to reduce those barriers.

Chapter 7 looks at the role of technology and how too much focus on technology will endanger your initiative. It also introduces new ways to look at technology and its role within the knowledge flow.

Chapter 8 offers some lessons learned around measuring your initiative. How should you measure? What are some of the key indicators you might want to use? It also looks at the limits of measuring and why you should be very careful with using measures as drivers.

Chapter 9 attempts a cautious look into the future. What are some of the platforms that will play a role in how people share their knowledge in the years to come? Based on the role that Web 2.0 technologies and related processes play, some trends are discussed.

Chapter 10 concludes with some final thoughts and a pointer to a place where further discussion might happen.

At the end of the book you will find Appendix A: Key Success Factors. This list collects the main clarifications and specificactions to take into account in order to tackle issues that you encounter within areas like marketing, barriers, measuring, and motivation.

As the areas of knowledge flow management are steadily evolving, the chapters in this book can only cover a subset of all the issues you might encounter on your way to master the knowledge flow in your organization. But most of the principles are general enough to be applied even after technology has evolved and social processes have changed. The key is to keep a holistic view, spend considerable and persistent effort to manage all those aspects that are directly connected to human behavior, and see technology as the enabler but not as the sole solution.

Acknowledgments

The actual writing of the book was only a very small part of developing the ideas behind it. It was a much longer process, and many people have contributed over the years. The first person I want to thank is Gloria Miller, my manager back in 1997, who gave me the freedom to pursue this somewhat unusual project I had in mind. A lot of credit for developing a “knowledge management” mind goes to those leading and participating in the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management. During my participation from 1999 to 2003, I was fortunate to meet David Snowden, Eric Lesser, Mike Fontaine, Rob Cross, Don Cohen, Steven Denning, and many others. Larry Prusak’s great story-filled keynotes were highlights during that time, lighting my own passion for the topic. In combination with the numerous discussions I had with those from other organizations (ranging from the U.S. Army to the World Bank), I always returned home filled with the ideas and energy needed to push forward on my own initiatives. If you get started with knowledge management, you can easily feel somewhat isolated. So reaching out to experts outside your own organization is very important.

The next group that gave me that type of inspiration was the Harvard Learning Innovation Laboratory (LILA). Special thanks go to David Perkins and Daniel Wilson, who invited me to LILA and led such an exceptional group of practitioners and researchers. Robin Athey, Brigitte Lippmann, Carlota Vollhardt, Fred Vail, Peter Engström, Nat Welch, and Mike Prevou are only a few of those to whom I am very thankful for ideas and feedback. I also met Etienne Wenger again at LILA after listening to him at what I consider my first real knowledge management presentation at a Chicago conference in 1998. It was great to be able to personally discuss it with him at LILA meetings. I want to thank Tom Davenport for inviting me to the Babson Working Knowledge Research Center, where I met a group of people from whom I learned so much. At Babson I was able to reconnect with Larry Prusak and a number of the IKM members; I also met a range of very inspiring knowledge management thinkers, like Book Manville.

In the last few years I connected with knowledge management groups in Germany and Switzerland. Thanks for some great discussions to Gerold Riempp, Stefan Smolnik, and Reimar Palte from the European Business School and to Beat Knechtli, Olivier Zaech, and Pavel Kraus from the Swiss Knowledge Management forum.

A special thanks goes to my team at SAS, who helped me get the main initiatives off the ground and give their input and feedback: Britta Lerch, Ana Lopez-Echevarria, Victoria Vaca, Paul Higgins, Kerstin Lambert, Anja Häse, Nic Handschuh, Stephanie Salomo, Meike Kalkowsky, and Daniel Kummer. My frequent discussions with Louise Smith, our knowledge manager for the Asia-Pacific region, have been invaluable over the years. Curt Yeo in the United States played a similar role for some time. I also want to thank my dear friend Thomas Bock, who not only provided me with a “sales view” but also served as a great devil’s advocate at many occasions.

Especially when writing a book as a single author, it is very important to have good reviewers. A big thank-you for great comments goes to Hannu Ritvanen, Rasmus Staerke, David Biesack, Dee Stribling, and others. Thank you to Holger Ideler for offering me a banking perspective on the topic in a number of pizza sessions here in Zürich. As I am not a native English speaker, John Kohl’s book The Global English Style Guide proved to be very useful.

Thank you to Stacey Hamilton, my editor at SAS, who led me very smoothly through this adventure of writing my first book and provided such a great interface to Wiley, the publisher. Thanks to all those at Wiley who made it happen. I am also grateful to Scott Isaacs for supporting the idea of the book and giving me the opportunity to start the project.

Last but not least, a really big thank-you goes to my family. My wife, Inge, not only allowed me to vanish weekend after weekend and even holiday time behind the Mac but also gave a lot of moral support over all those years. And my college-age daughters, Alexandra and Franziska, did the same via video-calls from a number of places around Europe.

CHAPTER 1

The Human Touch

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

—Plutarch, AD 46-120, Greek essayist

Sydney, Australia: Brian, a young programmer who recently started with the company, opens up the contribution form for ToolPool, a global system for sharing technical knowledge. He enters some text describing a program he recently wrote based on his knowledge of a programming language he had learned at the university. His program extends one of the core company products in a smart and unusual way.

Madrid, Spain: Isabel, an experienced consultant, is working on a project at a Spanish bank, where she faces an interesting requirement. She visits ToolPool and after a quick search finds and downloads Brian’s program, as it will help fulfill the requirement quickly and elegantly. After using it, she goes back to ToolPool and rates Brian’s entry with five stars and adds a comment about how much it helped her.

Cary, North Carolina, United States: Mary, the development manager for the product that Brian extended, scans the Monday morning e-mail from ToolPool, finds Brian’s program, and adds a link to the wiki page used for planning the next release of the product.

These are examples of what has been known as knowledge management. Unfortunately, very often the analysis of this situation would now go on to talk about what ToolPool is, what technology it was built on, how much it cost to implement it, and how many information technology (IT) people are currently needed to run it.

But what is really happening here is not that Brian’s knowledge is being managed. If anything is managed in this process, it is the flow of Brian’s knowledge to other relevant parts of the organization. And ToolPool is only one way that this could have happened. Equally, it could have been that Isabel met Brian at an international technical workgroup and found out about his program.

This book is not about knowledge management technology. It is about ways to influence organizational knowledge flow. Technology does play a role as an enabler, and I mention aspects of it, but the focus is on the human side of making knowledge sharing work. How can you motivate people to share their knowledge, if at all? How can you ensure they will continue to participate? What type of incentives should you use? What are some of the barriers inhibiting the flow that you will have to overcome? What can you do to retain the knowledge that exists only in the minds of those leaving your organization?

While I include examples and case studies from an IT company, many of the principles equally apply to any type or form of organization, whether a government agency, a hospital, or a loose group of physiotherapists exchanging their knowledge in some organized fashion. So the word organization is to be seen as wider than a single legal entity or company.

WHY THIS BOOK?

If you currently search for books on knowledge management (KM),1 you will find a lot of them out there. Amazon.com returns about 16,000 results when you search for the combined term. These books range from highly academic ones to hands-on manuals. So why would you need another one? Why did I even consider writing one with all that coverage out there?

Over the years, I have had many discussions on the topic of knowledge sharing and how to make it work in an organization. When I started my first knowledge exchange initiative (ToolPool) back in 1997, it was not specifically labeled knowledge management, but after a couple more years and through my involvement with the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management (IKM), it became clear that what we were doing would fit into one of the definitions of KM.

ToolPool, this first initiative, is used as the main case study in the book. It is still running very strongly with global participation internally to SAS (the business analytics company for which I work). At almost 13 years, it might be one of the longest-running KM initiatives. By definition, ToolPool is about technical knowledge, but the principles that make it work are highly nontechnical, as you will see. The contrast of technical and nontechnical elements makes it quite suitable as an example.

ToolPool is only one out of a whole range of different KM initiatives, but it was the major experimentation playground for many years. It was the one to observe, adapt, and analyze. ToolPool has a clear focus on sharing technical tips, tricks, tools, and program code. That topical focus made it easier to deduce learnings and lessons learned from it than from a big-bang all-encompassing knowledge base. As it turns out, this focus is already one of its key success factors. As discussed in Chapter 2, big-bang approaches will have a harder time surviving.

Learning through experimentation was paired with learning through interaction with those responsible in other organizations for getting knowledge to flow. Many insights of what works and what does not came through interaction with others, such as colleagues or those whom I met at external organizations, such as the IKM, the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory, or the Babson Working Knowledge program. Key notes from KM pioneers such as Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport influenced my thinking as much as break, lunch, and dinner conversations during those events or with colleagues at SAS.

Most of the time it was not about getting tips but sharing experiences and the reaction and discussion that followed. In one case, I was not sure whether I should add ratings to contributions and discussed some of my thoughts around it. It would have been almost impossible to really share everything I had on my mind about the issue, as it included a considerable amount of context that was tacit and only in my head.

As always with like-minded people, the learning was reciprocal. I shared key information that others would integrate into their context to come to a new level of understanding, and I received feedback that would take my thinking to the next level and help me realize better strategies to approach complex issues. In the case of ratings, I concluded that they would make sense to explore as long as I created the right environment and made them very practical.

I think it is very important to draw the line between knowledge and information. Knowledge is connected to all the prior experiences and exists only in the context of the mind. It cannot be managed. What can be managed are ways to enable the flow of that knowledge to others. What can be passed is information (data in context), not knowledge.

I was inspired to put my ideas on knowledge sharing into a book by those who experienced the passion that I developed for the topic, whenever I got into one of the frequent discussions around it.2 And some specifically suggested sharing my recent ideas around the flow of knowledge to a wider audience by publishing them.

Adding to my motivation to write this book was the realization that KM as an organizational discipline has been around for almost two decades, is still acknowledged to be a key factor for organizational success in the future, but often just does not work. A pattern seems to be that those driving it are sometimes doing so based on incorrect assumptions.

Reading and scanning books, articles, or just Twitter messages on KM, I also felt a growing frustration that too much of what has been written focuses on technology. Typically authors talk about “KM Systems” as if you could manage knowledge in a system. And if you look closely, authors frequently mix the words knowledge and information as if they were synonyms. Often it seems that technology is the only part the authors really understand very well. Other topics that are much closer related to humans are largely neglected. While the author might acknowledge that humans play a central role in KM, often the focus remains on technology.

It is a little bit as if you have a hammer in your hand and then suddenly everything looks like a nail to you. But without understanding and acknowledging the basic difference between the concepts of knowledge and information, you are very likely to use a hammer when you need a razor-sharp knife. In the best case, you just do not get the full benefits from your initiative; in the worst case, you are actually wasting huge amounts of money doing so.

So what is different about this book? I am raising the question of why, with so much expertise (and thousands of books) on the topic, there are still many organizations that struggle with KM. Why can they not make it work? Why is KM not embedded into the everyday practice of every organization if it is so strategic? Why does almost everybody that I talk to tell me that their organization is struggling with making use of existing knowledge? Why is it so hard? I am not claiming that at SAS we have solved all these issues, but we are definitely ahead of the game in many respects.

This book provides some answers to those questions. It might not give you solutions to all potential problems, but it will provide some important reasons why KM might have not worked in your organization and help you with some proven ideas that will make success a lot more likely going forward. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit,3 knowledge management is one of the five key trends that will determine competitiveness in the coming decade. The other four trends are globalization, demographics, atomization, and personalization.

Some of the ideas and lessons presented here might prove priceless, as they will help you avoid some simple traps and focus on elements to improve the organizational knowledge flow that you might not have thought of or tried in the past.

The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by introducing some terms and basic principles to be discussed later in the book.

I do not provide an extensive set of models or research. Enough books out there cover that.4 The next chapters contain pragmatic tips and tricks extracted from real-life experiences. The information comes from the front, where initiatives really worked and produced extensive value. The stories and examples presented here come from initiatives that survived the critical starting stages and are continuing to prove themselves after more than a decade.

To set a base-level understanding, I start out with a short discussion of the term knowledge management. You will notice that the title of the book contains the term Knowledge Flow instead of Knowledge Management. I strongly believe that one of the main reasons why KM projects fail is somewhat due to the use of the term knowledge management and the misunderstanding it creates in the mind of stakeholders. The approaches that people take are often guided, or should I say misguided, by starting out with the wrong frame of mind.

Who is the intended audience for this book? For one, it is aimed at those who have been challenged to bring a new organizational knowledge management program to success or revive an existing underperforming one. The stakeholders might be from IT, from a human resources function, from a business unit, or in a strategic role already focused on knowledge like a chief knowledge officer. They might be line function or sponsoring stakeholders like a chief information officer or the head of personnel.

Because executive buy-in and leadership is a major success factor in driving organizational knowledge flows, it is also important that chief executive officers (CEOs) have the proper understanding as they get involved with strategies. After all, the CEOs are the ones who put the topic high on the future agendas of their organizations.

Knowledge management in the current understanding is often seen as a very technical, software-oriented area, and some people see it as relevant for high-tech organizations only, exclusively for those knowledge workers who spend most of their time online.

With the wider view I am taking, I claim that managing knowledge flows is something that can be applied and used in almost any type of organization. If you detach yourself from the idea that it is about storing “knowledge” in a database, you will see that it is applicable to you, even if you work in an environment that sees itself as being highly nontechnical. Some principles will even work for a group of physiotherapists sharing their experiences in various ways, such as in workshops, expert circles, and online forums.

TERMINOLOGY AND DEFINITIONS

About 15 years ago, the term knowledge management was starting to be used in organizational environments, and although I had been dealing with activities that would fit a number of the many KM definitions, we did not call it that at the very start. The first initiatives around exchange of knowledge at SAS were dubbed “supporting sharing of what people know”; we did not use the term knowledge management until about 1998. Out in the industry the term had quickly been adopted by management consultants and certain software organizations. Suddenly a “database” was a “knowledge base,” and any product only remotely connected to helping with influencing the flow of knowledge was given that new “cool” label.

But the hype created a number of issues with the term, and in the end the term got “burned” to a certain degree. The problem was that knowledge is a wide concept, so it was easy to drop anything into it. But using a term for something too unspecific has a number of effects—for instance:

• Everybody makes up their own definition of it.

• It ends up encompassing elements that were never meant to be covered.

• It creates a wrong sense of understanding, and people will use unsuitable approaches to solve issues connected with it.

This is precisely what happened with the term knowledge management . So let us have a look at the term in more detail.

First, there is a problem with those two words in combination. If you take a puristic view, it describes something impossible. As Larry Prusak and other KM experts have pointed out, knowledge is actually connected to people, it cannot be managed outside of people’s heads. It exists only in the context of prior human experience. So correctly spoken, it is not possible to “manage” that knowledge.5

Second, knowledge is actually tacit (implicit) by nature. Nonaka and Takeuchi had talked in their SECI model about ways of externalizing knowledge,6 but still, once it is outside of people’s heads, it is mere information, not knowledge anymore. It actually needs another human being to interpret, internalize, connect, and apply it to actually become knowledge again. Along those same lines, it is not possible to “transfer knowledge,” at least not in the direct sense of transferring an entity from one person to another. What actually happens is that person A shares some information, which is then used by person B and combined with prior (tacit) knowledge and experiences to create new knowledge. The knowledge is never transferred directly, as that would indicate that it is moving unmodified. It will always change, however. The knowledge that person A had while sharing information and experiences might be somewhat similar to what person B recreates out of that shared information, but it will always be different, because the framework and the context of prior knowledge and experiences will be different. The word transfer indicates the movement of an entity, but that is definitely not what is happening.

A third situation where the word knowledge is actually out of place is in the connection with systems, or knowledge bases. The use of the word in that context seems to indicate that knowledge can be stored outside of humans, for example, in a computer system.

One could argue the difference is marginal, but in my mind the fact that knowledge is often seen as an entity that is external to human beings is the number-one reason that so-called knowledge management projects have failed. It easily leads to people using the terms knowledge, information, and sometimes even data as synonyms.

Based on the previous discussions, you can very easily spot articles or books that talk about knowledge management without the proper understanding. I usually stop reading once I find that authors are mixing the terms information and knowledge as if they were the same thing. For me that is a clear indication that they do not understand what knowledge is. Try it for yourself: The next time a proclaimed KM expert mixes the terms interchangeably in the introduction to an article, a blog entry, or even a book, I advise you to be careful with the rest of it.

Along the same lines, terms like knowledge management software or knowledge management vendor