The New Edge in Knowledge E-Book

Carla O'Dell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 355

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The best thinking and actions in the fast-moving arena of collaboration and knowledge management The New Edge in Knowledge captures the most practical and innovative practices to ensure organizations have the knowledge they need in the future and, more importantly, the ability to connect the dots and use knowledge to succeed today. * Build or retrofit your organization for new ways of working and collaboration by using knowledge management * Adapt to today's most popular ways to collaborate such as social networking * Overcome organization silos, knowledge hoarding and "not invented here" resistance * Take advantage of emerging technologies and mobile devices to build networks and share knowledge * Identify what can be learned from Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to make firms and people smarter, stronger and faster Straightforward and easy-to-follow, this is the resource you'll turn to again and again to get-and stay-in the know. Plus, the book is filled with real-world examples - the case studies and snapshots of how best practice companies are achieving success with knowledge management.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Endorsements

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1 Positioning Knowledge Management for the Future

What Is Knowledge Management?

KM in a New Context

Primary Directives

Showcasing KM Leaders

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 2 A Call to Action

Determine the Value Proposition

Identify Critical Knowledge

Locate Your Critical Knowledge

How Knowledge Should Flow

Getting Buy-In

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 3 Knowledge Management Strategy and Business Case

A Framework for KM Strategy Development

The Business Case for KM

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 4 Selecting and Designing Knowledge Management Approaches

A Portfolio of Approaches

Selecting KM Approaches

Designing a KM Approach

What Can Go Wrong

Portfolio Example: Retaining Critical Knowledge

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 5 Proven Knowledge Management Approaches

Communities of Practice

Lessons Learned

Transfer of Best Practices

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 6 Emerging Knowledge Management Approaches

The Promise of Social Computing

Revealing New Facets of Information

The New Generation of Self-Service: The Digital Hub

The Digital Hub at Work

Challenges and Change Management

Our Recommendations

Case Examples

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 7 Working Social Networking

Guidelines for Enterprise Social Networking

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 8 Governance, Roles, and Funding

Governance Group

KM Core Group

KM Design Teams

Investing in KM

Balancing Corporate and Business-Unit Funding

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 9 Building a Knowledge-Sharing Culture

Lead by Example

Brand Aggressively

Make KM Fun

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 10 Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management

A Portfolio of Measures

Measuring across the Levels of Maturity

The Power of Analytics

A KM Measurement System

Closing Comments

CHAPTER 11 Make Best Practices Your Practices

Above and In the Flow

Other Principles

So What Do You Do Monday Morning?

Appendix: Case Studies

ConocoPhillips

Fluor

IBM

MITRE

References

About the Authors

About APQC

Index

What others are saying about

The New Edge in Knowledge

“Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert have written an amazingly down to earth, useful and practical book on knowledge management and its importance to modern business. Starting with the distinction between information and knowledge, they provide a viewpoint that leaves IT in the dust. Read it to prepare for tomorrow’s world!”

—A. Gary Shilling, President, A. Gary Shilling & Co., Inc.

“A practical business approach to knowledge management, this book covers KM’s value proposition for any organization, provides proven strategies and approaches to make it work, shares how to measure KM’s impact, and illustrates high level knowledge sharing with wonderful case studies. Well done!”

—Jane Dysart, Conference Chair, KMWorld, and Partner, Dysart & Jones Associates

“This book is a tour de force in the field of knowledge management. Read every single page and learn about best practices from the leading firms around the world. All of this and more from the company that leads the way in the field: APQC. I highly recommend it for your bookshelf.”

—Dr. Nick Bontis, Director, Institute for Intellectual Capital Research

“Food for thought from two of the pioneers. Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert have been in the trenches with many of the organizations that have succeeded in leveraging KM for business benefit. They recognized early the symbiotic relationship between knowledge flow and work flow and have guided practitioners in the quest to optimize and streamline both.”

—Reid Smith, Enterprise Content Management Director, Marathon Oil Company

“Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert take knowledge management from vague idea to strategic enabler. In so doing, they clear up not only the whats, but the whys and the hows. This book establishes knowledge management as an organizational discipline. The authors offer a straightforward set of execution steps, coaching readers on how to launch their own knowledge management programs in a deliberate and rigorous way.”

—Jill Dyché, Partner and Co-Founder, Baseline Consulting; Author of Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

“The authors and APQC have put together an excellent ‘how to’ manual for Knowledge Management (KM) that can benefit any organization, from those experienced in KM to those just starting. The authors have taken their years of experience and excellence in this field and written a masterful introduction and design manual that incorporates industry best- practices and alerts readers to the pitfalls they are likely to encounter. This book needs to be in the hands of every KM professional and corporate senior leader.”

—Ralph Soule, a member of the U.S. Navy

Copyright © 2011 by American Productivity & Quality Center. 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:

O’Dell, Carla S.

 The new edge in knowledge : how knowledge management is changing the way we do business / Carla O’Dell, Cindy Hubert.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-470-91739-8 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-01516-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-01517-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-01518-6, (ebk)

 1. Knowledge management. 2. Organizational learning. 3. Information resources management. 4. Organizational effectiveness. I. Hubert, Cindy. II. Title.

HD30.2.O34 2011

658.4'038–dc22

2010045245

To our husbands, families, and APQC family for going the distance with us every time.

Foreword

I first ran into Carla O’Dell in the mid-1990s at a remarkable conference held at the University of California at Berkeley. The conference was to celebrate the first appointment of a Xerox Distinguished Professorship in Knowledge and to honor the first holder of that chair, Ikujiro Nonaka. There were about 30 participants, academics, and practitioners, who were all pioneers in this burgeoning movement to better understand how knowledge works in organizations.

Almost all of those participants are still involved in this invisible college of knowledge researchers, and some of the leading actors in this ongoing drama remain Carla O’Dell and her colleagues at the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). Let’s look at some of the main principles focused on knowledge management back in those beginning days.

Knowledge is a fixed pool, a collection of resources that can be measured and used by standard management techniques.Technology is the key tool to unlock the value of this resource. The more technology, the better.Individuals are the critical unit of analysis in working with knowledge—the more productive the individual, the more knowledge is being used.

It is now clear in hindsight that these principles were developed with information in mind, not knowledge, and that they were not at all suitable to working with such an elusive intangible. It is because of these ideas that many knowledge management efforts ran into problems and that the whole subject began to fade in the minds of busy executives.

However, it didn’t die out at all. In fact, it was undergoing a resurgence as I was writing this in 2010. And one of the reasons is the outstanding research and communication of that research by APQC. Their work is grounded, is focused on the actual experience of workers and managers trying to work with knowledge, and conveys findings in clear and easily absorbable forms. Their yearly conference is one of the best places on Earth to learn what is happening in the field—direct from those rare birds, the reflective practitioners.

Based on this work and other efforts around the world, we now know quite different things about working with knowledge (in contrast to information).

Knowledge is better understood as a flow. It is highly dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to measure or even to manage. Working with it entails new techniques that we are still learning about.Although technology surely has its place, working with knowledge is primarily a human activity needing human organization and understanding.Knowledge in organizations is profoundly social and best managed in groups, networks, communities, and practices.

I can go on about all we have learned in the days since that Berkeley conference. But perhaps it is enough to stop here and salute Carla and her esteemed coworkers at APQC, who have steadfastly carried forth the mission of understanding knowledge as the critical thing that it is for organizational as well as human progress.

—Larry Prusak, founder and executive director of the Institute for Knowledge Management

Preface

Knowledge management has come of age, and it is now time to reap the benefits. Organizations that figured out how to secure meaningful value from helping people share knowledge are thrilled with their results and can’t imagine working any other way. How else would their far-flung teams collaborate? How else would content and knowledge be shared just in time, with just enough detail, and just for the employee or team seeking it? Some organizations have built their entire business models around their capability to manage and share knowledge. They can’t compete without it.

This book tells you how leading organizations achieve great results in knowledge management, or KM, and provides the strategic principles to help you do the same in your organization. Nonprofit research firm APQC has almost 20 years of hands-on experience in KM benchmarking, best practices, and implementation with the best organizations in the world. This book shares what we have learned while leading APQC’s efforts and directs you to even more tools and resources.

KM’s New Playing Field

Many recent changes in the way we do business and communicate in general have exciting implications for KM. Even companies and governments with mature KM programs have adjusted their strategy for these game-changing trends.

The digital world has begun to reshape KM. Online social networking has shaken up traditional KM. Although new technologies always present new challenges, no KM function can ignore this opportunity. Enterprise 2.0 tools may be the best thing to happen to KM since the water cooler.In their personal lives and on the job, employees have become digitally immersed. Employees of all ages expect more engagement and access to information and want work processes that reflect the ease with which they communicate outside of work.Smart phones and other mobile devices now allow us to communicate and share any place, any time, and with anyone. KM can take advantage of these always-on and always-on-you devices to make content available to employees at their most teachable moment.A huge demographic is now leaving the work force. As baby boomers exit the playing field, their absence puts a greater need on incoming employees to get up to speed quickly.

These societal shifts have changed the power dynamics for how all organizations operate. An increasingly savvy workforce is dictating how and when they need information, and organizations face tremendous opportunities to turn individual employees’ knowledge into organizational intellectual assets.

Employees need vivid, relevant examples and practical advice for everyday work. Executives need a tangible and substantial return on investment. And organizations need to respond to the forces at work and create new approaches. In this new environment, KM is an absolutely necessary core business practice to face the competition. With it, employers can reasonably expect better knowledge-based decisions from their workforce.

Making the Right Game Plan

This book addresses the core strategic issues in making KM successful. We’re not just throwing around the term strategic; let us emphatically state: This book provides a strategic road map for an enterprise KM program. We share APQC’s vast body of knowledge from hundreds of research and advisory efforts. In addition to providing practical and proven advice, we help you build a business case using examples from Accenture, ConocoPhillips, Fluor, IBM Global Business Services, MITRE, Petrobras, Schlumberger, the U.S. Department of State, and many others we have been privileged to work with.

Chapter 1, “Positioning Knowledge Management for the Future,” provides the foundation for our discussion of key strategic concerns in KM, as well as detailing KM program objectives and new forces in the KM arena. It also introduces a framework to guide your enterprise KM program design efforts.

Chapter 2, “A Call to Action,” details how to identify and focus attention on the value proposition and critical knowledge and then provide tools to map and understand that knowledge.

Chapter 3, “Knowledge Management Strategy and Business Case,” focuses on the KM program strategy. We show you how to build the business case for enterprise KM to address strategic objectives. We also review how critical knowledge must flow and how a KM program matures.

Chapter 4, “Selecting and Designing Knowledge Management Approaches,” describes the primary categories of KM approaches and provides tools, questions, design principles, and key concerns in selecting the right portfolio of approaches. We also explain how to incorporate these approaches into employees’ work flow.

Chapter 5, “Proven Knowledge Management Approaches,” examines the characteristics, benefits, challenges, and critical success factors for implementing proven approaches such as communities of practice.

Chapter 6, “Emerging Knowledge Management Approaches,” examines the promise of Web 2.0 tools and details KM approaches such as wikis, microblogs, social bookmarking, and tagging. We also address best-practice characteristics, measurement tools, and unique challenges posed by these new opportunities.

Chapter 7, “Working Social Networking,” further dives into Web 2.0 tools by focusing on the potential of enterprise social networking and provides cautions and guidelines for harnessing the exciting possibilities for KM, including an in-depth discussion of expertise location.

Chapter 8, “Governance, Roles, and Funding,” lays out the people infrastructure for an enterprise KM program. We examine strategic concerns surrounding your KM program governance model, core roles, staffing numbers, and funding concerns.

Chapter 9, “Building a Knowledge-Sharing Culture,” focuses on the all-important people issues and executive involvement. It provides branding and collaboration advice, a communication strategy template, communication plan discussion points, recognition approaches, and advice for engaging employees.

Chapter 10, “Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management,” explains how to address common measurement needs with measures by KM program maturity level, a measurement model and alignment worksheet, analytics, and a reporting structure.

Chapter 11, “Make Best Practices Your Practices,” explains how to keep a strategic focus for your KM program as change management and implementation demands evolve. Bringing together the guiding principles we detail throughout the book, we focus on how to ensure your KM program continues to mature and improve.

The Appendix, “Case Studies,” chronicles four leading organizations with outstanding enterprise KM programs.

Each chapter details the pertinent strategic concerns and then directs you to key implementation resources available online at www.newedgeinknowledge.com.

Who Should Step Up to the Plate?

Whether you are just starting with KM, starting over, or trying to figure out the next big thing, this book could save you a lot of time and money. We tackle the pressing issues in KM today, keeping in mind the enduring principles and the emerging opportunities to successfully manage knowledge.

The perspectives and robust methodologies in this book can help those just getting started as well as those committed to taking their KM programs to world-class levels.

Many executives are dismayed by the amount of money they spend on KM technology. Information moves around, but what happens to knowledge? Are people smarter? Making better decisions? Selling more? Connecting the dots? Not without a KM strategy that works. This book can help executives spend KM dollars more wisely and understand their role in creating an organization that thrives on its knowledge.KM champions and professionals charged with designing and implementing KM programs want help getting funding, getting started, and getting results. This book can help these practitioners create a solid business case for enterprise KM, as well as engage participants. Most importantly, our book provides a practical and strategic approach to translate individual knowledge into action.

This book is not a guide for implementing communities of practice or localized efforts. With APQC, we have written such guides and have 28 best practices reports, numerous books, and more than 100 detailed case studies of organizations with best practices in KM. Instead, this book is a strategic road map. Many organizations have inefficient and disparate local efforts to manage knowledge; others have repeatedly made unsuccessful organization-wide KM efforts, wasting precious funding and goodwill. And still, some organizations are just starting to try to initiate KM efforts. This book addresses how all such organizations can implement an organization-wide KM strategy that works. The end result is a robust and steadfast enterprise KM program.

Keep in mind that KM has had its ups and downs. At various times, pundits have declared KM dead or a failure. A lot of IT vendors went belly-up in the dot-com bust. They hyped their tools as synonymous with KM, which, of course, they weren’t. But organizations still need to get information and knowledge from the employees who have it to those who need it. Those needs never went away. Those needs continue to grow as organizations become more global.

APQC never stopped working in KM. Our research and practice is booming, and our members achieve great results and build deep competency. Our goal is to help everyone, including you, operate at the highest level of KM maturity and results.

Acknowledgments

We thank APQC and our colleagues, families, and friends for allowing us the time to write. Quiet time for dialogue and deep reflection are hard to come by. With their help, writing this book afforded us that.

The best ideas in this book came through collaboration, and we had fun working with each other. We would have nothing to write about without our APQC members and customers and the best-practices organizations we have studied and worked with. You will meet some of them in this book. We treasure the relationships and the shared learning we have with each of them. And we extend a special thanks to the members of our KM Advanced Working Group, who keep us on the cutting edge of KM:

Baker Hughes Inc.IBM Global Business ServicesMarathon Oil CorporationPetrobrasResearch in Motion Ltd.SAPSingapore Armed ForcesState Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance CompanyU.S. Navy Carrier Team OneU.S. Army Armament Research, Development, and Engineering Center (ARDEC)

And we thank representatives from the four primary organizations featured in the book for their generosity in sharing their KM experiences over the years with us and with hundreds of APQC members through site visits and case studies. These representatives include: Dan Ranta, Yvonne Myles, and their marvelous teammates at ConocoPhillips; John McQuary, Tara Keithley, and their stellar team at Fluor; Bryant Clevenger, Ruth McLenaghan, and Isabel Dewey leading the way in IBM Global Business Services; and Jean Tatalias and Marcie Zaharee, who make sure MITRE knows what (and who) it knows.

Without the masterful hand of our APQC editor and project manager, Paige Leavitt, this book could have been just a set of models, reflections, and anecdotes rather than an attempt to transfer our knowledge. We can’t thank her enough.

And we give a special thanks to members of our APQC KM team: David Bullinger, Chris Gardner, Jim Lee, Darcy Lemons, Janis Mecklenburg, Lauren Trees, Jeff Varney, Erin Williams, and Angelica Wurth. They make us and our customers all look good.

CHAPTER 1

Positioning Knowledge Management for the Future

In 2000, Brad Anderson, then president of electronics retailer Best Buy, called the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) for help. Wal-Mart, Target, and other discount retailers were hotly pursuing Best Buy’s customers. Anderson wanted Best Buy to exploit the knowledge gained from its head start selling digital electronics. If selling electronics became solely a commodity business, then Best Buy might not win. But Brad knew that Best Buy’s customers were struggling to keep up with the explosion of digital technology and would value knowledgeable guidance from the company’s sales employees. Brad had just read our book If Only We Knew What We Know (Grayson and O’Dell 1998) and called APQC to see if knowledge management (KM) could help.

Fast forward to 2010: Best Buy has grown from 400 to 1,400 stores in the United States and Canada, with another 2,600 stores around the world, and from $6 billion to $50 billion in annual sales (DailyFinance 2010). More impressively, Best Buy continues to outperform its competitors in revenues and margins.

Of course, KM is only a part of the reason; but if you ask the folks at Best Buy, they will tell you the ability to share what they know and act on it has been a large part of their success. The early communities of practice that started in 2000 to share knowledge across the stores set the stage for the matrix of knowledge-sharing approaches the organization has today.

Everyone competes on how much they know. Companies lose sales, governments lose battles (especially with terrorists), and people lose jobs when they don’t have the strategy and means to connect the dots. But there’s a clear solution.

Although you can’t manage the knowledge in people’s heads, you can capture, enable, and transfer knowledge and best practices.

What Is Knowledge Management?

From a practical perspective, we define knowledge as information in action. Until people take information and use it, it isn’t knowledge. In a business context, knowledge is what employees know about their customers, one another, products, processes, mistakes, and successes, whether that knowledge is tacit or explicit.

APQC defines knowledge management as a systematic effort to enable information and knowledge to grow, flow, and create value. The discipline is about creating and managing the processes to get the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and help people share and act on information in order to improve organizational performance.

Organizations implement a KM program to institutionalize and promote knowledge-sharing practices. An enterprise KM program is usually a centralized, organization-wide effort to standardize and excel in KM. Enterprise does not have to be the entire corporation. Enterprise may refer to a business entity that is a meaningful cost or revenue center performing work supporting a defined region of customers. Examples include divisions such as IBM Global Business Services and government agencies such as the Department of State or the U.S. Navy. Within such a program, organizations implement KM approaches such as communities of practice, expertise location systems, and wikis to formalize and enable knowledge sharing. KM activities, on the other hand, are all of the things KM professionals do to support the program and its approaches, such as planning and design, change management, communication, training, and budgeting. Through these activities and approaches, KM programs should:

Connect employees to one another to help them excel at their jobsConnect employees to knowledge assets (just enough, just in time, and just for them)Connect those with experience or know-how with those who need it

These actions will accelerate the rate of learning; cut down the risks of not knowing and repeating mistakes; and retain knowledge assets when people move, leave, or retire.

This all requires strategy. To enable KM to succeed in your organization, you will need a well-thought-out strategy. You can waste a lot of money, time, and goodwill by implementing KM approaches before you’ve determined how your organization will overcome silos, knowledge hoarding, and “not invented here” resistance. You can waste even more of your organization’s resources by simply adopting an information technology (IT) tool and calling it a KM program. (Technology alone will not ensure engagement and value.) Let us help you position KM in the sweet spot of knowledge and business strategy. We know what works.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

Explicit knowledge (also known as formal or codified knowledge) comes in the form of documents, formulas, contracts, process diagrams, manuals, and so on. Explicit knowledge may not be useful without the context provided by experience.

Tacit knowledge (also known as informal or uncodified knowledge), by contrast, is what you know or believe from experience. It can be found in interactions with employees and customers. Tacit knowledge is hard to catalog, highly experiential, difficult to document, and ephemeral. It is also the basis for judgment and informed action.

KM in a New Context

One of us—Carla—wrote her first book on how to implement KM, If Only We Knew What We Know, in 1998, when the discipline was less than a decade old (Grayson and O’Dell).

What a difference a decade makes. Witness September 11th, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the rise of China as a superpower, global warming, the near meltdown of the global financial system in 2008 and 2009, and the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and resulting pollution in 2010.

The changes are just as substantial as we edge closer to the realm of KM: rising Internet and broadband access, the explosion of mobile devices and smartphones, the continued rise in virtual work and global teams, the international equalization of competitive prowess and knowledge,1 the decline of readership for the printed word, the rise of digital readership, and on and on.

It would be hard to overstate how profoundly these developments have both challenged and enhanced the promise and practice of KM. KM’s core objectives haven’t changed, but how we accomplish them has. In this section, we zoom in on the forces affecting organizations and KM now and for years to come. We offer advice throughout this book to deal with them.

A Ready User Base

More than 1.8 billion people have access to the Internet (Shirky 2010). As of July 2010, there were more than 500 million Facebook users (Gaudin 2010) with more than 55 million updates a day and 3.5 billion content pieces shared weekly (Giles 2010). With 4 billion mobile phones in use (CIA 2009b), Neilsen expects smartphones to outnumber cell phones by 2011 (Entner 2010).

Force 1: Digital Immersion

We are experiencing the incursion of the Internet and digital technology into almost every aspect of our lives. Wireless connections and mobile devices have made the Internet available from almost anywhere, and ever-increasing bandwidth has enabled the rise of streaming video and other high-impact content. Employees of all ages spend 70, 80, or even 90-plus hours a week in front of laptops and smartphones, conducting a mix of professional and personal business. Expectations of 24/7 connectivity are affecting the way we work and live.

Many people are comforted by the feeling that they’re always getting things done—responding to e-mails in meetings, taking calls in line at the supermarket, and so on. But that feeling may be an illusion.

Are today’s employees as savvy as they appear at multitasking? Not according to Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford University and the director of the Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. His data suggest that even the brightest people are hampered by an unwillingness (or inability) to focus on one thing at a time. Nass and his research team predicted that multitaskers might be good at three things:

1. Filtering. Focusing on what’s relevant while ignoring distractions and extraneous information.

2. Switching. Moving between tasks quickly and getting up to speed with a minimum amount of ramp-up time.

3. Organizing their memories. Transferring information from short-term to long-term memory to ensure that important facts are retained.

But his research results then indicated the opposite: “It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking,” Nass writes. “They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another” (2010).

Even more disturbing, almost all the research participants thought they were good at these aspects of multitasking.

If you are familiar with Lean manufacturing techniques, you know that set-up time does not add value. And when you switch what you are working on, there is set-up time. HP research indicates it can take 15 minutes to fully reset your focus after an interruption (Friedlander 2010). You are not actually multitasking. Instead, you toggle between tasks and lose start-up time every time you switch back. And there is a good possibility that you will forget something before you get back to it.

The findings are clear: While supposedly getting more done in less time through our immersion in digital technology, we are actually working more slowly, absorbing information less effectively, and hampering our capacity for analytic reasoning.

A study by the University of California at Irvine found that the average professional switches between work activities every three minutes and five seconds (Pattison 2008). A similar study involving Microsoft employees reinforced that when employees were interrupted by e-mail or instant messages, it took them an average of 15 minutes to return to more complex mental tasks like computer programming or writing reports. This kind of multitasking decreases productivity while increasing stress and feelings of overload. “When people are switching contexts every [few] minutes, they can’t possibly be thinking deeply,” writes Professor Gloria Mark of the University of California at Irvine (Lohr 2007).

If we don’t have any choice and we’re going to hire (and even encourage) multitaskers, then what kind of KM scaffolding are we going to need to create to get thoughtful work done? We must adapt content and messages to align with employees’ time and attention limitations. For KM, the implications are that:

We should assume employees are multitasking.It isn’t making them perform better or pay attention to everything they see.We shouldn’t design KM approaches that interrupt employees any more than they already are.Even if a piece of information or knowledge is critical to retain, we can’t assume employees will remember it when they need it. It has to be there at the teachable moment.

Force 2: Social Computing

Nearly one-fourth of the world’s more than 1.8 billion Internet users have profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace (Miniwatts 2009). And 75 million are signed up on Twitter (Gaudin 2010). LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals, has more than 70 million users (Rao 2010). Facebook alone will likely exceed 600 million users by 2011. To put this number into perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous after India and China (Giles 2010). Even more staggering, in just one month, Facebook users post more than 3.5 billion pieces of content.

With that much practice, it’s no surprise that employees feel at ease with social networking tools. Social computing, Web 2.0, and the rise of social media are transforming KM. It is so good for KM that if we didn’t have it, then we would have to invent it.

We define social media as Internet technology that allows people to generate content and interact in a way that creates new information and value. Social media becomes social computing when applied to a noncommercial intent among people to share and co-create. Web 2.0 tools are specific social computing technologies that are relatively easy to adopt and master. From these developments come Enterprise 2.0 applications, which tailor social media for business by addressing privacy concerns and helping to align a wealth of internal knowledge and information sources within organizations and thus enable social computing.

A defining feature of social computing is the reliance on the employee—not the organization—to create, share, rate, and consume content. Simply by having the means to do so, each employee can be an author, arbiter, and consumer at once.

A second defining feature of social computing is that the content improves the more people interact with and build on it. Wikis and open innovation sites work best when informed people contribute; ratings are arguably better and more accurate the more people contribute; metatags are more useful the more they are applied; folksonomies can rival corporate taxonomies when many people tag and rate content; and good sites and documents rise to the top of search requests the more often people bookmark them and share those bookmarks.

We believe social computing tools are reinvigorating KM by making it easier for employees to participate in knowledge creation while showing them the value of sharing with an online network of peers. By borrowing ideas from Facebook, organizations have been able to help employees connect across disparate regions. Similarly, sites like Wikipedia have popularized ways to collaborate and co-author content. Since a majority of employees are already familiar with the features and have seen their value, it is easier to build buy-in and may be easier to drive participation.

Many organizations—especially those in government and in highly regulated industries—continue to be extremely concerned with the ramifications of these barrier-crushing applications. For example, standards around trust are relaxing when it comes to the democratization of information and opinion. And social computing is altering the determination of who are experts. But the most pressing concerns surround security and privacy: what stays behind the firewall and what employees actually share with one another and the world at large. KM professionals must find ways to capitalize on the positive aspects of these new technologies while addressing these concerns.

Another key concern is how employees participate. Social computing works when enough people participate. And participation has historically has been the biggest challenge for KM. We see an important, sobering parallel in content contribution:

On Facebook, 80 percent of the content is posted by 20 percent of users.Only one in five Twitter account holders have ever posted anything, and 90 percent of content is posted by 10 percent of the users (Moore 2010).

Keep those statistics in mind when thinking about participation rates for KM approaches using Web 2.0 tools inside your organization. A small percentage of people are the core contributors of content. Even popular social computing approaches require KM professionals to marshal an effective KM strategy and infrastructure to elicit engagement.

Changing Expectations

The Economist reports: “As people become increasingly used to sharing and collaborating outside the workplace, they are coming to expect firms to be more open and collaborative places too. . . . Doing business, after all, boils down to managing a complex web of relationships with customers, suppliers, and others” (2010).

Force 3: Demographics and Dynamics

We could get so caught up in the hype around generational differences at work (which may not be that great) that we may be overlooking the elephant in the room: retirement of the huge baby boomer generation. Many organizations face looming knowledge retention and transfer issues, regardless of industry, annual revenue, or their number of employees.

The retirement of a record 77 million baby boomers has the potential to result in huge losses of critical tacit knowledge, including the loss of organizational and technical knowledge on key processes and competencies. And churn from reorganizations, rapid growth, layoffs, internal redeployments, and new business models for offshoring work require just as much careful identification and transfer of knowledge. We’ve also seen skilled employee shortfalls in key disciplines and time-to-competency issues for those entering the workforce. Employees—especially new hires—face steeper, longer learning curves at the same time that employers are looking for faster revenue and higher productivity.

The scarcity of talent will be a driving force in KM. “Fewer younger people will be working to support a significantly larger older generation in the future,” PricewaterhouseCoopers writes. “Millennials will be a powerful generation of workers” (2007).

Despite the handwringing every generation expresses about the next one, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution every generation has been more productive than the previous one. Innovative technologies along with education and free market models have been the reason. Organizations will also benefit from incoming generations’ increased desire to share knowledge (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2007).

KM needs to adapt to these evolving demographics and power dynamics. We’re just seeing the first wave of a much larger phenomenon. Employees increasingly expect more engagement and information and want to achieve it in the same way they do in their personal lives.

We have one final point about the much-ballyhooed generational differences. Although some differences do exist, some of the behaviors we interpret as generational differences are actually “stage of life” differences. Twenty-something workers have always had different interests and priorities than their fifty-something colleagues.

Force 4: Mobile Devices and Video

The tagline “There’s an app for that” has entered our lexicon, and everyone seems to be perpetually in a “Crackberry” prayer mode or immersed in their iPhone to the exclusion of all else. So what? Smartphones have been around for a relatively long time. There are well-established company policies and precedents for how to manage security; who pays for the device and its text, voice, and data charges; how to ensure the security of information; and how the IT organization can establish, manage, and integrate the whole system.

What are not well established are guidelines for KM professionals to capitalize on this ubiquitous, addictive pocket computer. What is appropriate to share through that tiny screen? How much do employees want to know, and when do they want to know it? What can we learn from RSS, alert systems, and Twitter to communicate with employees?

We also believe the future belongs to streaming video, and KM will benefit. Too expensive until now, cheap digital video is now literally in the hands of millions of people. YouTube and big bandwidth have made video a feasible and desirable medium for millions of average people to teach, learn, and share.

Demands to “show me, don’t tell me” make video far superior to text for communicating something physical (for example, how to open a banana like a monkey). It is also terrific for communicating emotion. Now the buzz is to use it for a wide range of internal communication and not just the annual CEO speech.

Yet many, if not most organizations block access to YouTube. It’s a quixotic effort, considering the sophistication of the personal devices employees have at their disposal. Organizations—and KM programs—would benefit by instead taking advantage of employees’ comfort and familiarity with mobile devices and streaming video. In time, more powerful enterprise applications will be developed for mobile devices and streaming video, which will expand the power of these tools for finding and sharing information.

Is Your KM Program Ready?

The Economist predicts that more than 600 million people will use their phones to tap in to social networks by 2013 (Giles 2010). KM needs to be able to say, “We have an app for that.”

These are some of the major forces at work on KM today. We maintain that KM can help the digitally induced, shrinking-attention-span, socially networked, information overloaded, smartphone-obsessed, and busy knowledge worker of today.

Primary Directives

This leads us to two major directives for any KM program.

Have KM Ready at the Teachable Moment

The term teachable moment refers to a time when an individual is most receptive to learning something (Encarta 2009). It involves the idea that the thing learned at that moment, when the individual is faced with a problem or an opportunity, is more likely to be used and retained than if it comes at another time. Think of teachable moments as windows of opportunity to provide knowledge assets to an employee when they are needed and the employee is most receptive.2 Better decisions and more productive actions result.

KM was born to address the teachable moment.

KM programs can take advantage of emerging technologies and design innovative ways to enable knowledge sharing at these teachable moments, with just enough detail, just in time, and just for that employee.

The nature of teachable moments, however, makes this a challenge. They are somewhat unpredictable and can be fleeting. If employees can’t get an answer to a question when they need it, then they may not ask again. Or they will go with the first answer they find, which may not be the best one. And although sometimes we can orchestrate a teachable moment, this isn’t always the case. In addition, organizations operate more virtually than they have in the past, which reduces the face-to-face opportunities that are such a rich environment for creating and responding to teachable moments.

Manage Knowledge Above and In the Flow of Work

We stumbled across the idea of above and in the work flow with regard to KM in a 2007 post to the Transparent Office blog by Michael Idinopulos, referring to the difficulty of getting people to use wikis. We think it offers a useful framework for being conscious of the kind of KM program you design.

Enabling employees to do their work more easily—by collaborating and capturing and sharing knowledge without an additional burden or interruption on their part—is doing KM in the work flow. Asking employees to stop their work process to move to another mode to reflect, capture, or share is doing KM above the work flow.

Working above the flow isn’t always bad. Even creating a KM strategy is above the work flow of the core lines of business. But working above the flow can be resource-intensive. And if you want employees to step out of their work to support the flow of knowledge, then you will need to explain why and ensure there is an intrinsic or extrinsic payoff.

The trick is to balance above and in the work flow. For example, responding to the teachable moment by definition is in the work flow, but it is still necessary to create the content or access to the content and people, which is an activity above the work flow. That takes resources and is money well spent.