KM Value

Yesterday I introduced Knowledge Management (KM) as a value-addition to a company and the necessary Enterprise Content Management (ECM) which would be the back bone of such a system. Before I get into the weeds, I wanted to step back and clarify why companies find value in KM.

As the United States has progressed, our economy has began to rely more on intellectual capital than manufacturing. Simply, our nation's competitive advantage lies in the minds of our people rather than the manual labor they might perform. In parallel, a company's market value has become increasingly dependent upon the value of its intellectual capital or intangible assets. Intellectual property, patents, certifications, and training have become cornerstones of the modern company because a company's competitive advantage relies on the ability to create and leverage this knowledge. This forms the foundation of modern knowledge management philosophy.This reasoning touches every part of the corporation from human capital management to IT.

 One overwhelming example of the KM impact lies in organizational design. To fully leverage knowledge, a corporation much establish the appropriate KM functions, units and responsibilities within an organization. They must also align the reporting structure to acknowledge key tacit knowledge flows, build cross-functional/office teams, and develop support networks/communities to spawn and catch knowledge. I will be posting more on how companies can take each of these steps in subsequent posts.

The most relevant idea comes alive when you think about a simple case: a key employee departure. In addition to losing the services of this employee, the company also loses:

1. All tacit knowledge the employee has gained
2. All networks the employee has built
3. All explicit knowledge the employee kept personally

The idea of a true knowledge management system would be to introduce systems of redundancy which allow the company to minimize the risk of knowledge loss (in this case) AND to maximize the opportunity of knowledge creation (in other cases). 

The backbone of this ability for a company is a true enterprise content management system which will ensure that (at the very least) all explicit knowledge be kept in house where other can access the data. Such an application could also facilitate knowledge creation by, for instance, allowing employees to find experts within a company by performing enterprise-level searches. (There are some mitigating factors, such as employee privileges, which I will explore in a later post)

I'll continue to visit Knowledge Management throughout this week. If you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to let me know.

You Don't Know Jack: The Titanic, Deck Chairs, and Knowledge Management

According to Wikipedia the definition of knowledge management (KM) is as follows:

[KM] comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

The foundation for KM has been laid in the early 1990s as the market has seen more value in what an organization knows, than what they create. KM has thus been garnering more and more attention from management academics and corporations ever since.
There are generally two types of knowledge within an organization: tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the type of knowledge which is hard to pass one, the internal store of information which make it nearly impossible to become a great master of an art without studying beneath one for years. Explicit knowledge pertains to all of the information which can be written down and expressed easily through communication, i.e. the location of Arizona.


In a similar vein, it is important not only to capture information, but to know the location of your knowledge. In large organizations (or even smaller ones) there can be many cracks through which vital information seeps, such as a departing employee or infrastructure failures. What companies should look for is a solution which enables employees to find what they are looking for so that they can do their jobs.


To enable this to happen, there must be a function of enterprise-wide search throughout the company, since relevant documents can be anywhere in a growing era of mobility (think about your iPad, iTouch, blackberry, laptop, home computer, file servers and work desktop). Without the ability to search through anywhere they store data, the ability for employees to access the store of knowledge which the company has built will be limited. And what's the point of knowing something if you can't use it?


Many of the best companies know this, and as Wikipedia says:

Organizations and business decision makers spend a great deal of resources and make significant investments in the latest technology, systems and infrastructure to support knowledge management. It is imperative that these investments are validated properly, made wisely and that the most appropriate technologies and software tools are selected or combined to facilitate knowledge management.

The challenge in enterprise-wide search is the ability to return results in time. Many solutions take weeks or time-out when searching, especially through email (because of the mailbox oriented design of many companies). ZL Unified Archive's competitive advantage is its search speed, in once instance it has searched through over 3 billion documents in a global deployment in a little over 1 minute and continues to do so to this day. In choosing a solution, and making sure it is "validated properly" I'd challenge someone to do it faster, more precisely and on such a scale.


The other challenge of KM, is the ability to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Personally, I follow the iceberg model. Most of a corporation's knowledge lays underwater as tacit knowledge. However, large corporations need to make this as explicit as possible, and an effective enterprise content management system is the first step in doing this. Without the ability to capture what you know, you will never learn. If you stop learning, you're dead in the water. And you don't want to be rearranging chairs on your corporate Titanic in these waters.