Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: I recently read your article Masterclass: Identifying KM objectives and you mention conducting an opportunities survey. Do you know where I can find a sample of something like this? Is this something you'd recommend for me to try?

I do recommend that you try it. Here is another excerpt from my book which provides an example.

Opportunities Survey

Use this survey when you are creating your Top 3 Objectives List. It allows you to test your assumptions and ensure that your program is designed to meet the needs of your organization. This should be conducted once before beginning any new KM initiative.

Here is an example of a survey you can use. You can adapt this as necessary to your situation.

1. Check all of the following challenges you are currently experiencing:

1. It's difficult for my team to make decisions, and when we make them, they are bad.

2. It's hard to find relevant information and resources at the time of need.

3. We have to start from scratch each time we start a new project, and my team keeps reinventing the wheel.

4. We repeat the same mistakes over and over.

5. It's difficult to find out if anyone else has solved a similar problem before or already done similar work.

6. Information is poorly communicated to me, and I am unaware of what has been done, what is happening, and where the organization is heading.

7. I can't find standard processes, procedures, methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples.

8. I can't get experts to help me, because they are scarce, in great demand, and unavailable when needed.

9. We are unable to respond to customers who ask for proof that we know how to help them and that we have done similar work before.

10. It takes too long to invent, design, manufacture, sell, and deliver products and services to our customers.

2. List any other challenges you regularly experience with learning, sharing, reusing, collaborating, innovating, and searching for knowledge.
3. From the challenges which you checked and the ones you listed, please rank the three most important in decreasing order of importance:

1. <fill in the most important challenge>

2. <fill in the second most important challenge>

3. <fill in the third most important challenge>

4. What examples can you provide where learning, sharing, reusing, collaborating, innovating, and searching for knowledge are working well today?
5. What examples can you provide where learning, sharing, reusing, collaborating, innovating, and searching for knowledge worked well in the past?
6. What examples can you provide where learning, sharing, reusing, collaborating, innovating, and searching for knowledge worked well in the past or are working well today in other organizations?
7. What suggestions do you have for dealing with any of the challenges you identified?
8. What other needs do you have for learning, sharing, reusing, collaborating, innovating, and searching for knowledge?
9. What suggestions do you have for meeting the needs you identified?
10. Describe how knowledge management would work ideally.

KM Blog of the Week

A Bull in the Enterprise 2.0 China Shop by Tom Davenport

I felt like an atheist at a Baptist convention. I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to debate Andrew McAfee, a professor at Harvard Business School and the movement’s high priest. My mission was to deny the existence of this faith-based initiative, or at least to argue that it’s not going to be our salvation.

I tried to make a few points:

• That it’s not even clear what Enterprise 2.0 is.
• That Enterprise 2.0 technologies will not, by themselves, revolutionize organizations and make them more democratic.
• That Enterprise 2.0 technologies produce too much content for their own good.
• That there is no business benefit from social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace other than giving people something to do at work when they get bored.

Watching the Film of the Fight by Andrew McAfee

I've just been looking over the (very high quality) video archive of the debate this morning between me and Tom Davenport over Enterprise 2.0, and I have to say it's pretty good!

After one review of the video, it seems to me that our main point of disagreement concerned the extent to which the E2.0 toolkit really is something new, or whether it's just an incremental extension to the longstanding set of technologies for collaboration, interaction, and information sharing. Tom stressed repeatedly that companies have been deploying such tools for decades, and he kept explicitly and implicitly asking the important question: what, if anything, is new now?

In my opening remarks and a few times subsequently, I tried to articulate my answer to this question: that digital platforms that initially impose little or no structure on interactions, but that contain mechanisms to let patterns and structure emerge over time, are actually quite new.

Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head by Andrew McAfee

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the allotted time. So I had to ad lib. The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.

KM Link of the Week

Two links from ActKM:

• World Health Organization Knowledge Management Strategy (provided by Chris Zielinski)
• United States Agency For International Development Knowledge For Development Strategy, FY 2004-2008 (provided by Peter Hobby)

KM Book of the Week

Call for Chapters

Building Organizational Memories: Will You Know What You Knew?

A book edited by Dr. John P. Girard, Minot State University

Proposals Submission Deadline: August 15, 2007

Full Chapters Due: December 23, 2007

Introduction

Much has been written about how organizations create and exchange knowledge to achieve a competitive advantage. To date most researchers have concentrated on the present and how organizational leaders may use knowledge to create value today. The book builds on the many great works in the knowledge management domain; however, it is unique in that the focus will be on what leaders should be doing now (or soon) to ensure the next generation of organizational leaders know what they knew.

The term organizational memory is used to describe the preservation of organizational knowledge. Almost certainly there will be some debate about the exact meaning of this term - the following definition is provided to begin the debate: Organizational memory is the body of knowledge, past, present, and future, required to achieve the strategic objectives of an organization. Enabled by technology, leadership, and culture, organizational memories include repositories of artifacts, communities of people, and organizational knowledge sharing processes, which focus on achieving the organizational vision.

The Overall Objective of the Book

In the fields of management, information studies, information systems, psychology etc., there exists a need for an edited collection of articles in the area of organizational memories. The book aims to provide relevant theoretical frameworks, latest empirical research findings, and practitioners' best practices in the area. The book will be multidisciplinary in nature and will consider a wide range of topics, each of which is related to preserving organizational knowledge for the next generation. It is written for professionals who want to improve their understanding of the strategic role of organizational memories.

The Target Audience

Professionals and researchers working in the field of knowledge management in various disciplines, e.g., library, information and communication sciences, administrative sciences and management, education, adult education, sociology, computer science, information technology. Moreover, the book will provide insights and support executives concerned with the management of expertise, knowledge, information and organizational development in different types of work communities and environments.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Organizational memory models
2. Defining organizational memory
3. Cross-generational knowledge sharing
4. Measuring organizational memory success
5. Technology to support organizational memories
6. Organizational cultural considerations
7. Generational differences
8. Future value of knowledge
9. Barriers to organizational memories
10. Multinational or multicultural considerations
11. Organizational forgetting
12. Best practices in organizational memories
13. Competitive risk of preserving knowledge
14. Knowledge preservation techniques (narrative, after action reviews, communities etc.)
15. Knowledge repositories

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before August 15, 2007, a 2-5 page manuscript proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by September 15, 2007 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter organizational guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by December 23, 2007. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. The book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global, publisher of the IGI Publishing (formerly Idea Group Publishing), Information Science Publishing, IRM Press, CyberTech Publishing and Information Science Reference (formerly Idea Group Reference) imprints.

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) or by mail to:

Dr. John P. Girard, Department of Business Information Technology, Minot State University, Minot, ND 58703, Tel.: 701-858-3194, Fax: 701-858-3438, E-mail: john@johngirard.net

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]