Knowledge
Management
October 2007 Štefan Urbánek

Contents
I. What is Knowledge Management
II.How we did it
III.How to get it done
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I. What is
Knowledge
What problems it solves, where it fits.

It Is a Business
Activity
treating the knowledge component of business activities as an explicit
concern of business reflected in strategy, policy, and practice at all levels of
the organization; and, making a direct connection between an organization's
intellectual assets (explicit and tacit) and positive business results.
Barclay and Murray
Knowledge management is a collaborative and integrated approach to the
creation, capture, organization, access and use of an enterprise’s intellectual
assets.
Grey
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It Is a Business
Activity
Explicit (recorded)
tacit (personal know-how)
intellectual assets
intellectual assets
!
time
Oragnisational memory Positive business
results
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What does it
mean?
Few examples

Lost Knowledge
Capital
people join and leave teams
team members share knowledge
lost member is lost knowledge
?
?
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Learning
Organisation
people join and leave learning teams
team members store and share
when one leaves a team, team retains its
knowledge
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Time
meeting, analysis knowledge sharing knowledge application
1+1=? 2
1+1=? 2
No KM
time
With KM
No KM
With KM free time
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Summary I.
Helps people do their jobs
and save time through better decision making and problem solving
Promotes peer-to-peer mentoring
develops a common language
Diffuses best practises
cross-fertilizes ideas and increases opportunities for innovation
Builds organisational memory
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Paradigm Shift
knowledge is power
sharing knowledge is more powerful
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II. How we did it
How it was born, how it grew,
how is it now and what is Wiki

From the Beginning
Started as DWH team knowledge storage
Infected neighboring teams
Now official knowledge management for IT
Increases collaboration, saves time, reveals misinformation
Seeded in marketing department
Plan to make whole organization participate
and migrate existing prehistoric knowledge management systems
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Instant Solution: Wiki
Collaborative space
anyone can add, edit, discuss, correct
Information put into context
connected with related information, knowledge, people or
documents
Place for knowledge refinement
incremental idea creation Wiki
social error correction
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Collaborative Space
participants
pages
links
back links
discussions
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Demo
(some screen-shots from Wiki here...)
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Summary II.
The Tool is Wiki
many implementations exist
Information is put into context
linked with people and other knowledge
Collaboration is the way
sharing, evolution, refinement, correction
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Discussion
Customer Services Strategy
Technical
Commercial
Forums Wiki
Human Resources IT
Glossary
Processes
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III. How to get it
done
What to do to have knowledge management
and what to do to make it work

Before we start
Nature of knowledge:
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Start
Define knowledge management strategy
Perform knowledge audit
Create plan
Define and assign roles
Adjust processes and prepare cultural change
Pick a tool
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Steps and roles
time
Research and plan Create and seed Grow Use and benefit
sponsor - pushes the project, takes care of
resources, removes obstacles
evangelist - maintains knowledge, motivates
others, seeds core knowledge, corrects, links
participants - feed, discuss, refine, use
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Possible Issues
Resistance to change
“not invented here”, “we have been doing it like this for ages, it
works”
No Time and no Desire
“I have millions of more important things to do”
No Trust
“people are trolls by nature”, “it is not complete”
Low or no Sponsorship
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Recommendations
Do not design, let it grow
it is an evolutionary process that must be embedded into the
organizational culture
knowledge management is alive, sometimes unpredictable
Trust people, they will trust you
motivate
do not add many restrictions, they can discourage people
social moderation will do emerge
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Summary III.
Almost always requires a cultural change
if not a complete transformation or tweaking of existing culture(s)
Put people and culture first
systems and tools are second
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Discussion III.
Chaotic
Ad-hoc
Managed
Agile
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Thank You
stefan@agentfarms.net
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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Credits

Images
Brain image: Wikimedia Commons, Human Brain
Beans and peas image: Project Gutenberg, www.guttenberg.org, Outlines of Lessons in Botany,
Part I; From Seed to Leaf, by Jane H. Newell, Illustrated by H. P. Symmes
Seeds image: Wikimedia Commons, Seeds / Star Anise
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