Perspectives on Knowledge Management: Concepts, Imperatives

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Perspectives on Knowledge Management Concepts,
Imperatives Community
CITO 6th Annual Regional Summit
Maurice McNaughton Director, Center of
Excellence Mona School of Business, UWI
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What is Knowledge?
My father would say, Son when I was your age
Principle, moral values (Why)
Wisdom
Strategy, practice, method, insight (How)
Knowledge Information combined with
the experience, skills, values and insights of
the human user to create value for the corporation
Men at age 43 typically go through a mid-life
crisis
Description What, who, when, where, How many
Information Data plus some contextual
references or categorization which provides
relevance, value or meaning to the organization
or user of the information
Age43 yrs old
Data Structured or unstructured facts and values
of parameters and measures
43
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Knowledge in Organizations

Know-Why Holistic knowledge of underpinning principles, goals and contextual richness bigger picture Strategic purpose
Know-How Knowledge, understanding of processes, patterns and chains of causality Has both an explicit dimension (i.e. instructions, procedure) and a tacit dimension (skill, experience and insight)
Know-Who Identification of the owners of knowledge i.e. knowing who knows what. Acquired through extended participation in a community and social networks.
Know-What knowing the facts (information) as well as knowing what to do knowledge about products, customers, markets and competition

• Knowledge Management
• the process which involves the systematic
  leveraging and cultivation of vital knowledge
  assets to create value for the organization

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The Knowledge Society

• To make knowledge work productive will be the
  great management task of this century just as to
  make manual work productive was the great
  management task of last century
• Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity
  Guidelines to Our Changing Society
• Knowledge Worker
• One who works primarily with Information or
  develops and uses knowledge in the workplace

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Implications for the Workplace

• Collapse of traditional boundaries of space
  time for interactions with Customers, Suppliers,
  Employees
• Fundamental shift between management worker
• Knowledge-workers own the means of production
• intellectual capital cannot be owned, only
  attracted and will go where it is wanted, treated
  well
• symbiotic relationship
• Conversations are the way knowledge-workers
  discover what they know, share with colleagues,
  create relationships that define the
  organization, ultimately create new knowledge.
• Manager's job is to create an environment that
  allows knowledge workers to learn and share
  (from experiences, other workers, customers,
  suppliers, business partners)

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Creativity vs Knowledge

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.
• Albert Einstein

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Enabling Technologies

• ICT tools used to support KM
• Channels (email, IM) create, distribute digital
  information (high use,low commonality)
• Platforms (intranets, Corporate Websites,
  Portals) - centralized production, high
  commonality, low use
• Issues
• KM Systems not on radar
• traditional technologies don't do a good job of
  capturing knowledge
• most Knowledge work practices /output are
  transparent/invisible to most people in the
  organization

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Successful KM Platforms

• Google
• 31 billion searches on Google every month
• Who used to answer these questions before Google
  (B.G.)?
• Wikipedia
• Knowledge content creation and editing by ad hoc
  virtual teams
• A marvel in technical and social engineering
• A 2005 study showed that the accuracy and quality
  of information in wikipedia compared favorably
  with the online edition of Encyclopaedia
  Britannica
• Open Source Domain

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Enterprise 2.0 Learning from the Web

• Searchable keyword search appears more useful,
  intuitive than structured taxonomies and
  navigation tools
• Linkages informal way of rating value and
  importance of content
• Authoring democratize the Authoring/publishing
  processviz
• Blogs individual authorship, cumulative content
• Wikis Group authorship, iterative content -gt
  high quality, convergent content
• Tags emergent, user categorization/classification
  - folksonomy (non-herarchical redundant)
• Extensions pattern-matching, suggestion
  algorithms
• Signalling Email notification / RSS Feeds
  (Really Simple Syndication)

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Knowledge Communities

• Anchored in Social Networking
• Powerful, Complex knowledge resource fueled by
  common interests, collaborative creativity and
  shared thinking
• Whole is greater than Sum of the parts
• Can be employed to identify, create, represent,
  and/or distribute knowledge
• Enabled by Web 2.0 functionality Internet, Blogs
  Wikis, IM, RSS Feeds, Mash-Ups
• Example Open Source Communities