As Knowledge is intangible, dynamic, and difficult to measure, but without it no organization can survive. unarticulated knowledge is more personal, experiential, context specific, and hard to formalize; is difficult to communicate or share with others; and is generally in the heads of individuals and teams. So to start we need to understand what is important to us.
This do we need KM ?
As our Competitive success will be based on how strategically intellectual capital is managed
As after capturing the knowledge residing in the minds of employees so that it can be easily shared across the enterprise
We can after Leveraging organizational knowledge is emerging as the solution to an increasingly fragmented and globally-dispersed workplace
As we can understand that reuse of knowledge saves work, reduces communication costs, and allows a company to take on more projects
According to Wikipedia "Knowledge Management (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 Activities we need to do it are
- Generating knowledge, capturing knowledge
- Making knowledge accessible
- Representing and embedding knowledge
- Facilitating knowledge
- Transferring knowledge to an archival for day to day use
In my thoughts, let's call it an art of preserving useful knowledge & archiving it for future use for efficiencies increase & continuous improvement purpose. In my adaptions we have built & used a knowledge management systems, which are comprises a range of practices used in to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. These insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in teams , members, or embedded in organizational processes or practice. This acquired knowledge help us to continuously improve from the learning acquired & re-align the strategies to get maximum efficiencies and quality for the output.
Let's take a sample to understand this correctly, if someone asks what sales are apt to be next quarter, we would have to say, "It depends!" I would have to say this because although we have data and information, we have not built knowledge yet. This is a trap that many fall into, because they don't understand that data doesn't predict trends of data. What predicts trends of data is the activity that is responsible for the data. To be able to estimate the sales for next quarter, we might need the information about the competition, market size, extent of market saturation, current backlog, customer satisfaction levels associated with current product delivery, current production capacity, the extent of capacity utilization, and a whole host of other things. When we were able to amass sufficient data and information to form a complete pattern that we can understand, we would have knowledge, and would then be somewhat comfortable estimating the sales for next quarter. We are looking for documenting such complex knowledge.
In an organizational context, data represents facts or values of results, and relations between data and other relations have the capacity to represent information. Patterns of relations of data and information and other patterns have the capacity to represent knowledge. For the representation to be of any utility it must be understood, and when understood the representation is information or knowledge to the one that understands.
Recently with the advent of the Web 2.0, the concept of KM has evolved towards a vision more based on people participation and emergence. This line of evolution trend is still continuing. However, there is an ongoing debate and discussions about which area have priorities over others. So these areas & priorities can be revised as per the needs.
The Areas to be addressed for a typical IT services organizations are
- Technological data
- Organizational data
- Process documentation
- Trainings & feedback
- Dashboards/ Measuring and reporting
As you can feels KM is an umbrella activity for continuous improvement with proactive learning from all previous best practices (implementations) & errors not to repeats (error eliminations) but not limited to just learning, includes the learning from improved tools & third party products studies from Internet & intranets
The Data elements to be achieve can be as follows
- Previous project Documents & Data
- Learning from previous projects
- Code snippets, qualitative review logs
- Prato charts & actions taken results
- Updated framework for better productivity
- Organizational Assets updates improvements in communication with PMO & cooperate functions
- Environmental factors updates choosing better tools & environments for better productivity
These are not all, we have to keep learning from our & neighbors mistakes & build best practices to fellow to improve over efficiencies in organizations
Motivational factors / Process results
- Continuous improvements in terms of deviation analysis & process fine tuning thru SEPG
- Effort & cost estimation alignment with the LOC & Function point variable factors
- Improved matrices in terms of proactively predicting the alarms & set triggering the right element this time.
- Improved collaboration with client & third parties in terms of getting support proactively than reactively
- Tool for Global / Virtual teams to access / share all project knowledge status & training details
- Making available increased knowledge content in the development and provision of products and services
- Achieving shorter new product development cycles (Efficiencies improved)
- Facilitating and managing innovation and organizational learning & thus sharing best practices across the department, work unit
- Leveraging the expertise of people across the organization & documenting the knowledge for future reference
- Increasing network connectivity between internal and external individuals
- Managing business environments and allowing employees to obtain relevant insights and ideas appropriate to their work
- Solving intractable or wicked problems
- Managing intellectual capital and intellectual assets in the workforce (such as the expertise and know-how possessed by key individuals)
The value of Knowledge Management relates directly to the effectiveness that is return on investment, with which the managed knowledge enables the members of the organization to deal with today's situations and effectively envision and create their future. Without on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed based on what the individual or group brings to the situation with them. With on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed with the sum total of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a situation of a similar nature. There is no one-size-fits-all way to effectively tap a firm's intellectual capital. To create value, companies must focus on how knowledge is used to build critical capabilities.
There are always positive & negative aspects of systems as per the usage scenarios. Let's consider an example. A firm that had invested millions of dollars in a state-of-the-art intranet intended to improve knowledge sharing got some bad news: Employees were using it most often to retrieve the daily menu from the company cafeteria. The system was just started making appearances among users or in day-to-day business activities.
Few executives would argue with the premise that knowledge management is critical—but few know precisely what to do about it. There are numerous examples of knowledge-management programs intended to improve innovation, responsiveness and adaptability that fall short of expectations. The Organizations need to spend efforts in research activities at various points & explore all such instances including the roots of the problem and have developed a method to help executives make effective knowledge management a reality in their organizations.
Much of the problem with knowledge management today lies in the way the subject has been approached by vendors and the press. Knowledge management is still a relatively young field, with new concepts emerging constantly. Often, it is portrayed simplistically; discussions typically revolve around blanket principles that are intended to work across the organization. Most knowledge-management initiatives have focused almost entirely on changes in tools and technologies, such as intranets.
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