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ESSENTIALS
of Knowledge
Management
Essentials Series
The Essentials Series was created for busy business advisory and corporate professionals.The books in this series were designed so that these busy professionals can quickly acquire knowledge and skills in core business areas.
Each book provides need-to-have fundamentals for those professionals who must:
• Get up to speed quickly, because they have been promoted to a new position or have broadened their responsibility scope
• Manage a new functional area
• Brush up on new developments in their area of responsibility
• Add more value to their company or clients
Other books in this series include:
Essentials of Accounts Payable, Mary S. Schaeffer Essentials of Capacity Management, Reginald Tomas Yu-Lee Essentials of Cash Flow, H. A. Schaeffer, Jr.
Essentials of Corporate Performance Measurement, George T.
Friedlob, Lydia L.F. Schleifer, and Franklin J. Plewa, Jr.
Essentials of Cost Management, Joe and Catherine Stenzel Essentials of CRM: A Guide to Customer Relationship Management, Bryan Bergeron
Essentials of Credit, Collections, and Accounts Receivable, Mary S. Schaeffer
Essentials of Financial Analysis, George T. Friedlob and Lydia L. F. Schleifer
Essentials of Intellectual Property, Paul J. Lerner and Alexander I. Poltorak
Essentials of Patents, Andy Gibbs and Bob DeMatteis Essentials of Payroll Management and Accounting, Steven M. Bragg Essentials of Shared Services, Bryan Bergeron Essentials of Supply Chain Management, Michael Hugos Essentials of Trademarks and Unfair Competition, Dana Shilling Essentials of Treasury and Cash Management, Michele Allman-Ward and James Sagner
For more information on any of the above titles, please visit www.wiley.com.
ESSENTIALS
of Knowledge
Management
Bryan Bergeron
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, e-mail: permcoordinator@wiley.com.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty:While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bergeron, Bryan P.
Essentials of knowledge management / Bryan Bergeron.
p. cm. -- (Essentials series)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-471-28113-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Knowledge management. I. Title. II. Series.
HD30.2 .B463 2003
658.4'038--dc21
2002155501
Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Miriam Goodman
Contents
vii
Preface
E ssentials of Knowledge Management is a practical survey ofthe field of Knowledge Management (KM)—a business optimization strategy that identifies, selects, organizes, distills, and packages information essential to the business of the company in a way that improves employee performance and corporate competitiveness. The preservation and packaging of corporate knowledge (i.e., information in the context in which it is used) is especially relevant today, given that the majority of the service-oriented workforce is composed of knowledge workers. To compete successfully in today’s economy, organizations have to treat the knowledge that contributes to their core competencies just as they would any other strategic, irreplaceable asset.
The aim of this book is to examine approaches to Knowledge Management that contribute to corporate competitiveness, and those that don’t. The book assumes an intelligent CEO-level reader, but one who is unfamiliar with the nuances of the KM field and needs to come up to speed in one quick reading. After completing this book, readers will understand how their business can be optimized using KM techniques and strategies. Moreover, readers will be able to converse comfortably with KM professionals, understand what to look for when hiring KM
staff and consultants, and understand the investment and likely returns on various KM approaches. To illustrate the practical, business aspects of Knowledge Management in an easily digestible fashion, each chapter contains a vignette that deals with key technical, cultural, or economic issues of the technology.
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Reader Return on Investment
After reading the following chapters, the reader will be able to:
• Understand Knowledge Management from historical, economic, technical, and corporate culture perspectives, including what KM is and isn’t.
• Have a working vocabulary of the field of Knowledge Management and be able to communicate intelligently with KM professionals and vendors.
• Understand the trade-offs between the commercial options available for a KM implementation.
• Understand the significance of Knowledge Management on the company’s bottom line.
• Understand the relationship between Knowledge
Management and other business optimization strategies.
• Understand how KM professionals work and think.
• Have a set of specific recommendations that can be used to TEAMFLY
establish and manage a KM effort.
• Understand the technologies, including their trade-offs, that can be used to implement Knowledge Management in the corporation.
• Appreciate best practices—what works, why it works, and how to recognize a successful KM effort.
Organization of This Book
This book is organized into modular topics related to Knowledge Management. It is divided into eight chapters.
Chapter 1: Overview
The first chapter provides an overview of the key concepts, terminology, and the historical context of practical Knowledge Management in the workplace. It illustrates, for example, how every successful organization uses Knowledge Management to some degree, albeit perhaps not in a x
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sophisticated, formalized way. This chapter also differentiates between knowledge as an organizational process versus simply a collection of data that can be stored in a database.
Chapter 2: Knowledge Organizations
Taking the perspective of the corporate senior management, this chapter explores the implications of embracing Knowledge Management as an organizational theme. It explores the role of chief executive as chief knowledge officer, how any KM initiative is primarily one of corporate culture change, what can be expected through application of KM strategies in a large organization, general classes of KM initiatives—including gaining knowledge from customers, creating new revenues from existing knowledge, and capturing individual’s tacit knowledge for reuse—as well as a review of the predictors of a successful initiative.
Chapter 3: Knowledge Workers
This chapter explores Knowledge Management from the employees’ perspective. Topics include dealing with employee resistance to the increased overhead of not only performing their jobs but taking time to document their behavior for others, addressing the potential reward for a job well done with decreased job security, the importance of creating employee recognition and reward systems to encouraging employee participation in a KM initiative, and ways to use KM techniques to enhance employee effectiveness.
Chapter 4: Process
This chapter focuses on Knowledge Management as a process. Topics include process reengineering, competency measurement, how to best apply collaborative systems, approaches to unobtrusive knowledge capture, filtering and refining knowledge, methodologies for applying knowledge for decision support, and how Knowledge Management relates to traditional business processes and business models.
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Chapter 5: Technology
This chapter explores the many computer and communications technologies that can be used to enhance the organizational and behavioral aspects of a Knowledge Management initiative. Included are a survey of technologies for knowledge collection (e.g., data mining, text summarizing, the use of intelligent agents, and a variety of information retrieval methodologies), knowledge storage and retrieval (e.g., knowledge bases and information repositories), and knowledge dissemination and application (e.g., intranets and internets, groupware, decision support tools, and collaborative systems).
Chapter 6: Solutions
This chapter looks at the various solutions offered by vendors in the Knowledge Management market.Topics include defining assessment metrics of performance, industry standards and best practices, and how to assess the impact of a KM initiative on qualitative factors surrounding organization-wide change of corporate vision, values, and behaviors.
Chapter 7: Economics
This chapter explores the financial aspects of Knowledge Management, from a return-on-investment perspective. Topics include pricing models for information infrastructure development, overhead costs, contractual issues, and hidden costs of Knowledge Management, and how to justify the cost of investing in new technologies. The chapter also explores the knowledge economy in terms of the knowledge value chain.
Chapter 8: Getting There
The final chapter provides some concrete examples of the resources, time, and costs involved in embarking on a practical Knowledge Management effort. Topics include implementation challenges, working with vendors, achieving employee buy-in, including how to shift corporate xii
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culture from knowledge sequestering to knowledge sharing, employee education, realistic implementation timelines, and managing risk. The chapter ends with a look to the future of Knowledge Management as it relates to information technology, process, and organizational change.
Further Reading
This section lists some of the more relevant works in the area of Knowledge Management, at a level appropriate to a chief executive or upper-level manager.
Glossary
The glossary contains words defined throughout the text as well the most common terms a reader will encounter in the Knowledge Management literature.
How to Use This Book
For those new to Knowledge Management, the best way to tackle the subject is simply to read each chapter in order; however, because each chapter is written as a stand-alone module, readers interested in, for example, the economics of Knowledge Management can go directly to Chapter 7, “Economics.”
Throughout the book, “In the Real World” sections provide real-world examples of how Knowledge Management is being used to improve corporate competitiveness and ability to adapt to change.
Similarly, a “Tips & Techniques” section in each chapter offers concrete steps that the reader can take to benefit from a KM initiative. Key terms are defined in the glossary. In addition, readers who want to delve deeper into the business, technical, or corporate culture aspects of Knowledge Management are encouraged to consult the list of books and publications provided in the Further Reading section.
xiii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my enduring editorial associate, Miriam Goodman, for her assistance in creating this work. In addition, special thanks are in order to my editor at John Wiley & Sons, Sheck Cho, for his insight and encouragement.
xv
C H A P T E R 1
Overview
Readers prepared to add a powerful new tool to their arsenal of competitive business strategies may be surprised to discover that Knowledge Management (KM) has more to do with ancient civilizations than with some recent innovation in information technology (IT).
Consider that, since antiquity, organized business has sought a competitive advantage that would allow it to serve customers as efficiently as possible, maximize profits, develop a loyal customer following, and keep the competition at bay, regardless of whether the product is rugs, spices, or semi-conductors. Beginning about 15,000 years ago, this advantage was writing down the selected knowledge of merchants, artisans, physicians, and government administrators for future reference. Writing was used to create enduring records of the society’s rules, regulations, and cumulative knowledge, including who owed and paid money to the largest enterprise of the time—the government.
In Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago, people began to lose track of the thousands of baked-clay tablets used to record legal contracts, tax assessments, sales, and law. The solution was the start of the first institution dedicated to Knowledge Management, the library. In libraries, located in the center of town, the collection of tablets was attended to by professional knowledge managers. An unfortunate side effect of this concentration of information was that libraries made convenient targets for military conquest.
Even though war had the effect of spreading writings and drawings to new cultures, access to the information they contained was largely 1
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t restricted to political and religious leaders. Such leaders represented the elite class, who either understood the language in which the scrolls or tablets were written or could afford to have the works translated into their native tongue. Things improved for the public in the West a little over five centuries ago, with the invention of movable type and the printing press.With the Renaissance and prosperity came a literate class and the practice of printing in the common tongue instead of in Latin.
In the world of commerce, the expertise of many professions continued to be passed on through apprenticeship, sometimes supplemented by books and other forms of collective memory. This concentration of knowledge limited actual manufacturing to relatively small shops in which skilled craftsmen toiled over piecework. Things changed with the introduction of the assembly line as a method of production. The industrial revolution was possible largely because rows of machines—not an oral or written tradition—provided the structural memory of the process involved in the production of guns, fabrics, machinery, and other goods whose design enabled mass production. No longer was a lengthy apprenticeship, or literacy, or even an understanding of the manufacturing process required for someone to quickly achieve acceptable performance at a task. Anyone, including women and children with no education, could learn to refill a bobbin with yarn, keep a parts bin filled, or operate a machine in a few hours—and keep at it for 12 hours at a time, seven days a week. For the first time, productivity could be measured, benchmarks or standards could be established, and processes could be optimized. As a result, productivity increased, goods became more plentiful, and they could be offered to the masses at an affordable price while maintaining a healthy profit margin for the company and its investors.
However, knowledge of the overall process and how individual workers contributed to the whole was closely held by a handful of assembly-line designers and senior management.
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Modern business in the postindustrial U.S. service economy is largely a carryover from this manufacturing tradition, especially as it relates to accounting practices and corporate valuation. For example, the government, a silent partner in every business venture, recognizes the purchase price and depreciation schedule of physical assets, but not the processes or knowledge held in the minds of workers. Similarly, the manner in which employees are assigned positions in the modern corporation reflects the industrial era in which individual workers have little knowledge of—or voice in—the overall business model. It’s common, for example, for large rooms crammed with cubicles to house hundreds of workers who mindlessly process printed or electronic documents. These workers manipulate and validate data, according to easily learned rules established by management. As a result, the knowledge of the overall process resides in the minds of senior management, and employees for the most part are treated as if they were easily replaceable assembly-line workers in a manufacturing plant.
At higher levels of the knowledge worker hierarchy, university degrees and certificates from various organizations or guilds provide the self-imposed labels that managers and professionals use to qualify for one of the predefined positions in the matrix of the organization. These knowledge workers have more of an overall picture of the business than lower-level front-line workers do, but there is likely duplication of mis-takes in different departments since these workers may not have a process in place to share knowledge of best practices. For example, professionals in multiple departments with the organization may be experimenting with outsourcing, each discovering independently that the promised savings are far less that the popular business press suggests.
Despite the parallels in front-line employees working with data instead of textiles or iron, the reality of the modern corporate workplace also contrasts sharply with what was considered by employees and man-3
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t agement as a permanent condition until only a few decades ago. The situation of lifetime employment offered by large manufacturing plants in the steel, petroleum, and automobile industries during the latter half of the twentieth century is virtually unheard of today, even with labor unions.
Given the volatility of the economy and mobility of the workforce, new entrants into the workforce can expect to work with five or more firms during their lifetimes. Even in Japan, where lifetime employment was once an unwritten rule, major corporations routinely downsize thousands of workers at a time.
While industrialization may have been detrimental to the environment and some social institutions, it isn’t responsible for the current pressure on businesses to be more competitive. Rather, economic volatility, high employee turnover, international shifts in political power, global competition, and rapid change characterize the modern economic environment. As a result, the modern business organization can’t TEAMFLY
compete effectively in the marketplace without skilled managers and employees and without methods for managing their knowledge of people, and all the processes and technologies involved in the business, including information technology.
E X H I B I T 1 . 1
Use
Modification
Creation/
Access
Disposal
Acquisition
Translation/
Archiving
Repurposing
Transfer
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Managing information throughout the ages, whether expressed in the form of figures cut into clay tablets, rows of machines on a factory floor, or a roomful of cubicles in which service providers handle electronic documents, entails a web of eight interrelated processes (see Exhibit 1.1). Consider the eight processes in the context of a multimedia production company:
1. Creation/acquisition. The multimedia—some combination of images, video, and sound—is either authored from scratch or acquired by some means. For example, the multimedia company many create a series of images depicting a new manufacturing process for a client.
2. Modification. The multimedia is modified to suit the immediate needs of the client. For example, the raw multimedia may be reformatted for use in a glossy brochure.
3. Use. The information is employed for some useful purpose, which may include being sold and distributed. For example, the brochure is printed for distribution by the client.
4. Archiving. The information is stored in a form and format that will survive the elements and time, from the perspectives of both physical and cultural change. The multimedia included in the brochure may be burned onto a CD-ROM and stored in a fireproof safe off site, for example.
5. Transfer. The information is transferred from one place to another.
The electronic files of the brochure may be distributed via the Internet to clients in corporate offices around the globe.
6. Translation/repurposing. The information is translated into a form more useful for a second group of users or for a new purpose.
The images used in the brochure are translated into web-5
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t compatible images to create an online brochure on the client’s intranet web site.
7. Access. Limited access to the translated or original information is provided to users as a function of their position or role in the organization. For example, managers in the client’s organization with the access codes and passwords to the password-protected web site can view the online brochure that describes the new manufacturing proc