What Does Workspace Virtualization Mean for KM? (Video)
Learn more at KMWorld 2019, coming to Washington, DC, Nov. 5-7.
Increasingly, workspaces are going to be atomized, they're going to be virtual, and they're going to be fast, said World Bank senior KM officer Pascual Saura, who looked at the impact of workspace atomization and virtualization in his presentation at KMWorld 2018.
“What does this mean for KM?” he asked. “Well, I think that this is a prime moment for knowledge management,” he said. “We cannot innovate, we cannot really create online the way we do face-to-face. Knowledge management will bridge that gap, but it will change also a little bit in the process.”
Saura said he defined knowledge management as a way to bring value to a company or an organization by helping it avoid past mistakes, repeat successes, and spark innovation. “And we typically do this for expertise, communities, contents, and technologies,” he said.
“First, I would argue that knowledge management is about bringing two kinds of knowledge. First, what I would call go-to knowledge, and the second is knowledge to go further. So, what is go-to knowledge? Well, the go-to knowledge is the knowledge that your front line is asking from you. They're engaged in their field, they're providing value for your company or organization, they need answers quick: What have we done here? Who is competent in that? Who can help me? How much money do we have to do this, etc.”
To address this requirement, organizations need to put in place a system to answer those questions fast, he said. “You provide just-in-time advisory services and what you need to do more predominantly when you're working online is to make it visible. The workforce is distributed, they cannot just go and knock on your door; they need to understand where the help is going to be coming from.”
For this, organizations are using help desks, centers of excellence, and repositories. “And, I would say, a little bit of branding as well is very important so you can shine like a beacon of light for people to find you right away," he added. "For the water department for which I am working in the World Bank, for example, we branded the help desk as ‘Ask Water.’ We took a little while, but after 18 months, 2 years maybe, absolutely everybody knows that if they have any question, a technical question about how the organization should be presented, etc., they just have to remember that one word to get in touch with the whole network of experts that we have, all the resources of the database, all of the terms of reference and CVs that we have at their disposal.”
It is important, said Saura, to use a little bit of branding to be very visible in addressing what the teams are demanding.
Many speakers have made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2018/Presentations.aspx.
Watch the complete video of this presentation in the KMWorld Conference 2018 Video Portal.