Making Knowledge Management Practical
Information is power, but the interpretation of information is more powerful. Well, if you are going to attempt to interpret information to create knowledge, you better be able to find the right information.
Organizations require and need a way to classify, or "tag," content for the primary purpose of locating it throughout its lifecycle. They often implement "controlled taxonomies" which are fraught with limitations for users and require plenty of administration. Establishing and using taxonomies for the purpose of indexing content is a social activity and organizational constipation occurs when you try to formalize a social activity.
Darin Stewart, author of Building Enterprise Taxonomies, writes in his blog, "In my experience, using the ‘T' word in conversation invokes one of two responses. Either people immediately fall asleep or they run screaming from the room. There is very little middle ground. ‘Taxonomy' invokes bad memories of advanced placement biology courses and trying to remember if ‘species' comes before ‘genus' or vice versa. Even the more general ‘controlled vocabulary' has certain ‘Orwellian' overtones that frightens off users and sponsors alike who suddenly feel constrained or censored because you are restricting how they express themselves or label their content. In the context of the enterprise, taxonomy no longer means a place for everything and everything in its place."
When most organizations create non-hierarchical taxonomies for the purposes of indexing and searching for content, the taxonomy terms tend to be very broad. It seems that knowledge management solutions need to incorporate social activities for tagging content to reduce the "user tax" of taxonomies.
Solutions that use X-onimies (conceptually these are taxonomies, folksonomies and personomies) to classify and search for content provide a means to ease the user tax burden. This approach provides any organization with the ability to use a managed vocabulary with broad terms to address the organization's needs for content classification, while the folksonomy and personomy frees content and users from the constraints of the managed vocabulary. This provides users with the ability to use informal social and personal tags for content, eliminating the "tax" on taxonomies.
Once again in the words of an expert on taxonomies, Darin states, "Our taxonomies or any domain model (which is essentially what we are talking about) are going to be rough approximations of the real world at best. There are going to be errors and omissions. So it's important to give our users some leeway in how they tag things, because—like it or not—they will anyway." We all observe this user behavior on Web blogs and forums; we now need to recognize its importance and applicability in knowledge management systems.
Leveraging Your Intellectual Capital
Knowledge is playing a key role in the information revolution. One of the major challenges is to select the correct information from numerous sources and transform it into useful knowledge. Tacit knowledge based on an individual's life experiences, and explicit knowledge based on commonly known or accepted information, are both underutilized.
"Looking through the lens of complexity theory, we can see why knowledge management is a new and fundamental corporate activity. Complexity theory allows us to understand why knowledge is a corporate asset and why and how it should be managed. Complexity theory allows us to say that knowledge management is not just another activity of importance for a company." In the knowledge era, the owner of the knowledgebase usually dictates the process. This knowledge is what allows an organization to manage a brand and outsource most of the chain's other activities.
Examples of this can be seen in companies like Nike, Calvin Klein and Benetton. Knowledge in a company takes different forms. Tacit knowledge is focused on life experiences, while explicit knowledge refers to the rules and procedures that a company follows. Knowledge management solutions must assist in the conversion of knowledge by providing knowledge workers with tools to leverage their tacit and explicit knowledge that they possess or have access to.
Knowledge-based economies are forcing people to do more work in less time. Knowledge workers who lack adequate education and training, or explicit knowledge, are struggling to keep up. Many companies are seeking ways to use an individual's tacit knowledge to augment a person's academic learning and experience. A key element in attracting and maintaining talented and productive knowledge workers is to provide opportunities to use tacit knowledge. Many organizations waste valuable intellectual capital because their corporate practices undermine support efforts to gather, sort, transform, record and share knowledge. Priceless knowledge is continually lost because organizations make poor use of their prime resource—relatively unchallenged, creative people who are eager to apply their knowledge.
A large amount of tacit knowledge is lost through outsourcing, downsizing, mergers and terminations. Supposedly, employees possess 90% of the knowledge in any organization. Interestingly, investment in tapping into tacit knowledge is a non-existent line item in corporate budgets. However, studies indicate it is tacit knowledge that plays a key role in leveraging the overall quality of knowledge. When organizations merge, downsize, reorganize, or when organizational culture changes, priceless knowledge is lost or buried under new information. Employees leave and take their valuable knowledge, resources, skills and experiences with them. Unless organizations recognize the creative and ingenious ways people get things done, tacit knowledge—in particular—will be lost. New knowledge is created when people transfer and share what they know. The value and worth of individual, group and organizational intellectual capital grows exponentially when shared. Human inertia is the biggest obstacle to knowledge-management efforts.
WSN Insight, a KM solution for SharePoint, delivers the relevant collaboration requests (aka conversations) and content for each knowledge worker to a personalized knowledge dashboard. The dashboard contains many conversation key performance indicators (KPIs) to help prioritize matters. The feature also has the ability to find the members of the organization who can contribute to the conversation based on various attributes (skills, projects, experience, customers, etc.) of each employee. This solves some of the biggest challenges organizations face when implementing a knowledge management infrastructure.