The New Edge in Knowledge

How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business

Carla O'Dell, Cindy Hubert

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118015186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The best thinking and actions in the fast-moving arena of collaboration and knowledge management

The New Edge in Knowledge captures the most practical and innovative practices to ensure organizations have the knowledge they need in the future and, more importantly, the ability to connect the dots and use knowledge to succeed today.

• Build or retrofit your organization for new ways of working and collaboration by using knowledge management
• Adapt to today's most popular ways to collaborate such as social networking
• Overcome organization silos, knowledge hoarding and "not invented here" resistance
• Take advantage of emerging technologies and mobile devices to build networks and share knowledge
• Identify what can be learned from Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to make firms and people smarter, stronger and faster

Straightforward and easy-to-follow, this is the resource you'll turn to again and again to get-and stay-in the know. Plus, the book is filled with real-world examples – the case studies and snapshots of how best practice companies are achieving success with knowledge management.

CHAPTER 1

Positioning Knowledge Management for the Future

In 2000, Brad Anderson, then president of electronics retailer Best Buy, called the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) for help. Wal-Mart, Target, and other discount retailers were hotly pursuing Best Buy’s customers. Anderson wanted Best Buy to exploit the knowledge gained from its head start selling digital electronics. If selling electronics became solely a commodity business, then Best Buy might not win. But Brad knew that Best Buy’s customers were struggling to keep up with the explosion of digital technology and would value knowledgeable guidance from the company’s sales employees. Brad had just read our book If Only We Knew What We Know (Grayson and O’Dell 1998) and called APQC to see if knowledge management (KM) could help.

Fast forward to 2010: Best Buy has grown from 400 to 1,400 stores in the United States and Canada, with another 2,600 stores around the world, and from $6 billion to $50 billion in annual sales (DailyFinance 2010). More impressively, Best Buy continues to outperform its competitors in revenues and margins.

Of course, KM is only a part of the reason; but if you ask the folks at Best Buy, they will tell you the ability to share what they know and act on it has been a large part of their success. The early communities of practice that started in 2000 to share knowledge across the stores set the stage for the matrix of knowledge-sharing approaches the organization has today.

Everyone competes on how much they know. Companies lose sales, governments lose battles (especially with terrorists), and people lose jobs when they don’t have the strategy and means to connect the dots. But there’s a clear solution.

Although you can’t manage the knowledge in people’s heads, you can capture, enable, and transfer knowledge and best practices.

What Is Knowledge Management?

From a practical perspective, we define knowledge as information in action. Until people take information and use it, it isn’t knowledge. In a business context, knowledge is what employees know about their customers, one another, products, processes, mistakes, and successes, whether that knowledge is tacit or explicit.

APQC defines knowledge management as a systematic effort to enable information and knowledge to grow, flow, and create value. The discipline is about creating and managing the processes to get the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and help people share and act on information in order to improve organizational performance.

Organizations implement a KM program to institutionalize and promote knowledge-sharing practices. An enterprise KM program is usually a centralized, organization-wide effort to standardize and excel in KM. Enterprise does not have to be the entire corporation. Enterprise may refer to a business entity that is a meaningful cost or revenue center performing work supporting a defined region of customers. Examples include divisions such as IBM Global Business Services and government agencies such as the Department of State or the U.S. Navy. Within such a program, organizations implement KM approaches such as communities of practice, expertise location systems, and wikis to formalize and enable knowledge sharing. KM activities, on the other hand, are all of the things KM professionals do to support the program and its approaches, such as planning and design, change management, communication, training, and budgeting. Through these activities and approaches, KM programs should:

• Connect employees to one another to help them excel at their jobs
• Connect employees to knowledge assets (just enough, just in time, and just for them)
• Connect those with experience or know-how with those who need it

These actions will accelerate the rate of learning; cut down the risks of not knowing and repeating mistakes; and retain knowledge assets when people move, leave, or retire.

This all requires strategy. To enable KM to succeed in your organization, you will need a well-thought-out strategy. You can waste a lot of money, time, and goodwill by implementing KM approaches before you’ve determined how your organization will overcome silos, knowledge hoarding, and “not invented here” resistance. You can waste even more of your organization’s resources by simply adopting an information technology (IT) tool and calling it a KM program. (Technology alone will not ensure engagement and value.) Let us help you position KM in the sweet spot of knowledge and business strategy. We know what works.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

Explicit knowledge (also known as formal or codified knowledge) comes in the form of documents, formulas, contracts, process diagrams, manuals, and so on. Explicit knowledge may not be useful without the context provided by experience.

Tacit knowledge (also known as informal or uncodified knowledge), by contrast, is what you know or believe from experience. It can be found in interactions with employees and customers. Tacit knowledge is hard to catalog, highly experiential, difficult to document, and ephemeral. It is also the basis for judgment and informed action.

KM in a New Context

One of us—Carla—wrote her first book on how to implement KM, If Only We Knew What We Know, in 1998, when the discipline was less than a decade old (Grayson and O’Dell).

What a difference a decade makes. Witness September 11th, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the rise of China as a superpower, global warming, the near meltdown of the global financial system in 2008 and 2009, and the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and resulting pollution in 2010.

The changes are just as substantial as we edge closer to the realm of KM: rising Internet and broadband access, the explosion of mobile devices and smartphones, the continued rise in virtual work and global teams, the international equalization of competitive prowess and knowledge,¹ the decline of readership for the printed word, the rise of digital readership, and on and on.

It would be hard to overstate how profoundly these developments have both challenged and enhanced the promise and practice of KM. KM’s core objectives haven’t changed, but how we accomplish them has. In this section, we zoom in on the forces affecting organizations and KM now and for years to come. We offer advice throughout this book to deal with them.

A Ready User Base

More than 1.8 billion people have access to the Internet (Shirky 2010). As of July 2010, there were more than 500 million Facebook users (Gaudin 2010) with more than 55 million updates a day and 3.5 billion content pieces shared weekly (Giles 2010). With 4 billion mobile phones in use (CIA 2009b), Neilsen expects smartphones to outnumber cell phones by 2011 (Entner 2010).

Force 1: Digital Immersion

We are experiencing the incursion of the Internet and digital technology into almost every aspect of our lives. Wireless connections and mobile devices have made the Internet available from almost anywhere, and ever-increasing bandwidth has enabled the rise of streaming video and other high-impact content. Employees of all ages spend 70, 80, or even 90-plus hours a week in front of laptops and smartphones, conducting a mix of professional and personal business. Expectations of 24/7 connectivity are affecting the way we work and live.

Many people are comforted by the feeling that they’re always getting things done—responding to e-mails in meetings, taking calls in line at the supermarket, and so on. But that feeling may be an illusion.

Are today’s employees as savvy as they appear at multitasking? Not according to Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford University and the director of the Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. His data suggest that even the brightest people are hampered by an unwillingness (or inability) to focus on one thing at a time. Nass and his research team predicted that multitaskers might be good at three things:

1. Filtering. Focusing on what’s relevant while ignoring distractions and extraneous information.

2. Switching. Moving between tasks quickly and getting up to speed with a minimum amount of ramp-up time.

3. Organizing their memories. Transferring information from short-term to long-term memory to ensure that important facts are retained.

But his research results then indicated the opposite: “It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking,” Nass writes. “They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another” (2010).

Even more disturbing, almost all the research participants thought they were good at these aspects of multitasking.

If you are familiar with Lean manufacturing techniques, you know that set-up time does not add value. And when you switch what you are working on, there is set-up time. HP research indicates it can take 15 minutes to fully reset your focus after an interruption (Friedlander 2010). You are not actually multitasking. Instead, you toggle between tasks and lose start-up time every time you switch back. And there is a good possibility that you will forget something before you get back to it.

The findings are clear: While supposedly getting more done in less time through our immersion in digital technology, we are actually working more slowly, absorbing information less effectively, and hampering our capacity for analytic reasoning.

A study by the University of California at Irvine found that the average professional switches between work activities every three minutes and five seconds (Pattison 2008). A similar study involving Microsoft employees reinforced that when employees were interrupted by e-mail or instant messages, it took them an average of 15 minutes to return to more complex mental tasks like computer programming or writing reports. This kind of multitasking decreases productivity while increasing stress and feelings of overload. “When people are switching contexts every [few] minutes, they can’t possibly be thinking deeply,” writes Professor Gloria Mark of the University of California at Irvine (Lohr 2007).

If we don’t have any choice and we’re going to hire (and even encourage) multitaskers, then what kind of KM scaffolding are we going to need to create to get thoughtful work done? We must adapt content and messages to align with employees’ time and attention limitations. For KM, the implications are that:

• We should assume employees are multitasking.
• It isn’t making them perform better or pay attention to everything they see.
• We shouldn’t design KM approaches that interrupt employees any more than they already are.
• Even if a piece of information or knowledge is critical to retain, we can’t assume employees will remember it when they need it. It has to be there at the teachable moment.

Force 2: Social Computing

Nearly one-fourth of the world’s more than 1.8 billion Internet users have profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace (Miniwatts 2009). And 75 million are signed up on Twitter (Gaudin 2010). LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals, has more than 70 million users (Rao 2010). Facebook alone will likely exceed 600 million users by 2011. To put this number into perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous after India and China (Giles 2010). Even more staggering, in just one month, Facebook users post more than 3.5 billion pieces of content.

With that much practice, it’s no surprise that employees feel at ease with social networking tools. Social computing, Web 2.0, and the rise of social media are transforming KM. It is so good for KM that if we didn’t have it, then we would have to invent it.

We define social media as Internet technology that allows people to generate content and interact in a way that creates new information and value. Social media becomes social computing when applied to a noncommercial intent among people to share and co-create. Web 2.0 tools are specific social computing technologies that are relatively easy to adopt and master. From these developments come Enterprise 2.0 applications, which tailor social media for business by addressing privacy concerns and helping to align a wealth of internal kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Positioning Knowledge Management for the Future
• CHAPTER 2 A Call to Action
• CHAPTER 3 Knowledge Management Strategy and Business Case
• CHAPTER 4 Selecting and Designing Knowledge Management Approaches
• CHAPTER 5 Proven Knowledge Management Approaches
• CHAPTER 6 Emerging Knowledge Management Approaches
• CHAPTER 7 Working Social Networking
• CHAPTER 8 Governance, Roles, and Funding
• CHAPTER 9 Building a Knowledge-Sharing Culture
• CHAPTER 10 Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management
• CHAPTER 11 Make Best Practices Your Practices
• Appendix: Case Studies
• References
• About the Authors
• Index