(Il)logical Knowledge Management

A Guide to Knowledge Management in the 21st Century

Beverly Weed-Schertzer

• Editorial: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838678050
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Information Management

In today's world, strategic knowledge management is a critical practice for all businesses seeking to protect its assets and produce intelligible and useable information. However, formally implementing a comprehensive knowledge management infrastructure to support an organization—enabling businesses to create, protect, and collaborate through knowledge—is often easier said than done. How do businesses adapt to the evolving challenges of knowledge management, and what best-practice tips are actually based on common misconceptions?
From social media and collaborative information systems to new technological developments in cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, (Il)logical Knowledge Management dives deep into the sometimes less-than-logical approaches to knowledge management that pervade present practice. It goes beyond existing understanding of how knowledge is transferred, stored, and shared to address the key challenges organizations face in overseeing their business' knowledge management efforts. In finding the logical by way of the illogical, Beverly Weed-Schertzer highlights opportunities in both the public and private sectors to improve the efficacy and extent of knowledge management infrastructure.

1

Sources and Segmentation

Beverly Weed-Schertzer

Knowledge management is a sensible practice that encompasses a series of phases to produce a finished knowledge product. The finished product is a knowledge asset associated with an organization or community of interest. Content that is used to construct knowledge assets is ever changing and elusive. This makes housekeeping and the task to keep knowledge current extremely challenging. To a level, it may seem like an unworthwhile effort. It seems much more effective to collect knowledge in abundance and let people sort through it and figure it out themselves. Up front, this seems like the path of least resistance, but in the long run, it is not a good idea. It is not a good idea because it produces the most ineffective benefits to the user base. The user base includes customers which puts a business at risk to impacting good customer relationships, and revenue. The greatest amount of effort is invested in the preplanning and planning stages of knowledge management. Preplanning and planning stages of knowledge management and involved extensive resource and time investments will produce the most effective benefits to the user base. Mainly, the value will be experienced through gained efficiency and increased productivity for the organization's staff users. For customers, it will improve their experience from interactions they have with the business. Portions of knowledge are meant to be used in many different ways and by different communities of people. Think of the sponge and interconnecting the pockets of knowledge sources to make them available throughout the organization. This requires a robust plan to stay ahead of requirements for knowledge and creativity that continually explores and improves the life cycle methods used to distribute and share knowledge assets. This is what we know as knowledge management (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1. Examples of Knowledge Use.

Knowledge Content	Knowledge Use	Example
Planning	Strategic	Business plans, design plans
Insight or advice	Strategic or tactical	Interpreting information, forecasting, building solutions, theorizing, predicting outcomes of a problem situation
Forecasting	Strategic	Time lines, assessments, road maps
Brainstorming	Strategic	Focus group notes, meeting notes, brown bag events, emails, messaging, specific business information, i.e., customer data
Work instructions	Tactical	How to use a business application; how to set up an email signature
Diagnostics, investigations, research	Tactical	Troubleshooting a system issue; resolving a customer problem
Processes	Tactical or strategic	Proactive processes are considered strategic, for example, proactive problem handling and forecasting budgets, reactive or routine processes are tactical such as operating manuals

Managing knowledge is a difficult process to develop and sustain without central direction. Central direction is required for any knowledge program to achieve its goals. A common and major goal for managing knowledge well is to adopt a uniform approach and flexible set of activities. The major aspect that drives knowledge management is the fundamental understanding on why the organization needs knowledge management. Another major aspect is to have a good view of and understanding of the layout of the organization to be able to recognize viable sources for content. Knowledge management is more than just mapping information from the business intelligence areas within an organization. Mapping information is only one exercise and part of a knowledge management plan. Knowledge quality depends more on the human aspect and how well the content is formed to be logical knowledge. The human aspect comes from an individual's insight, their experience, and skills they hold. Insight into an internal knowledge of an individual is just as ever changing as the content being used as a knowledge asset. Keeping knowledge current is an issue that most likely cannot be mastered, but it can be an area that is significantly improved through the use of a realistic strategy and process. The mistake most organizations make is approaching knowledge the same manner and with similar processes that we use for information management. Remember knowledge is elusive and is ever changing. For example, a knowledge contributor provided insight to a specific situation that helped define conditions on how a decision was made. This insight will change over a period of time. The reasons why insight changes can be from new information or experiences. New information and/or experiences has improved their insight. The elusive part is related to how well knowledge contributors maintain their knowledge assets. This makes managing knowledge a multifaceted discipline entailing a set of processes and driven through intellect and awareness.

Knowledge management is a complex and dynamic area that provides a considerable amount of business value and a lot of struggles at the same time. Once an organization has a good understanding on why they need knowledge management and able to define requirements for a knowledge program is when planning begins. Strategic planning begins by defining the traits of the program and what knowledge is used for. This book is written from a strategic perspective rather than a tactical one. This viewpoint will follow a strategic path from a clear starting point to guide the reader through an approach to focus on the logical aspects to knowledge management.

Knowledge management considers how people learn, share, and apply content. Information management considers business intelligence and data generated within systems. Knowledge and information are very similar in nature but have a distinct difference. Distinction between the two is important to understand before creating a knowledge plan. Understanding the difference between information and knowledge will be helpful in identifying what parts of information is used for knowledge content. Content is handled through content management practices. Content management practice is a part of knowledge management. Technology systems used to manage content and knowledge are very similar in functionality if not the same.

For example, you can create a new web page and it could be part of an organization's intranet. There can be content on this web page that could have a link or multiple links to an external website. The new page that was created can be accessed from a laptop or a mobile phone. The content of the web page is made available to the people within the organization, enabling them to search for information on the new web page. For both content and knowledge management practices, the web page content remains on a central storage repository. In this example you would see that knowledge management sits within the content management realm because they share the same systems. The distinct difference is that content does not specialize in knowledge. Content management is like the factory warehouse doing the work for knowledge, and knowledge management is the packaging of the product being made in the factory. Content and knowledge management are commonly known through websites accessed via the Internet and found on company's internal intranet. Content is made available through open platforms because it is the easiest type of platform to collect large amounts of knowledge in a short amount of time. Content is what is managed in a knowledge management environment and processed to ensure the substance of the content is logical, useable, and reliable.

Open platforms for knowledge environments are tricky. There are guidelines to differentiate between good and poor knowledge; however, they are sparse. Once a knowledge platform is open publicly to the organization, it exposes the content to damaging effects that can devalue its use. Knowledge user agreements are a good way to align knowledge content with need. Knowledge user agreements should be developed in part of the planning phase for a knowledge program. Knowledge user agreement gets the entire user base within an organization that will benefit, contribute, transfer, share, and train on knowledge on the same page and coordinates them to align to the same set of procedures.

A knowledge user agreement covers

• How to contribute to the knowledge platform and expectations for how frequent content is maintained.
• Instructions to edit knowledge content.
• Details on the distinction between what is factual and subjective. This part sheds light on the logical and illogical knowledge variances.
• How to transfer knowledge and what systems and methods are approved to use. Details on who is authorized to receive knowledge. For knowledge that is protected under regulation and compliance, consult with the organization's legal department and use contractual agreements where needed to protect the company's knowledge assets.
• Descriptions and attributes about the knowledge management culture.

Knowledge Strategy

A high-performing knowledge program begins with a well thought out and practical strategy. A knowledge strategy is to build the environment that creates, stores, supports, maintains, distributes, combines, and improves knowledge assets. Begin strategizing with brainstorming sessions. From brainstorming, the charter for the knowledge environment is decided and documented. Develop a clear strategy that supports the vision and mission for the organization to achieve its intentions (goals). Brainstorming and strategy creation is done first because the majority of the work involved to set up a knowledge environment is done first, before the processes are designed and documented and the technology setup and configured.

How the knowledge will be used is a big part of the strategy and the brainstorming sessions. For instance, most organizations use knowledge management and relation to organizational learning. Much of the knowledge assets are used for organizational trainings for new employees and continuing education for existing employees. Knowledge specifies what actions to take in relation to a specific set of circumstances. This relates to organizational learning as much as it does in supporting daily business operations. Individuals are capable of knowing how to handle and manage knowledge; however, knowledge management is an organizational activity that focuses on knowledge management goals and how to achieve them.

The following key steps are involved in creating a knowledge strategy:

1. The first step is to create the knowledge environment design model. Make a list of what the organization needs for managing knowledge and define what exists in the organization for business intelligence. Use this list to determine what information from the company's business intelligence will be utilized in the knowledge environment and link content to users. Explain who the audience is for each packet of content. Group content by audience interest. In a design for the knowledge environment group them by
   • Organizational level, organizational learning, customer-related, support-related, service or product delivery, and vendor management: Grouping audiences into major groups will help drill down and define subgroups within each higher group. This makes designing the landscape for the knowledge environment well defined for process, technology, public content, proprietary content, roles and responsibilities, and content ownership. Public content is shared at the organizational group level and support-related content would be considered proprietary contact. The reason we separate public content from proprietary content is to determine the specific type of technology that will be used to store and distribute the content to the group community. This includes information that is created within the occupational silos that could be utilized by other groups in the organization to save time from having to recreate content. For example, a wiki-type technical platform is best suited for public content that is shared to the organizational group and its subgroups.
   • The theme of the knowledge environment is to transport business intelligence (information) to a centralized area of the organization and feed it into acknowledge technical landscape (in Chapter 4, technology is explained for the knowledge environment).
2. The next step after brainstorming is to prepare for content collection. We have established business intelligence (information) is a feed into the Knowledge Management process and it runs in a knowledge environment. Content collection is a set of procedures utilized to leverage business information and utilize it as a knowledge asset. Collection methods will be a combination of automation and manual effort and is done by a role that has investigative capabilities. Content collectors are like detectives; they are familiar with the business layout and where to find current and authorized information. Content collectors trace the content to the originator or the person or team who developed the content.
3. After content collection is accomplished, the next step is storing. Content storing is a set of activities that moves the content that was collected and brings it into repositories within the knowledge environment. The repository is set up to support either public or proprietary content. In preparation, activities for this step focus on storing public content into a public repository and proprietary content into a proprietary repository. Once the content is stored in the knowledge environment public or proprietary repository, fr...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sources and Segmentation
• 2 (Il)Logical Knowledge Process
• 3 Tools for Knowledge and Organizational Learning
• Appendix
• Index